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 friends to instantly 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 standard online game, full with branching decisions and complicated enemies.
WDI labored carefully with visible results studio Industrial Mild & 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 arrange itself for the journey’s new upgrades, ILM has been transitioning from UE4 to Unreal Engine 5.
“For the first mission, we partnered with a third party game developer that helped us create the gameplay code, and then we had Industrial Light & Magic produce all the game assets, and then work to integrate those things together,” mentioned 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 partners. So Industrial Light & Magic is producing the game assets. ILM Immersive [formerly known as ILMxLAB] is doing the gameplay programming. Our friends at Skywalker Sound are responsible for all of the audio programming and all the audio media production. So, it’s really great because they’re all literally in one building, and from an integration standpoint, it makes putting everything together much faster.”
Idea artwork for The Mandalorian mission coming to Smugglers Run.
Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run at Disneyland and Walt Disney World places you in command of the long-lasting Corellian starship from the Star Wars movies. There are three roles to choose from (every becoming as much as two individuals) within the cockpit: pilots, gunners, and engineers. Pilots maneuver the ship and are accountable 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 might enhance that quantity relying on how nicely you do as a group. Your efficiency will range 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 lovely Pressure-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 bunch of ex-Imperial officers and pirates — and since it is a bounty looking mission, Mando and his baby will assist your crew monitor them down. At a sure level through the chase, your engineers should make a crucial resolution 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 every time you ride mission two, you will have the opportunity to have an entirely different branching experience,” mentioned Kalama. “And then within each of the environments themselves, we’ve worked with our partners at ILM to develop levels that have considerably more branching [paths] so that even if you return to the same destination, there’s a new route or new secrets to uncover.”
He additionally mentioned 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 typically they respawn.
Exploring the wreckage of the second Loss of life Star in Smugglers Run.
These formidable 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 most recent era CPUs and graphics playing cards (every laptop holds eight GPUs).
“We’re excited about the additional headroom we have, because there were a lot of features or stretch goals in terms of visual fidelity that we ultimately had to dial back in order to make that trade off of performance,” mentioned Kalama. “But we’re also very excited about having a lot more dynamic destruction, and that’s something that we really felt that we were a little bit more limited on in the previous version of the engine.”
Guests to Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge should wait till Could 22, 2026 to strive the brand new Smugglers Run expertise, which coincides with the discharge of The Mandalorian and Grogu movie in theaters.
