When you play Star Wars: Vader Immortal I for the first time, you notice that there is something vital missing from the gameplay. Although you get distracted from this nagging idea in your head pretty quickly, your feelings of something missing stay consistent throughout the entire short gameplay. Then in one of the final scenes, it hits you. You’re missing the force. The most romanticized ability of the Sith and Jedi alike, is missing this game.
Star Wars: Vader Immortal II is set to be released this calendar year, and it has all VR and Star Wars fans on the edge of their seats more than ever. At the D23 event last weekend, episode II got new concept art released and more information about the force.
In Episode I you are briefly engaging with Lord Vader as you are pulled from hyperspace over Mustafar. In the next game, you are going to be much more immersed into the action with the Sith Lord himself. You are going to be trained to use the force with Darth Vader as you learn what he went through and how you can manage the same tunnels he once did. Director Ben Snow met with starwars.com to give them more information about the upcoming episode.
In a brief explanation of the newest episode, he says that “in Episode II we discover that Mustafar has its own powerful crystals that powered their technology,” Snow says. “The Bright Star is one of those, but so exceptionally powerful that it was revered as a holy relic by the Mustafarian tribe we meet in Vader Immortal. Its power had attracted the attention of Lady Corvax, with disastrous results, and legend has it that she locked it away deep in the fortress.”
Vader is the perfect teacher for something like this. While in the caves with him, you are going to learn each skill that is required for your upcoming missions. Vader needs you to help him, but Snow notes that throughout the training gameplay, he loses his patience easily.
“As a part of the story, we have a connection with the history of the ancient fortress we’re exploring,” Snow adds. “This gives us special abilities that Vader needs, so it’s in his interest that we have some understanding of the Force. Vader is one of the most powerful practitioners of the Force. In some ways, who better to teach us? He’s approaching it from the dark side — the training is a little different than we would have gotten with Master Yoda.”
Once your master is satisfied with where you are in your training, you are going to start exploring the Corvax Fortress. Down here, you are going to help Vader find something that his former teacher princes him. “The fortress contains what may be the key to something Vader has been searching for for almost two decades,” Martin says. “Something that his master, Palpatine, promised him but never delivered on.” Could Vader finally find the power to brung his long lost love back? Probably not, but we can hope.
The rest of this episode explores more of Mustafar, a planet that played a role in the first 6 episodes of the Star Wars series. “Mustafar was once a verdant and green world, and this fortress harkens back to that time — thousands of years before the films we know,” Martin says. Fans inside the experience will learn more about the lore surrounding the Bright Star and its place in the planet’s history, but Martin hints that the object itself, once worshipped by the Mustafarian people, is to blame for the world’s current state. “The Bright Star is, in part, responsible for turning Mustafar from the lush green world of the ancient past into the fiery hellscape we first saw in Revenge of the Sith and later in Rogue One.”
As you can tell, you are going to be exploring and learning much more this episode than the first. You will be exploring meaningful areas to the master you serve, and you are going to learn the ways of the force from him. As for incorporating your new skills, you are going to have another lightsaber dojo. In the first episode, you would simply fight the robots until you felt prepared to fight the real enemies. This would grow old quickly and it was hard to spend more than a few short minutes in the dojo.
In the news version, you are not only going to be using your saber, but you will be using the force as well. This will lead to more realistic trading sessions that could last a lot longer than the usual 150 seconds from episode I.
“Lightsaber Dojo II is all about using the Force and a lightsaber at the same time,” Perez says. “Lightsaber Dojo I was just a glimpse at the possibilities of lightsaber combat training. In the second installment, you get to build off that training with your lightsaber and the Force in VR for the first time.”
One thing that wasn’t made clear this weekend is the availability of the upcoming Star Wars game. The first was exclusive on the Quest at launch, but made its way over to the Rift platform. With the future of the playable platforms in question, make sure to check back at VRGear.com for more Star Wars and VR updates.
