'Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine' allows firsthand lightsaber duel in VR
With the emergence of virtual reality-based gameplay this year, "Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine" would be the best way for gamers, especially those who are big fans of the "Star Wars" franchise, to experience a lightsaber duel like a real Jedi warrior. ILMxLab, the team behind special effects for the Star Wars franchise, has released the trailer of the cinematic VR experiment.
"Star Wars: Trials on Tatooine" is a brief narrative after the events of "Return of the Jedi," and the player character will take the role of Luke Skywalker's padawan apprentice. As a Jedi master's student, the player will have the opportunity to wield a lightsaber and use it for training or to engage in an action-packed duel. Adding more Star Wars nostalgia to the game is the scene of the Millennium Falcon flying across space, meeting Han Solo and Chewbacca, witnessing the desert planet of Tatooine, encountering a bunch of Stormtroopers, and having R2D2 himself giving the player his lightsaber – all these in virtual reality.
In an interview with IGN, ILMxLAB's Associate Visual Effects Supervisor Roger Cordes described the preparation of their team to develop "Trials on Tatooine."
"We are a storytelling company... We are well-versed in a hundred years of the language of cinema, all of which gets thrown out the window when you no longer have a locked on camera [in VR], and it's a first-person storytelling experience, so we have to kind of find our way in that wilderness about how to tell a compelling story in the Star Wars universe," Cordes stated.
"Trials on Tatooine" does not have a lot of trials or challenges to constitute a complete gameplay experience, but rather a high fidelity storytelling. It is made exclusive for the HTC Vive, a VR headset owned by HTC and Valve Corporation. While there is no definite release date set for "Trials of Tatooine" at the moment, it is likely to come during or after the launching of HTC Vive on April 5.
