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 immediately management their expertise and work together with the story. However for the subsequent 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 decisions 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 occasion sport developer that helped us create the gameplay code, after which we had Industrial Gentle & Magic produce all the sport belongings, after which work to combine these issues collectively,” stated Asa Kalama, vp and govt inventive 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 belongings. ILM Immersive [formerly known as ILMxLAB] is doing the gameplay programming. Our mates at Skywalker Sound are chargeable for the entire 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 all the pieces collectively a lot quicker.”
Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Disneyland and Walt Disney World places you accountable for the long-lasting Corellian starship from the Star Wars movies. There are three roles to select from (every becoming as much as two individuals) within the cockpit: pilots, gunners, and engineers. Pilots maneuver the ship and are chargeable 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 crew’s excessive rating) for finishing your goal and might enhance that quantity relying on how properly you do as a crew. Your efficiency will fluctuate every time you’re on the journey, however in any other case the story within the authentic mission is strictly linear. The second mission, which Disney beforehand introduced would star the Mandalorian and his lovable Drive-wielding son Grogu, will supply way more replayability.
On this new expertise, you’re being despatched to the desert planet of Tatooine to seize a bunch of ex-Imperial officers and pirates — and since this can be a bounty looking mission, Mando and his little one will assist your crew monitor them down. At a sure level through the chase, your engineers should 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 should have the chance to have a wholly completely 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 should 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 by way of how evasive they are often, and the place and the way usually they respawn.
These bold new options are potential now that ILM is working with UE5. The crew can also be upgrading the computer systems which might be connected to every of the Millennium Falcon cockpits with the most recent technology CPUs and graphics playing cards (every laptop holds eight GPUs).
“We’re excited concerning the further headroom now we have, as a result of there have been quite a lot of options or stretch objectives by way of visible constancy that we finally needed to dial again in an effort 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 little bit bit extra restricted on within the earlier model of the engine.”
Guests to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge should wait till Might 22, 2026 to attempt the brand new Smugglers Run expertise, which coincides with the discharge of The Mandalorian and Grogu movie in theaters.
