Ace Combat 8 apologises as its PC bonus lands badly
Bandai Namco's own Steam notice admits to unexpected crashes in the PC build, while the Belkan War re-release bolted into the pre-order bonus has pilots reaching for the refund button.
Ace Combat 8: Wings of Theve has hit turbulence. With the Deluxe Edition's advance access already open and the full release days away, Bandai Namco's own Ace Combat team has published a Product Notice apologising for outright crashes in the Steam version of the game.
What Bandai Namco has admitted
The notice, posted to the game's Steam Community Announcements hub on Tuesday, 29 September, opens with pilots reporting unexpected crashes while playing the Steam build. The team says it is investigating and offers two things players can try in the meantime: making sure they are on the recommended graphics driver version, and checking that the drive holding the game has at least 16GB free with virtual memory enabled in Windows. It signs off by thanking aces for their patience.
The pre-order bonus doing the damage
Crashes alone would be an ordinary bad launch week. The sharper irritation is the pre-order bonus. Steam's store page lists the offer as a playable F-14A plus ACE COMBAT ZERO: THE BELKAN WAR (Steam Version) — which means the classic is delivered inside the new game on PC rather than as something you can launch on its own, while console players are reported to be getting it as a standalone download.
Pilots who bought in early to get at The Belkan War have spent the day discovering that they bought it twice and can only reach it once. Steam's own review counter has the standard edition at £54.99 and the user score sitting at Mixed, with 2,005 positive against 899 negative reviews out of 2,904 at the time of writing.
Our opinion
There is a version of this story where Bandai Namco simply sold an old game to people who love it, and everybody was happy. Instead the studio took a twenty-year-old fan favourite, welded it to the launcher of a brand-new £54.99 release on one platform and left it as a standalone on the others, which is the kind of decision that looks fine in a spreadsheet and insulting in a Steam library. The crash apology is well written, and credit where it is due for saying the word "apologise" instead of "we are aware of reports". But a support notice cannot fix a bonus that was designed wrong. Make The Belkan War standalone on PC. It is the same amount of work you have already done on console, and it buys back a great deal of goodwill that this launch is currently burning.