For a minute I thought some of the footage on display in the Ace Combat 7: Skies Unknown trailer was real. I was thinking to myself “Wow, why did Bandai Namco go and add real-life footage to the game? It kind of strips away from the actual gameplay immersion”. But it turns out that it wasn’t real-life footage, they’ve just managed to achieve photorealistic visuals with the upcoming Ace Combat 7.

The game is being developed on the Unreal Engine 4 and Bandai is gunning to release the title at some point in 2018 for PC, PS4 and Xbox One.

The new E3 2017 trailer gives you a small taste of what’s to come in regards to the gameplay, cinematics and story. You can check out the new trailer below courtesy of Gamespot.

They’ve managed to utilize a really soft shader for the lighting and shadows in the Unreal Engine, giving the characters and vehicles near real-to-life looking shadows and light passes. The character designs themselves don’t look all that great, and there’s a really bizarre uncanny valley effect going on once they zoom up on the faces and you can see how they’ve attempted to mix anime designs with realistic designs and… well… you can see it for yourself.

On the upside, though, at least the game is running at 60 frames per second, and that really helps give the impression that everything is realistic.

Heck, it’s almost scarily creepy how realistic the dog in that one scene looks.

I literally can’t see any of the triangles or where the polygons start or stop on the dog. It just looks like a real life dog. Bandai Namco has some impressive lighting engineers over there.

Heck, the volumetric smoke effects and explosion plumes are top notch. Even though the explosions are still alpha sprites, they look fantastic.

I didn’t think it was possible but Bandai Namco is really giving DICE a run for their money as far as military sim graphics are concerned.

The game is due for release in 2018 for PC on Steam, Xbox One, PS4 and the PlayStation VR.