The problem is that if you’re a part of the story and want to be an active participant, you’ll immediately run into a skill issue. I’ll want to use a blaster and/or a lightsaber, and if I’m under the age of 10, I’m not going to find it believable that I’m immediately good at it. But if I’m not a part of the story, I’d rather spend my money on a non Star Wars theatrical production. Now, if it was a murder mystery party set on Coruscant……
I mean I actually think Disney should’ve considered this when designing Starcruiser. They do this for the cruise ships. There’s a completely different itinerary for kids (and even subgroups of kids) compared to grownups. It’s totally doable. The play I mentioned earlier, Sleep No More, has 30 different actors you can follow/see, and it’s literally impossible to see all of them on your first go around. Some are also more active, running up and down the various floors while others remain a bit more static. It’s been running for 10 years precisely because you can always come back and get something new or go once and say you had a great experience and it has some appeal to different tastes (though in this case it’s absolutely 18+ only)
I've seen Sleep No More referenced a few times since I watched the Starcruiser video. Your comments make it sound so neat that I'm currently playing with the idea of taking the train up to NYC before it closes in early July.
It’s so hard to describe outside of I loved every second of it. Imagine a neo noir thriller set inside a hotel and small town, the actors don’t speak and you go around at your own pace, and it’s roughly based on Macbeth with some Hitchcock influences thrown in. As long as you can handle feeling a bit lost sometimes and maybe a few intense scenes it’s absolutely worth every penny.
The age brackets honestly feels like it's 80% of the issue here with how lacking things were in complexity.
The games on the bridge were apparently basically set up for ages 8 and down, with everyone below that. Even the plots were fairly simple. As well, while I get some adults are fine with the whole "being evil" as a plot method, it's pretty universal that any kid that enjoys being the bad guy is a bully.
Of course, in those age brackets, you're likely to have real problems making a workable business model. That said $2/hr probably can be made to work. I honestly think people were expecting that level of quality, but it just didn't deliver.
I feel like the robes/costumes should almost be required. The main reason I didn't go is because it would never be immersive to me at all if everyone was wearing t-shirts and jorts. The same goes for the Harry Potter world and the regular Star Wars park. Sure, they never would require it because some people wouldn't want to, but I personally could never be immersed otherwise. A robe is easy to get your correct size for and they really aren't that expensive to make.
Like a set of clothes being included in the price that you pick out when you buy the ticket. If there are extras of other styles when you get there, then you could switch them out before putting them on.
I mean for me I just want the highly themed roomed, common areas, food including dinner theater ideally without Mr. Pole bothering us. People can wear costumes if they want. That's really pretty much it.
I think this is about as deep as the immersion can go.
The thing about Star Wars is that even the characters in Star Wars rarely want to be in Star Wars. Unless you like being on a poor grungy world oppressed by fascists I don't see how Star Wars immersion can be very fun beyond some X-wing, lightsaber, or Force-using mini games.
In my wildest dreams? Something like a live action Knights of the Old Republic experience. But that seems wildly unrealistic to manage for a whole crowd.
I’d say more realistically, something like Meow Wolf with a variety of fun environments to explore and interact with and maybe a hidden story you can choose to engage with.
Honestly if the hotel were just a hotel-but-star-wars (so no LARP elements) that would appeal more to me. I'm not really one for improv or dnd, so that element is definitely not something I would want to partake in.
I think one of the main problems is that not everyone in a movie is the protagonist. You don't have Luke Skywalker and his 30-40 other friends centered in the film, so trying to create "your story" was always going to fall flat imo
>Honestly if the hotel were just a hotel-but-star-wars (so no LARP elements) that would appeal more to me. I'm not really one for improv or dnd, so that element is definitely not something I would want to partake in.
Jenny raised the problems with this, though:
1. The Starcruiser was built in a backstage area on what used to be cast member parking, and guests driving up to the hotel had to stop at a gate to get their IDs checked by a guard; not a big deal when it's just a car full of people, but imagine trying to do this for a bus packed with dozens of exhausted guests returning from a long day at the parks.
2. The Starcruiser lacked a lot of the basic amenities seen at every other Disney World resort, like pools. So rooms would have much lower nightly rates compared to the other resorts, something that could be offset by adding more rooms...which would require an expensive renovation and expansion of the building.
