Your first officially-sanctioned chance to swing a lightsaber in virtual reality is coming on Monday. It’s called Trials on Tatooine, it’s compatible with the HTC Vive, and according to The Verge, it will be available for download on Steam on July 18th. Best of all, it’ll be free.
The trailer for Trials on Tatooine, while obviously not in VR, is pretty tantalizing.
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Trials onTatooine is a project of Industrial Light and Magic’s xLab, and it’s a bit more of a teaser than an actual game. It clocks in at under ten minutes, during which players help repair the Millennium Falcon under Han Solo’s guidance, and defend it from Imperial Stormtroopers by deflecting blaster shots with a lightsaber.
That lightsaber will be controlled, not by a joystick or mouse, but by the Vive’s extremely lightsaber-like motion controller. In his preview in March, Coins2Day‘s John Gaudiosi said “the gameplay with the lightsaber works so naturally with the Vive controller that you could envision entire game experiences using it.” We might not have to wait to long for that, since Lucasfilm is now working with Sony on a Playstation VR entry in the Star Wars: Battlefront series.
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Though it’s short, Trials on Tatooine is exciting in one other key way: It takes place in the still-hazy time between the original Star Wars trilogy and the new sequence kicked off by The Force Awakens. That’s sure to set fans digging for hints of what happened in that interim.