ILMxLAB today announced that its upcoming VR experience Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge is getting a ‘first look’ next week, July 28th, which should hopefully demystify the studio’s next built-for-VR original story.

Update (July 21st, 2020): ILMxLab say that on July 28th via its @ILMxLAB Twitter account it will be showing off the “first story details” of Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge. We’re hoping for a trailer at the very least, and possibly a more granular release date. Up until now, all images have been specified as ‘concept art’.

The Oculus blog post also included a new concept image (created by ILMxLab’s Stephen Todd), showing off what seems to be a base area, embedded above the original article.

Image courtesy ILMxLAB

Original Article (May 28th, 2020): The new VR experience is said to take place sometime between Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker (2019) on the planet of Batuu, this time bringing VR users to the outskirts of Black Spire Outpost of ‘Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge’, the location-based Disneyland attraction. Black Spire Outpost, the largest settlement on Batuu, is an “infamous stop for traders, adventurers, and smugglers traveling around the Outer Rim and Wild Space,” the official Star Wars website says.

The studio says in an Oculus blog post that the original story will include “multiple styles of gameplay and difficulty settings to bring in a wide variety of players” when it arrives later this year.

And if you’re wondering whether this too will be an Oculus platform exclusive, ILMxLAB is working directly with Oculus Studios to make it happen, so that’s a big yes.

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“We’re very happy to collaborate with ILMxLAB again on Star Wars: Tales from the Galaxy’s Edge,” says Facebook VP of Content, AR/VR Mike Verdu. “VR is an incredibly powerful storytelling medium; this experience will immerse fans in a deep and thrilling adventure within the Star Wars galaxy, as they are transported to impossible places through the power of virtual reality.”

There’s no word on exactly when it’s set to release, or which platform we’ll be seeing Star Wars: Tale from the Galaxy’s Edge on first. If it follows in the footsteps of the Vader Immortal triology, we could be seeing another Quest-first release.

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Well before the first modern XR products hit the market, Scott recognized the potential of the technology and set out to understand and document its growth. He has been professionally reporting on the space for nearly a decade as Editor at Road to VR, authoring more than 4,000 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Arcticu Kitsu

    As nice of an idea this is, it honestly sucks that this and Medal of Honor is stuck as an Oculus exclusive. Its fine being a VR exclusive, just not an Oculus exclusive……

    Reading how much it is an Oculus exclusive just voids everything about it….. I’m out. Until they grow a brain I’m out.

    • Jeremy Kins

      So you’re telling me you’d be willing to shell out millions to fund a game’s development and then give it out to other competitors out of good will? lol

      • Zachary Scott Dickerson

        you know, the games are not FREE right? you could charge $90 on Steam, and $20 on oculus for instance. Or delayed release (3 months on oculus, then steam gets it, kind of like movies in theater vs. home rentals)

      • knuckles625

        Umm…that’s exactly what FB/Oculus’s competitor does: Half-Life Alyx? Beyond just the 1st party game development, what if I told you that Valve not only allows competitor hardware on their platform to run their (solo) 1st party games, but even more so foots the entire bill to support Oculus hardware and integrate new features. Any way you stretch it, Oculus’s walled garden approach isn’t in the best interest of any consumer

        • Ryan M

          It’s exactly what Nintendo does with… every single one of their titles. Think that’s worked out OK for them?

        • Andrew Jakobs

          Uhm no they didn’t.. You really think Valve is doing it because they love the community? Get your head out of your ass please.. Everything Valve does is purely to get more people to come to Steam, because THAT’S where they earn their money. That’s the only reason why they support the Oculus on Steam (and let’s not forget, it was their test headset for getting SteamVR up and running in the first place. The just wage the costs of supporting Oculus headsets to the sales they get on Steam, and you can bet your ass that the effort/costs are far less then the extra sales it gives them, otherwise they would have not supported Oculus headsets (Oculus headsets are still one of the largest group on SteamVR).

          • Pablo C

            If Valve would have been looking only for money (and not for the love of the comunity), they would have made Alyx for flat monitors. A flat HL game would have made 100x more money.

