LucasArts' special effects wing of Industrial Light and Magic have been working on a new project called Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine. It's a virtual reality game set to be released for the HTC Vive. No release date or price was announced but a trailer made its way online.
YouTube outlet VRScout managed to post the full 48 second teaser, and you can see it in action below.
The trailer, while short, gives gamers a glimpse into what Industrial Light and Magic x Lab have been working on recently. We see that the Star Wars game is obviously in first person and that players will be facing off against some Storm Troopers. We see the Millennium Falcon on display and R2D2.
The short teaser ends when the Storm Troopers start shooting in the direction of the player, and the player responds in kind by whipping out a blue lightsaber and deflecting the shots away from them as if it were controlled by a motion wand.
And speaking of motion wands... the Star Wars: Trials of Tatooine was originally supposed to launch alongside Star Wars: The Force Awakens back in December according to a report from Epicstream. However, delays to Valve and HTC's Hive meant that the Star Wars VR title had to be pushed back as well. The HTC Vive and its 3D positional motion wands are now set to arrive on April 5th, with pre-orders being open and available right now on the official website and on the Steam store page.
Ideally, launching the Star Wars: Trials of Tatooine right next to the movie would have been perfect from a marketing perspective, but now they have to find a new window that will garner them proper exposure and a tie-in to other popular Star Wars products. In fact, the launch of Star Wars: Battlefront from EA and DICE worked wonders for the game, allowing the company to ship more than 13 million units.
A launch window for a game is just as important as the content that it launches with, which is why DICE's Battlefront receives so much backlash from the gaming community because despite being popular and despite getting some good exposure, the game is content-deficient. In fact, most people compare the content in this new Battlefront to the content in Star Wars: Battlefront 2 from Pandemic and note that the new game from DICE only has half the amount of content from the decade old title.
For Industrial Light and Magic's upcoming VR Star Wars title the price will be just as important as the release date, because if it's just a glorified VR tech demo hopefully it won't cost anymore than $10. We'll likely find out more as the game nears release... and hopefully they'll add in the rest of the shadows for entities like R2D2 in the final build.
