Beyond Star Wars: Winning Playset mode, you’ll feel like a child again

You never wanted to create your own Star Wars scene as a child, but couldn’t afford all of the individual figurines of your favorite characters?

Star Wars: Beyond victory, there’s a perfect solution to it. Developer ILM Immersive’s upcoming Mixed Reality games will have three separate game modes, including Adventure, Arcade, and Playset.

In Playset mode, you can take individual digital figures and place them in different sets in the room while adding props such as guns and lightning to make your childhood dream Star Wars scenario come true. I had the opportunity to try out playset modes in Star Wars: Bead Victory, talk to Experience Design with producer Harvey Whitney, and talk about David Palumbo with playset development and integration with other modes in the game.

Open Toybox

Playset mode allows you to pull up menus with several categories, such as action figures, props, and effects. In the Action Figure segment, you can choose from all of your favorite Star Wars characters, such as R2-D2 and Darth Vader, and place them anywhere in your room. ILM must make sure they have unlocked all for me in my demo and players must advance through the story of the game.

“By examining the story, you get a fairly solid majority of the items,” explained Palumbo. “Then there are various challenges to unlock the rest of the game, both for adventure and arcade.” These challenges include collecting gold coins in arcade trucks and finding Easter eggs in Adventure mode.

There are many things that these characters can do, such as changing the size on a whim, or making them even smaller or larger comically. The Stormtrooper may already be scared of Darth Vader’s presence, but imagine him as Godzilla’s size. Yes, you can create that exact scene.

But what makes these digital figures really feel “like a toy” is their impressive joint flexibility. You can move individual limbs like real action figures. Do you want to shoot a gun? You can simply stretch his arms out and place the gun props in his hand. Interactiveness doesn’t stop there. You can also simulate iconic blaster noise from the franchise and shoot a gun by pushing down the trigger on the quest controller.

This works in both ways. If you have a weapon in a person’s hand, it will be fired, and if you have it, it will fire too. If there are obstacles that get in the way, they will be destroyed, as if the tie fighters were placed directly in front of them. So, these numbers aren’t just for the show, but you don’t even need to use your imagination anymore to play the action sequences of your dreams.

Palumbo explained that many of the playset mode mechanics come from the prototyping that the team did to help the team in advance with shots made on the film side of ILM. “One cool thing about working within Lucasfilm and with ILM is that this tool was built in VR for VR a long time ago,” he said. “But there is a joy in that mode that sticks to everyone’s heads.

It’s accessible to everyone

ILM includes a variety of accessibility features beyond victory, such as sitting modes and standing modes, allowing players to sit comfortably while playing the game. Subtitle options and color blindness considerations are also available. “We always try to get accessibility settings for previous projects and continue to develop them,” Whitney explained. “Every time we make something new, we try to build from what we have already done to make it better for everyone.”

The mixed reality nature beyond victory offers accessibility benefits over traditional VR. For arcade mode, the game uses holotels that can be expanded and adjusted to suit the player’s preferences. In this mode, players can participate in high-speed and thrilling races called pod races to the finish line. “You’re not completely depriving the world of power and tracking your space,” Palumbo said. “You have a world to ground you. It allows people to do more things like pod racing without getting stuck.”

The franchise won its first pod-racing-centric game in 1999 Star Wars Episode I: Racer, but ILM also got other inspiration. These included mostly older arcade games, such as the 1983 Spy Hunter and the 1987 1943.

“We loved the Episode I Racer game and knew that was a big point of comparison. “At the same time, I think we wanted to capture that same emotional pod race emotion with the mixed reality opportunity we had here,” Palumbo said.

He continued. “It should feel dangerous. It should feel fast. But there is another form factor that we worked with and were excited to use.”

Whitney mentioned beyond Victory’s director, Jose Perez III. He also mentioned how he had already had a vision since the start of development in various modes. Perez’s father was a mechanic and had a racer in his garage, which influenced the pod racing aspect of the game, but Perez also collected the toys, so he wanted to incorporate them in some way.

“At one point, there were people working on some sections, and the other had some sections. It was all moving at once, and a lot of the balls went up into the air,” Whitney said. “And it was really exciting to see how it all came together.”

Star Wars: Beyond Victory – Mixed reality playsets will be released on October 7th for Meta Quest 3 and 3S.