          • Anonmon

            And if Facebook cared about sales numbers instead of trying to dominate the VR market by becoming what Google has in the phone market and what Microsoft has in the PC space, they’d make it a point to support all the headsets they reasonably can so to have the widest outreach. Oculus headsets, just checking the Steam hardware results, are 44.86% of total headsets. This is gonna be skewed by the few that don’t use Facebooks store over Steam sure, but practically half the market is nothing to turn noses up to. And before anyone says something about being the hardware and software manufacturer, both Google make phones and Microsoft make computers, despite not being their absolute focus. I’ll concede that VR is a slightly different beast, but that doesn’t change that it’s the one that’s as all encompassing and compatible as possible that wins out in the end.

            Ironically, if Facebook really wanted to fulfill on their “Dominate the new market” plan, exclusives and walled gardens are the exact opposite of what they should be doing. As anyone doing anything in VR are on Steam first and Oculus second, even if they have a Oculus headset, because the place with wider compatibility is where everybody else, the social side and the software support side, is going to congeal. Exclusives in this context are just obnoxious for everybody.
            It’s how Android and Windows became what they are, NOT being tied to specific hardware and generally being open for end users to do virtually whatever.
            Palmer Luckey, in the early years when Oculus the company still existed beyond a front for Facebook, said he wanted compatibility with other headsets eventually with specific vetting and quality control, which obviously went up to smoke once Facebook bought them.

          • Andrew Jakobs

            As anyone doing anything in VR are on Steam first and Oculus second

            oh, so that’s why there are enough exclusives on Oculus Store not from Oculus Studio themselves, and only later going to steam.. And looking at how much trouble a lot fo VR-games on steam have with different headsets/controllers (like a lot of games not working properly with index controllers or touch controllers or vive controllers).
            (And almost 50% of the headsets are Oculus headsets, the rest is split among all the others, and as you say, there are still people not using SteamVR (especially Quest users, but you can see that amount already rising since the Link has been proven to work and virtual desktop also seems to work). So Oculus is still a major player, and you can bet your ass that a lot of those users also have games on the Oculus Store..
            Hee, I would certainly love it for other headsets to support the Oculus SDK (which is used for now in conjunction with Oculus Store), hopefully in the near future we will get multiple headset support like we see now with VivePort (which was also Vive only when it started out, but found out opening it up would make them more money), so it’s quite possible Facebook is already happy with the sales they get from the Oculus Store from only Oculus headsets, and don’t want to spend all the extra time and effort in expanding their SDK to support different headsets. As I gather from an earlier interview with some Oculus head, if a company like Vive would really want to, they could support the OculusSDK and get certified for the Oculus Store, but that’s on the headset manufacturer, not on Facebook. As I said, I guess Facebook is happy with the sales from their store to not put effort into supporting other headsets (which as I also said, has it’s own problems as seen on Steam with A LOT of VR-games).

          • Anonmon

            You do realize basically, if not absolutely, all of the Oculus exclusives are either literally from Facebook or funded by Facebook. No reasonable person is going to complain about the former, but the latter can get a touch obnoxious when they jump in and suddenly make things exclusive.

            And looking at how much trouble a lot fo VR-games on steam have with different headsets/controllers

            This is PC, that comes with the territory. Plus with SteamVR’s controller remapping and other customization options, there’s likely a community fix for anything that goes horribly wrong anyway.

            the rest is split among all the others

            44.44% is split between the Vive, Index, and WMR headsets, with the last one only being 8.35% of the market. Even just supporting the original Vive and Index would be a massive influx of potential revenue with how many people there are with those headsets. Make it so you can only use Knuckles controllers for controller parity fine, but it should still be an option.

            So Oculus is still a major player, and you can bet you’re ass that a lot of those users also have games on the Oculus Store.

            Never said they weren’t a major player, but just like iOS devices are a minority that can skewed to look like a majority if you only look at hardware sales, because android devices are split between far more different makes and manufacturers, the Oculus store will always be #2 having to dump money into exclusives to stay relevant in a walled garden in the face of SteamVR. Software exclusives are never good for anybody, there’s a reason why there’s still an uproar over EGS that exists to this day.

