Ever since most people saw the Star War original trilogy, it’s been many people’s dreams to wield a lightsaber and battle out Darth Vader, even if the original trilogy’s fight choreography wasn’t exactly action-packed. Thanks to a collaboration between Lucasfilm’s new ILMxLAB division, Industrial Light & Magic, Skywalker Sound, and the Star Wars story group, we’ll soon be able to do exactly that in VR.
While the project is currently unnamed, the Star Wars project is being written by David S. Goyer, whose written for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Call of Duty: Black Ops.
Goyer made some statements about the project while speaking at a panel during Star Wars Celebration in London (via Entertainment Weekly).
“What character is so iconic that we need to know more? [Where] we can’t sleep at night and want to experience things that can’t be experienced in film, or can’t be experienced in a novel? And we came up with [Vader].”
One interesting aspect of the project is that it will be completely cannon, which is nice considering how much of the series’s cannon has been stripped over the past few years.
“You don’t play it,” Goyer said. “You be it. You’re in it. You’re part of the story… You are ‘the visitor’—the visitor in this story that’s happening around you that you may have some effect on. You can pick up things, you can open things, you can push things. You can walk and touch characters. Imagine being in a movie.”
Currently it’s still unknown which VR platform the title will release on, although the HTC Vive is a good guess, since the title Trials on Tatooine just released on the Vive recently. According to Goyer, the project is still somewhere between one and two years away from being released.