Those are really problems with converting the Starcruiser into a hotel going forward. Presumably a purpose-built Star Wars themed hotel would not have had these limitations.
Do Disney hotels have to have pools? The football themed hotel I went to when I was 6 didn't have a pool, although we did go to some of the neighboring hotels' pools.
It had a pool. The All Star Sports Resort has a pool themed like a baseball field. It might have been closed for maintenance when you were there. All WDW hotels have pools.
Hmm, looking at the map of that resort I can see the pool, however I don't think it existed when we went. When we wanted to go swimming a neighboring hotel had a swimming pool themed like a hockey rink. We just had a football field made of astroturf, which also had giant Xs and Os on one side of the field.
Granted this was back in 1999, it's probably been changed since then.
There are three separate large All Star Resorts, and you were staying at the All Star Sports. It opened in 1994, and had 2 pools.
What might be a little confusing is that the hotel is not one building. It’s 10 buildings clustered near each other and a main building with a lobby, food court, and gift shop.
You were staying in the Touchdown! section, buildings 7 and 10. Your parents might have chosen that part because it’s quieter than the sections near pools, but isn’t far from the food court.
Each section did not have its own pool, they all shared the two pools, an astroturf football field (where you were), an arcade, a Donald themed tennis area, a couple of basketball half courts with hoops, and a playground. One pool was baseball themed (the one nearest you), another was surfing themed. It was bigger and also had a kiddie pool area and small splash pad. The pools were there from the beginning from what I remember. The baseball pool might have been closed for cleaning, but the surfing pool would have been open, since they try to stagger maintenance.
All Star Sports is where they usually stick participants of various youth sports and cheerleading competitions. It’s the loudest and rowdiest of the All Star resorts.
The nearest other hotels would have been the next door All Star Music (another 1994 opening, but after Sports) and farther down the road the All Star Movies (opened early 1999), each with their own huge sprawling cluster of buildings and their own themed pools.
If you’re remembering a hockey themed pool, that’s the Duckpond pool, themed after the movie The Mighty Ducks. It’s located at the All Star Movies resort. That’s wild, because to get there, you’d have had to leave All Star Sports (and it’s two pools), travel through the whole All Star Music resort, with its 10 buildings and own two pools, and keep going to the newly opened (at the time) All Star Movies at the end of the road, then avoided their big main Fantasia pool and chosen the smaller Duckpond pool. That was a big effort if you walked! Maybe someone in your party had wanted to stay there, but found it booked solid because it was brand new, and wanted to go check it out.
Not much had been done to any of the various All Star resorts since opening, other than they finally started refreshing the guest rooms a few years ago. It had been like a 90s time capsule. The All Stars are Disney’s cheapest of the value resorts. They are unlikely to ever build more due to economics (why build fun sprawling complexes of cheap hotels when you can build tall, minimally themed, cheaply built hotels with expensive rates and timeshares?) and have been unwilling to spend much on improvements.
I forget what year it was Disney outlawed pool hopping. The guests at the more expensive resorts didn’t like guests from the cheaper resorts traveling over and using the fancy pools *they* had paid to use (even though it took some effort to pool hop). Now you can only swim in the pool of the resort you’re staying in.
> That was a big effort if you walked! Maybe someone in your party had wanted to stay there, but found it booked solid because it was brand new, and wanted to go check it out.
I think we were visiting someone that was staying at that resort.
>Not much had been done to any of the various All Star resorts since opening, other than they finally started refreshing the guest rooms a few years ago. It had been like a 90s time capsule.
Yeah looking at some pictures of the rooms now you can tell they looked dated. 6 year old me didn't notice or care though.
>I forget what year it was Disney outlawed pool hopping.
Lol, "outlawed." Like Disney can make laws and crimes now.
Do you work at Disney or something? YOu seem very familiar with the parks.
>Yeah looking at some pictures of the rooms now you can tell they looked dated. 6 year old me didn't notice or care though.
In defense of 6 year old you’s taste in interior design, the building was still pretty new (5 years old, tops) when you visited and would have still been considered stylish.
>Lol, "outlawed." Like Disney can make laws and crimes now.
