Clouds

"You're surrounded. Head for the clouds!"

- Unknown

Clouds are condensed masses of liquid water suspended on Earth's atmosphere. They are formed by the saturation of air, either through water evaporating from the surface or from the air getting colder. Understanding clouds is vitally important to pilots, since air resistance is vastly different inside them, and water becomes a larger (albeit still only minimal) risk factor to the aircraft's integrity.

Despite their importance, clouds are usually underdeveloped or simply not paid any attention to within aviation games outside of visual effect; Ace Combat is no different. However, a sizable amount of development is being put into clouds for Ace Combat 7, which will be the first game in the series to provide gameplay differences depending on cloud cover.

Pre-AC7 History
Clouds have been featured in Ace Combat games since the precursor arcade games Air Combat and Air Combat 22 in the late 1980s and 1990s. They only appeared as part of the skybox, and could not be flown through. Air Combat on the PlayStation was the first game to introduce clouds as 2D sprites. Ace Combat 2 focused on them a lot more heavily, and even introduced a small mechanic where flying above a certain altitude would show an "ocean" of clouds below the player's aircraft to emulate its distance from the ground.

Ace Combat 04: Shattered Skies was the first game to feature detailed mission briefings, one section of which would inform the player on the amount of clouds over the mission area. This was also later featured in Ace Combat 5: The Unsung War, Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation, and Ace Combat Infinity.

Ace Combat: Assault Horizon presented more importance on clouds. They were mentioned during missions by characters when enemy aircraft would use them to hide, and they were also used during Home Front as an ambush tactic. However, this was a scripted event, as the clouds were still simply 2D sprites.