How Disney is using Unreal Engine 5 to add major upgrades to Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run

Millennium Falcon: The smugglers were a historic moment for Walt Disney Imagineering when it opened in 2019. It was the first Disney ride that allowed guests to control their experience directly and interact with history. But for the next smugglers put on mission, the company goes further and makes the journey feels much more like A traditional video gameComplete with engraving choices and sophisticated enemies.

WDI worked in close collaboration with Visual Effects Studio Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) on the first Run Mission passers -by, the latter using the 4 Unreal engine of Games Epic to create high fidelity graphics that give you the impression of being part of an exciting intergalactic robbery. Disney’s relationship with Epic actually dates back several years, when Lucasfilm has decided to use a unreal engine to build virtual sets on The Mandalorian TV show.

To prepare for new driving upgrades, Ilm is going from UE4 to Unreal engine 5.

“For the First Mission, we Parted with a third party game developer that helps 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,” Said Asa Kalama, Vice President and Executive Creative Disney Imagineering, in a presentation to the press at Unreal Fest 2025.

“Now, for the second mission, we are doing all with our partners Lucasfilm. So Industrial Light & Magic produces game assets. Ilm immersive [formerly known as ILMxLAB] Makes gameplay programming. Our friends from Skywalker Sound are responsible for all audio programs and all the production of audio media. So, it’s really great because they are all literally in a single building, and from the point of view of integration, it makes everything together much faster. »»

Millennium Falcon: The smugglers run in Disneyland and Walt Disney World puts you in the emblematic Starship Corellian of Star Wars films. There are three roles to choose (each adjusted to two people) in the cockpit: pilots, artillerymen and engineers. Pilots maneuver the ship and are responsible for jumping in the hyperspace, the artillerymen attack enemy fighters and engineers help repair the ship and draw harpoons to steal goods.

You earn galactic credits (serving as a high score of your team) to reach your goal and can increase this amount depending on how you do as a team. Your performance will vary each time you are driving, but if not the history of the original mission is strictly linear. The second mission, which Disney announced before, featured the Mandalorian and his adorable son brandishing with growled strength, will offer much more re -pole.

In this new experience, you are sent to the desert planet of Tatooine to capture a group of former Imperial officers and hackers – and as it is a bonus hunting mission, Mando and his child will help your crew find them. At a point during the prosecution, your engineers will have to do a critical decision About the premium to be continued: you would visit the city of Cloud in Bespin, the wreck of death II near Endor, that is to say the sprawling metropolises of Coruscant.

“So, each time you set up Mission Two, you will have the opportunity to have a completely different connection experience,” said Kalama. “And then in each of the environments themselves, we worked with our partners at ILM to develop levels that have much more branch [paths] So that even if you come back to the same destination, there is a new route or new secrets to discover. »»

He also said that development teams “amplified intelligence” of third -party people in this new mission in terms of evasive, and where and at what frequency they reappear.

These new ambitious features are possible now that it is working with UE5. The team also improves computers Who are attached to each of the Falcon Millennium cockpits with the CPUs and the latest generation graphics cards (each computer contains eight GPU).

“We are delighted with the additional margin that we have, because there were a lot of extensible features or objectives in terms of visual loyalty that we finally had to push in order to make this compromise on performance,” said Kalama. “But we are also very happy to have a much more dynamic destruction, and this is something that we really thought that we were a little more limited in the previous version of the engine.”

Star Wars visitors: Galaxy’s Edge will have to wait until May 22, 2026 to try the new smuggling race experience, which coincides with the exit of The Mandalorian and the Grogu Film in theaters.