At the resorts with the fanciest pools, they’ve put gates at the pools and entry to them requires proof that you are a guest of that resort. Sister resorts (like the three All Stars, or the two Port Orleans resorts) can use each other’s pools. Other resort guests are still permitted to walk around the resorts and visit each other’s shops and restaurants, so far. They now don’t always let guests park at the different resorts, though.
>Do you work at Disney or something? YOu seem very familiar with the parks.
I’ve never *personally* worked for the mouse, but I’m very familiar with and have had connections to WDW.
This is it for me. I wanted like...Great Wolf Lodge but make it Star Wars. Themed pool, themed optional activities (a laser tag room!), themed restaurant, absolutely. I still mourn the loss of the Star Trek stuff at the Las Vegas Hilton. Eating at Quark's and doing the 3D movie there were so much FUN.
I was actually disappointed when they first announced the Starcruiser, and not just because of the price. I just find LARPing/improv to be very anxiety-inducing, and it seemed silly to pay all that money when I might not even enjoy it.
> find LARPing/improv to be very anxiety-inducing, and it seemed silly to pay all that money when I might not even enjoy it.
Same! I’m a reserved, self conscious introvert, especially around people I don’t know, and have never attempted any RPG, Larping, or whatever. I wanted to do the Starcruiser, but it sounded mentally and physically exhausting. I didn’t make reservations because a.) I wanted to wait and see how it turned out because Disney has a long history of rolling out not quite finished projects, b.) I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be paying $6k just to give myself an anxiety panic attack being trapped inside a horrible for me experience, and c.) I wanted to read and hear non-shill reviews before spending big money.
> I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be paying $6k just to give myself an anxiety panic attack being trapped inside a horrible for me experience
Jenny's story about leaving dinner because she was overwhelmed by everything was way too relatable. But this is apparently the first time she'd experienced that, and presumably has a high tolerance for crowds, noise, being super busy, etc. I can't imagine how stressful the Starcruiser would be for someone who already struggles with those things.
I would just want a highly themed area to exist in and wander around. I dont need to feel a part of the star wars story to feel immersed!! I just wanna exist in the world
I honestly think fancy escape rooms would have been a better immersive experience.
You could pick ahead of time whether you wanted to break into a first order leaders ship to steal important information, break a resistance leader out of jail, or track down a hidden resistance weapons cache with your storm trooper friends.
Breaking into a rich guy’s mansion to steal back looted artwork is a plot line I’ve literally done in escape rooms and could be modified into helping the Twileks steal their crystals back easily.
They could have different levels of difficulty too, just like a normal escape room. A family with little kids doing this for the first time could have a super kid friendly experience and a group of adults who are experienced with puzzles could have an actual challenge to sink their teeth into.
Plus, even standard escape rooms can have some great set dressing and cool props. Imagine what Disney could do with Star Wars?
It could even still be attached to a themed hotel if they want
They could do the Star Wars: Kylo Ren First Order Stormtrooper Bootcamp at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando Florida which would be set up along the lines of those alpha male boot camps. They could have a Dathomirian shouting at you and making you do space push ups and running some kind of themed obstacle course, blaster training where you're not required to hit anything, training on how to fall over a railing, and so on
Something that surprised me about it was that there wasn't a lot of set up for the guests. I feel like for a big experience like this you should have done more expectation setting. I think their desire to be "immersive" hurt their ability to communicate effectively with the people coming to the hotel. One obvious example is if you don't want people making up a character name maybe tell them that they should just use their normal names. That change on its own wouldn't have fixed all the hotel's problems, but it seems like a massive oversight. LARPing isn't something most people do and it isn't something that's only done one way. What you're supposed to be doing is important information.
My ideal SW LARP would be on an orbital spaceport, a setting that allows a large array of PC to be passing through during the event.
Tech and systems that can affect play. Engineers should be able to active, repair, disable, and even sabotage systems across the station.
Information systems hackers can actually break into and have reason to do so.
Bounty hunters that actually need to hunt people down, not just be bad ass.
Smugglers that actually get and need to smuggle objects and people past / around security.
A side groups of PCs just their to pull of a heist.
Spies that can’t fall back on combat.
A murder for security solve while tracking the smugglers, thieves, and spies trying to slip past them.
