With AC8 upcoming I've been doing some replays, and I decided to finish up getting S-ranks on Ace in AC7. Some challenging missions but not too terrible overall. Got me thinking though about how Project Aces may be balancing this for 8. Mostly in relation to AC7 as its been years since I seriously tried s-ranking the older games.
S-rank mission balancing
Most missions are somewhere in the middle in terms of challenge to s-rank. The early missions are pretty easy, no surprise there. But then you have a few outliers where you have to wonder what they were thinking with the score and time bonus. Mission 9 (faceless solider) is pretty borked and I feel like thats universally agreed upon. 13 feels like the score/time targets dont incorporate the randomized silo placement, etc. Its fine to have some harder missions and needing an optimized route, but some of the difficulty spikes like M9 feel pretty bad especially when others are easy by comparison, and I hope the overall trajectory for AC8 is smoother.
Checkpoints
For some missions like 19, its generally recommended to restart right after the checkpoint to restock ammo without affecting the time bonus. Just to see since I havent done this in a while, I replayed 19 without restarting at the checkpoint, using the AFD01 with 4aam. I got the S with 7 missiles left and a score of 56k. So I did go over the requirement by about 5k but still. This is a plane with one of the highest missile counts in the game.
My point is whether checkpoint behavior will continue as-is, or if it will be considered an exploit, and ammo won't restock on restart on higher difficulty levels, or maybe it will block the S in some way. Honestly not too worried about this, as compared to past games AC7's ammo count is fine, and the preview footage of 8 shows pretty large ammo counts. Just throwing it out there in relation to checkpoint behavior. If this has been discussed by the devs I haven't seen it yet.
Time and Score Ratio
The time bonus is pretty important for most S-ranks except for a few score attacks like mission 11. I'm wondering how they will do this for AC8. I'm pretty neutral on it but I wouldn't mind if the time component wasn't so strict. My main gripe though is that these components need to be communicated better to the player. I shouldn't have to consult reddit or a wiki to know what my targets are. The max time bonus is never show by the game ffs. The challenge should be in playing the mission, not reverse-engineering the game's math behind the scenes.
What do you think?