Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run was a landmark second for Walt Disney Imagineering when it opened in 2019. It was the primary Disney journey that allowed company to instantly management their expertise and work together with the story. However for the following Smugglers Run mission, the corporate goes one step additional and making the journey really feel much more like a conventional online game, full with branching selections and complicated enemies.
WDI labored carefully with visible results studio Industrial Gentle & Magic (ILM) on the primary Smugglers Run mission, with the latter utilizing Epic Video games’ Unreal Engine 4 to create the high-fidelity graphics that make you are feeling such as you’re a part of an thrilling intergalactic heist. Disney’s relationship with Epic truly goes again a number of years, when Lucasfilm determined to make use of Unreal Engine to construct the digital units on The Mandalorian TV present.
To organize itself for the journey’s new upgrades, ILM has been transitioning from UE4 to Unreal Engine 5.
“For the primary mission, we partnered with a 3rd get together recreation developer that helped us create the gameplay code, after which we had Industrial Gentle & Magic produce all the sport property, after which work to combine these issues collectively,” stated Asa Kalama, vp and government artistic director at Walt Disney Imagineering, in a presentation to the press at Unreal Fest 2025.
“Now for the second mission, we’re doing this all with our Lucasfilm companions. So Industrial Gentle & Magic is producing the sport property. ILM Immersive [formerly known as ILMxLAB] is doing the gameplay programming. Our pals at Skywalker Sound are answerable for all the audio programming and all of the audio media manufacturing. So, it’s actually nice as a result of they’re all actually in a single constructing, and from an integration standpoint, it makes placing every little thing collectively a lot quicker.”
Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Disneyland and Walt Disney World places you answerable for the long-lasting Corellian starship from the Star Wars movies. There are three roles to select from (every becoming as much as two folks) within the cockpit: pilots, gunners, and engineers. Pilots maneuver the ship and are answerable for leaping to hyperspace, gunners assault enemy TIE fighters, and engineers assist restore the ship and fireplace harpoons to steal cargo.
You earn galactic credit (serving as your group’s excessive rating) for finishing your goal and may enhance that quantity relying on how effectively you do as a group. Your efficiency will fluctuate every time you’re on the journey, however in any other case the story within the unique mission is strictly linear. The second mission, which Disney beforehand introduced would star the Mandalorian and his cute Drive-wielding son Grogu, will provide much more replayability.
On this new expertise, you’re being despatched to the desert planet of Tatooine to seize a gaggle of ex-Imperial officers and pirates — and since it is a bounty looking mission, Mando and his little one will assist your crew observe them down. At a sure level in the course of the chase, your engineers must make a crucial determination about which bounty to pursue: You’ll both go to the Cloud Metropolis in Bespin, the wreckage of Loss of life Star II close to Endor, or the sprawling metropolises of Coruscant.
“So each time you journey mission two, you’ll have the chance to have a completely totally different branching expertise,” stated Kalama. “After which inside every of the environments themselves, we’ve labored with our companions at ILM to develop ranges which have significantly extra branching [paths] in order that even in the event you return to the identical vacation spot, there’s a brand new route or new secrets and techniques to uncover.”
He additionally stated the event groups are “amping up the intelligence” of TIE fighters on this new mission when it comes to how evasive they are often, and the place and the way usually they respawn.
These bold new options are doable now that ILM is working with UE5. The group can be upgrading the computer systems which are hooked up to every of the Millennium Falcon cockpits with the newest era CPUs and graphics playing cards (every laptop holds eight GPUs).
“We’re excited concerning the extra headroom we have now, as a result of there have been loads of options or stretch objectives when it comes to visible constancy that we in the end needed to dial again with the intention to make that commerce off of efficiency,” stated Kalama. “However we’re additionally very enthusiastic about having much more dynamic destruction, and that’s one thing that we actually felt that we have been a bit of bit extra restricted on within the earlier model of the engine.”
Guests to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge must wait till Could 22, 2026 to attempt the brand new Smugglers Run expertise, which coincides with the discharge of The Mandalorian and Grogu movie in theaters.