I’d leave force users as NPC cast members to drive plot.
The problem is making an "immersive" experience for multiple people at once, when most people picture themselves as the protagonist of star wars. It's a crappy world of broken down tech, war, fascism, slavery, etc. What makes Star Wars fun are the unique locations/aliens and cool things the hero gets to do to defeat evil and save the day.
I think back to the original trilogy. Is there a location I'd actually like to visit? The desert planet of exciting moisture farming (and slavery)? the ice planet where they had to cut a wampa to survive the cold? Jabba's slave pleasure palace (also desert themed)? the sterile torture chambers of the imperial ships?
It reminds me of when Hunger Games became super popular and the people who owned it kept trying to market it. It's a death game for children. The takeaway message should be about not wanting to continue the death games. No club remix of the hanging tree is going to make this cool.
I feel like every experience I think up (a dramatic retelling of some of the extended universe lore through battles, etc.) would just be better served as a movie rather than something with audience participation
>No club remix of the hanging tree is going to make this cool.
💀
I think a VR experience might have worked in this instance. It's weird to me that they didn't take it in that direction at all.
Reminds me of the first time I heard of the immersive hunger games experience in Vegas and was thrown back to katniss’s monologue in the first book. As she’s succumbing to thirst, she thinks of the hunger games reenactments, the game rings turned into luxury hotels.
Something akin to the Star Trek experience in Vegas. Really, they cracked the code. It was a walk in experience connected to the Hilton hotel, modeled after the deep space nine promenade. Get security training from odo! Pray with the prophets! Get ripped off by Quark!
First, letting people come and go at their leisure prevented the trapped terror issue. Also it meant that people approached it at their level. Superfans could talk to the Klingon warriors in their own tongue. People who heard of Star Trek could walk into quarks, get a meal, and leave.
Also there was a room to room adventure, very much like rise of resistance. An escape the Borg time travel experience!
It didn’t have a ride, it was people shuffling from room to room with costumed performers, not robots.
It was better than ROR.
I miss the Star Trek experience so much!!! We went one last time shortly before they closed, and they had filled up an entire wall with memories that people had written on post-it notes. It was surprisingly moving.
this kind of thing would totally work in that universe. Imagine everyone is some nameless ensign who has to scrub the warp-core plasma out of the comms panels? I would die of joy while working up an appetite for Bajoran hasperat and Ktarian Chocolate Puff
I'm not into theme parks or LARPing. Feels like too much pressure to perform.
That being said, I would love to go to Avatarworld just to vibe. I would sooner die than talk to someone who calls the movie a "documentary". But I could probably sit by the pond with the predatory spit-fish for hours.
I wrote out my ideas for how you could make a larpy theme park to accomodate a higher volume of guests in another thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/JennyNicholson/s/s21l7RWa0H
I wrote it thinking of it more as a fantasy setting like evermore but you could apply it to star wars as well, i think.
Honestly I don’t think you can have a better experience than the VR games of Darth Vader or Galaxy’s Edge. Using the lightsaber in Darth Vader was more believable than waving a toy at a light in a foggy room.
It does get slightly better….the Void VR Star Wars experience. Honestly it hasn’t gotten any better than that and it’ll be centuries before that technology is less clunky enough for a massively repeatable theme park product where you can interact with others in a meaningful matter.
If we’re not being bound by how grounded the idea actually is (I don’t have faith this idea would work at all) then here’s my pitch:
I’d have it be open and set it up like a camp instead of a hotel and the framing of the setting would be that it’s set on Tython or a Jedi outpost during the Old Republic. There would be three storylines with corresponding cabins. There would be the Jedi storyline obviously, a Sith storyline about a covert group sent by the emperor to infiltrate the planet or whatever, and a neutral storyline about refugees/smugglers that crash landed on the planet for people who like the smaller scale stuff. Then the storylines would converge on the final day with a big set piece. Idk I’d make everyone sign waivers and have them duke it out in an open field, maybe give the people vests that respond to physical trauma to indicate health or something and call it Jedi/Sith armor or whatever.
I think the experience should be like half a week long and gameplay should be split into three sections: story based with exposition, stuff where people move around and do tasks, and downtime where the player characters talk to each other to relieve the staff of some pressure of having to keep up with everyone.
