ILMxLAB, Lucasfilm’s immersive entertainment division, is bringing a Darth Vader-themed VR series to the recently announced Oculus Quest. With six main films dedicated to telling to Vader’s story though, you’d think there wouldn’t be much left to say about the franchise’s archetypal ‘dark father’. The developers behind the upcoming Vader Immortal however say in a blog post that there’s more to learn about Darth Vader, and it’s going to be canon to the series.

Written and produced by David S. Goyer, screenwriter behind a prolific body of works including The Dark Knight franchise and the location-based VR experience Secrets of the Empire, the new VR experience is slated to be a three-part series set between Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith and A New Hope.

The studio is staying pretty tight-lipped for now on specifics, although we’ve been told that users will visit Darth Vader’s castle on the lava-world of Mustafar, which was first seen in Rogue One: A Star Wars Story. There, we’re told that we’ll “encounter Vader himself and wield a lightsaber.”

According to ILMxLAB, Vader Immortal “counts [as canon], and was hatched and developed with guidance from the Lucasfilm Story Group. It will be an official part of the overall saga, adding to what we know of Vader and his story, and of everyone and everything else that Vader Immortal touches.”

“We came up with the concept, and then we had a conversation about where in the timeline it would fit,” Goyer says. “Everyone felt very strongly that it’s a legitimate Vader story and that it advances the ball in terms of who he is and what his goals are. We were also determined to make sure that it’s a story you can only experience in VR. There aren’t any other plans to port this into any other medium. We wanted to design it specifically for VR.”

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Users will also be able to explore Vader’s castle, which ought to reveal what Goyer calls “some other depths to his character that might be difficult to experience in other mediums.”

Vader Immortal is set to launch in tandem with Quest sometime in Spring 2019.

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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 3,500 articles on the topic. Scott brings that seasoned insight to his reporting from major industry events across the globe.
  • Luke

    does this come also for rift?

    • Roddeh

      Probably, launch will be Quest exclusive though.

      • according to Oculus, all Oculus Studio games for Quest will also be released on Rift.

    • Tommy

      Quest exclusive :)

      • NooYawker

        So Facebook even screws it own customers over?

  • nasprin

    I always thought that the Star Wars franchise could become a very powerful engine for the VR Industry – the lack of feedback and weight with VR controllers seems to fit perfectly for lightsaber combat (just look at Beat Saber), space sim combat has been proven to work wonderfully in VR, a well known franchise coming to VR would boost the amount of VR headsets being sold AND create a new hype around Star Wars (imagine being able to wield a lightsaber in a story-driven Star Wars game!) and with the amount of money Disney gets from Star Wars (even with the latest failures) there is definitly room for small-sized investments into VR-Studios.

    Hopefully this is exactly what many of us are waiting for.

  • Tommy

    Would LOVE if Timothy Zahn would write one of the episodes!!

  • MosBen

    I’m certainly intrigued by this, but I’ve got this niggling thought in the back of my head that we’re reaching the point in VR where some legitimately cool things are going to come out, and be really dated in just a few years as the tech continues to develop. It’s like the original Jumanji: it’s a really wonderful film that is really hampered by the CGI of the mid-90s. It’s so bad that it’s hard to recommend to people today, even if it’s a good story with good performances.

  • MosBen

    Something that’s interesting to me about this is that most lightsaber-esque experiences thus far (Beatsaber, et al.) give the user two sabers because they have two tracked hands. That makes sense from an input perspective, but it doesn’t really fit with the Star Wars cannon, in which the vast majority of Force users used a single blade. It also wouldn’t make a ton of sense, but maybe they’ll let you choose one light saber with the off hand being able to do Force powers, or two sabers.

  • dogtato

    a friend asked me what I thought of the quest. I said I guess it’ll be good, there will be more conent for vr. hard to say it’s good if it’s only for the quest though

  • Skippy76

    I think I just wet my pants….

  • VR4EVER

    I want this so badly! I might play this until the Quest falls apart. And then buy another one.

  • Lucidfeuer

    If it’s going to be canon, then it’s a terrible idea to fragment this content by it being exclusive. First it was the Battlefront II VR Mission, and now there’s this one…basic stupid idea from a franchise management pov.

    But hey…ILMlab has become the hallmark of gratuitous SW marketing experiments for VR and tech, some of which are vaporware like the Google Seurat demo and I’m pretty sure that RTX one is too…

    • david harrington

      stupid idea from a franchise management pov..

      you do realize they don’t even hire writers at lucas film anymore right?

  • DesertCobra

    Mustafar wasn’t first seen in Rogue One. Mustafar was where Anakin and Obi-Wan had the epic lightsaber battle at the end of Episode 3. With that said, it’s great to see some Star Wars content coming to VR, but the exclusivity of the content is a disservice to Star Wars fans on all other platforms.

  • JustNiz

    Are they REALLY launching this on the Quest only? What a clueless idea.