It took less than a minute after donning a Meta Quest 3 headset before I was reliving some of my best memories from childhood in augmented reality, sitting on the floor with my digital Star Wars action figures creating fantastical scenes from a galaxy far, far away.
Last week, I visited Meta's Los Angeles offices a mile from the city's sunny beaches to try out an upcoming game, Star Wars: Beyond Victory, due out October 7 only for the Meta Quest 3 and Meta Quest 3S headsets. The game is developed by Industrial Light and Magic, the special effects wizards that brought the Star Wars galaxy to life with starships and lasers, lightsabers and space battles.
Star Wars: Beyond Victory was first revealed at Star Wars Celebration earlier this year, where ILM teased the game's central story mode. In it, players take on the role of an up-and-coming podracer guided by the legendary Sebulba, racing rival of Anakin Skywalker in Episode I: The Phantom Menace. In Meta's offices, I donned a Meta Quest 3 headset and played an early section of the story, including a podrace.
While I was expecting immersive full-screen podracing much like in the Nintendo 64 classic game Episode 1: Racer, Star Wars: Beyond Victory is very different, leaning into the Meta Quest's augmented reality capabilities to portray racing on, functionally, a digital game table hovering above the real world room I was in. ILM's developers told me that given concerns over making players nauseous when racing in high-speed VR, they opted to make the game's action play out on a table in AR that gamers can resize to their liking, while still controlling their racer from a bird's eye view.
"The original podracing prototypes were based on slot car races because that was like thinking about racing cars in your room," said David Palumbo, senior experience designer at ILM and for Star Wars: Beyond Victory. "Eventually we hit on that holo-table prototype, and that sort of shifted the way we thought about mixed reality gameplay in a really fun way."
In my four-person race I finished a distant third, but there's a delightful novelty in reaching out with my Meta Quest controllers and -- this will be important later -- digitally grabbing the gameplay board to move it around or resize it to my liking. It felt tactile and responsive, letting me place it in the perfect spot to survey the action as I stood up. The ILM developers described their different approaches: one placed it before them while they were sitting, while another got down on the ground to play, much like they did with toy cars as a kid.
"I also think it plays really well with the nostalgia of what we're doing with action figures and playing with these little toys," said Harvey Whitney, senior producer at ILM and for Star Wars: Beyond Victory. "I remember as a kid every Christmas either getting a slot car or RC car, and so now being able to do that with Star Wars toys and flying them around and driving around, it just works so well."
Star Wars: Beyond Victory's Adventure mode is a story campaign around a rookie podracer climbing the ranks, while Arcade lets players jump into quick races. Industrial Light and Magic
I only spent around 20 minutes with the Adventure mode, so it's impossible to comment on how the storyline or podracing gameplay will be in its full release, though it does have an interesting voice cast including Lewis MacLeod (returning to voice Sebulba as he did in The Phantom Menace) and Saturday Night Live's Bobby Moynihan. Set in the period between the third and fourth Star Wars movies with the Galactic Empire in power but before the Rebel Alliance gets organized, Beyond Victory will tell a story about racing life on the fringes of the galaxy -- an aspect of the franchise that's surprisingly rarely explored given how important hot-rodding was to creator George Lucas and how much it influenced the original films.
Throughout Beyond Victory's story mode, your podracing rookie will run into some characters from ILM's previous AR game, Star Wars: Tales From The Galaxy's Edge, along with a few iconic figures from the movies. But you won't just be meeting them: many of the cast in the Adventure mode can be unlocked to play with in the Playset mode, which is where I spent most of my time in my preview assembling my own Star Wars scene, bringing my childhood play to the augmented reality future.
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