            Viveport

            Literally who?
            In all seriousness, I have a Vive and never touched it, have met plenty of people with Vives, and either all don’t use it either or genuinely have little to no idea it even exists or what it is. I have genuinely never met anyone who uses Viveport, or even thinks about it in any capacity aside from “That’s a thing that exists, right?”.
            Heck, I genuinely don’t even know in its entirety what Viveport even is. It’s a storefront? A stand in for SteamVR? I don’t think most people could tell you either.

            As I gather from an earlier interview with some Oculus head, if a company like Vive would really want to, they could support the OculusSDK and get certified for the Oculus Store, but that’s on the headset manufacturer, not on Facebook.

            Do you mean the same Palmer Luckey interview I made reference to in the previous post? “We can’t do that for any headset without cooperation from the manufacturer.” would be the relevant quote from that, so in any event it requires effort from all parties yes, but it’s nothing but a good thing in the long run for everybody.
            Which even with that, actions speak louder than words, and one major action tells you everything you need to know.

            Revive.

            If Facebook really wanted to, they could bring on the Revive dev to make all the SteamVR headsets natively possible with clean and properly integrated support, as he’s already done most of the effort. But no. You know what they do? Add DRM they drop only because they realized it was pointless. Valve in this situation would have hired the guy, if it wasn’t for Valve being the ones to do it themselves before anyone had to.
            And if Facebook would like more money, that’s absolutely on Facebook in conjunction with those hardware manufacturers to make that happen, not hardware manufactures exclusively. They have the cash from the endless reserves from mass selling user data, they just choose not to.

            In any event, hopefully OpenXR makes this entirely moot anyway. There was a scare in the early VR days that all games would be screwed out of hand controllers because the Rift came with a XB1 controller and the thought was all games would need to be held back by that, which didn’t happen. So I’m hopeful Facebook and Valve encourage backporting practically all software to OpenXR away from OpenVR and the Oculus SDK.

      • Arcticu Kitsu

        Seems like you’re missing the point harshly here.

        Knuckles did make a decent point though.

    • Drew

      You boycott Mario and Zelda since you can’t play them on Xbox?

      • Arcticu Kitsu

        One doesn’t equate to the other. Nice try.

        Funny thing is I do have a Switch but I still haven’t bought Mario nor Zelda because it doesn’t quite appeal to me. Way to miss the point…. You know, what you wrote is actually on the lines of gaslighting ^_^
        (Not quite, but close)…. Wooosh

        • Rosko

          Gaslighting? lol get a grip.

          • Arcticu Kitsu

            I’m fine, others aren’t spreading lies and strawmaning. I don’t need a grip because I’m fine.

      • DanDei

        In fact I do, yes.

  • Josh Stickney

    Yet I played Vader Immortal without an Oculus. hmmm

    • Andrew Jakobs

      Or you played it illegally, Or you bought it through the Oculus Store and used something like revive..

      • WellWellWell

        Stop making him sound boring he’s cool!

  • Alex

    enough with the VR experience, they are cool, yes Vader Immortal has the dojo to challenge our skills. But I’d really like a Star Wars story game in which you can die, that would complete the immersion… or at least give the option in the VR experience that would also be fine

  • Jim P

    Money talks. Funding rules.

  • Colin Parnell

    People who write lines like “when they grow a brain” are just the ones without any common or business sense. Its a clear and obvious, intelligent business decision to have exclusives, Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo all do, the ONLY people that get upset are consumers who clearly don’t “get” business and think that by not buying a game someone will give a shit. They wont. The only person missing out is the person who doesn’t buy the game. Those moaning on boards just shows how ignorant many people are of business.

    • Rosten

      You criticize someone for their scornful tone then you do worse. Your attitude and mentality are so contemptful, it’s nauseating.

      • SendsV8

        No, he’s right. Even if it makes you cry.

  • JesuSaveSouls

    Looks very interesting.