Tuesday, 9 September, 2025 UTC
Summary
Have you ever wanted to build your own imaginary Star Wars scenes as a child, but didn’t have the money to afford all of those individual figurines of your favorite characters?
Star Wars: Beyond Victory has the perfect solution to that. Developer ILM Immersive's upcoming mixed reality game has three separate game modes, including Adventure, Arcade, and Playset.
In Playset mode, you can take individual digital figures and place them onto various sets in your room while also adding props such as guns and lightning, allowing you to live out your childhood dream Star Wars scenarios. I had the opportunity to try out the Playset mode in Star Wars: Beyond Victory, as well as speak with producer Harvey Whitney and experience design lead David Palumbo about the Playset’s development and its integration with the game’s other modes.
Opening Up A ToyboxIn Playset mode, you can pull up a menu that has several categories, such as action figures, props, and effects. In the action figures segment, you can choose from all of your favorite Star Wars characters, like R2-D2 and Darth Vader, and place them anywhere in your room. ILM confirms that they have everything unlocked for me in my demo, and players will need to progress through the game’s story.
“Going through the story is going to get you a pretty solid majority of the items,” Palumbo explained. “Then there are different challenges in both Adventure and Arcade that are going to unlock the rest.” These challenges include collecting gold coins on the track in Arcade, as well as finding easter eggs in Adventure mode.
There’s a lot you can do with these characters as well, such as changing their sizes on a whim and making them comically small or large. Stormtroopers may already be scared by Darth Vader’s presence, but imagine if he was the size of Godzilla. Yup, you can create that exact scene.
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But what makes these digital figures truly feel “toy-like” is their impressive joint flexibility. You can move their individual limbs like you would an actual action figure. Want C-3PO shooting a gun? You can simply stretch out his arm and place a gun prop into his hand. The interactivity doesn’t stop there. By pressing the trigger down on your Quest controllers, you can shoot the guns as well, simulating those iconic blaster noises from the franchise.
This works both ways. If you have a weapon in a figure’s hand, it’ll fire, and if you’re holding it, it’ll fire too. If there are any obstacles in the way, like TIE Fighters placed directly in front, they’ll get destroyed. So these figures aren’t just for show, but you also don’t have to just use your imagination anymore to play out the action sequences of your dreams.
Palumbo explained that many of the mechanics in Playset mode come from the prototyping that the team did to help filmmakers previsualize their shots that were done on the film side of ILM. “One of the cool things about working within Lucasfilm and at ILM is that this tool was built in VR for Vive long ago,” he said. “But there's just such delight in that mode that it sticks in everyone's head, going, ‘how do we get this into that consumer ready mode?’”
Accessible For EveryoneILM has included various accessibility functions in Beyond Victory, such as seated and standing modes, allowing players to sit down comfortably while playing the game. Subtitle options and colorblindness considerations are available too. “We always take the previous project’s accessibility settings and then try to just keep developing on that,” Whitney explained. “Every time we make something new, we try to build off of what we've already done to just make it better for anybody.”
Beyond Victory’s mixed reality nature puts it at more of an advantage for accessibility than traditional VR. For its Arcade mode, the game uses a holotable that can be extended and adjusted to fit player preferences. In this mode, players can participate in high-speed and thrilling races called podracing to the finish line. “You're not dropping full force into the world and losing track of your space,” Palumbo said. “You have the world around to ground you. That makes something like podracing a lot more possible to do without getting people motion sick.”
Although the franchise got its first podracing-focused game in 1999’s Star Wars Episode I: Racer, ILM took other inspirations too. These included mainly old arcade games like 1983’s Spy Hunter and 1987’s 1943: Battle of Midway as well as newer arcade cabinets like Black Emperor.
“We love the Episode I racer game, and we knew that was a big point of comparison. “At the same time, I think with the mixed reality opportunities we had here, we wanted to capture that same emotional feeling of perilous podracing,” Palumbo said.
He continued. “It should feel dangerous. It should feel fast. But we also have a different form factor that we were working with and excited to use.”
Whitney mentioned Beyond Victory's director, Jose Perez III, and how he had already had a vision from the start of development with its different modes. Perez’s father was a mechanic and had a racer in the garage, and that inspired the game’s podracing aspects, but Perez also collected toys, so he wanted to incorporate those somehow as well.
“We had people working on some sections at one point, and some sections at the other. It was just everything moving all at once, a lot of balls up in the air,” Whitney said. “And it was really exciting to see how it all came together.”
Star Wars: Beyond Victory - A Mixed Reality Playset launches on October 7 for Meta Quest 3 and 3S.