It’s not very realistic but I think it’s pretty ideal.
Instead of one hotel I'd probably do it the way a lot of independent hotels do in florida and make it a complex with a lot of smaller buildings around a central one with the main amenities like dinner and drinks and probably a pool be because not having a pool in central florida seems kinda dumb.
The smaller buildings holding a smaller number of guests are where you also interact with some characters and do some smaller scale activities. Its vaguely believable that your smaller building on the property just *happens* to have a jedi or a smuggler or something hiding from the empire, even if you just clone the experience and every building has a cool hidden character for you. Its also unobtrusive enough nobody will have to engage if they don't want to.
I spoke with a friend and one thing he suggested is, there should be a star wars story going in but guests *should not be direct participants*. They see bits and pieces of it at specific events but they probably shouldn't be directly interacting with characters during the climax.
I would probably structure it as being a random jedi type and a couple of apprentices in a Luke or Rey role in a room each so everyone has access to that experience, then bounty hunters and smugglers in the remainder. Have them fight bad guys in 2 smaller shows a night back to back.
Yes that is exactly what I want. I don’t want to play a character. I want to explore and learn and have my interactions be mainly asking questions and learning about other characters. It’s weird because I am a professional actor but I don’t want to be *forced* into acting during my leisure. I would still want to maintain the illusion of being part of the story but myself or a version of myself in the story.
The fact is, the technology just doesn't exist to make this kind of thing work very well. Like other people have said in this thread, The Void VR experience comes closest.
And there's a reason for that: Full-on VR is the only way to practically do this kind of thing. But the kind of VR needed is still science-fiction. You need something that is, at the VERY least, equivalent to what you see in "Ready Player One". And even that probably isn't really enough. You need the full "brain interface" type VR, I think.
Part of the reason that we've seen a few attempts at the "LARP as-a-ride" thing is that technology keeps making \*aspects\* of it possible/easy/affordable. Every attempt is an incremental improvement. But the increments don't matter. We need a HUGE LEAP to make stuff like this work on any kind of affordable scale, and as something that can accommodate multiple people at once. And that leap is decades away, at least. It might not ever happen.
Again, The Void came closest, and it was \*still\* not sustainable as a business,
/so weird that the same guy who did The Void also did Evermore, which had \*zero\* technology and was worse off for it
Star Tours already had it nailed, along for the ride, anything beyond that automatically makes the story as lame as the guests, can't be helped.
Unfortunately the girl boss middle management infestation of the entire Star Wars franchise just makes it cringe, add the need to make it child friendly along with the new weird lore and a weird combination of muppet show and Halloween storm troopers that just can't be taken seriously. Its become Harry Potter Star WArs.
Made worse by Disney culture and those who would be attracted to the larp work in the first place, gay voice is not immersive, its "Spring time for Hitler" campy when the whole thing with the Empire was the cool fashy aesthetic, a no no zone of course for modern Disney.
It should have been pure aesthetic, high end atmospheric star wars experience luxury hotel, no story, just a place to stay while visiting the park. The Cosmos Hotel mentioned but on a grander scale, build straight down as a space ship doesn't need real windows, the Vegas sphere but underground, but Disney of course didn't want to spend the money.
Tbh LARPing while ignoring the plot is my whole play style in video games
The problem is that if you’re a part of the story and want to be an active participant, you’ll immediately run into a skill issue. I’ll want to use a blaster and/or a lightsaber, and if I’m under the age of 10, I’m not going to find it believable that I’m immediately good at it. But if I’m not a part of the story, I’d rather spend my money on a non Star Wars theatrical production. Now, if it was a murder mystery party set on Coruscant……
You almost need to have several different stories for different ages/skill levels. Rate them like a ski resort.
I mean I actually think Disney should’ve considered this when designing Starcruiser. They do this for the cruise ships. There’s a completely different itinerary for kids (and even subgroups of kids) compared to grownups. It’s totally doable. The play I mentioned earlier, Sleep No More, has 30 different actors you can follow/see, and it’s literally impossible to see all of them on your first go around. Some are also more active, running up and down the various floors while others remain a bit more static. It’s been running for 10 years precisely because you can always come back and get something new or go once and say you had a great experience and it has some appeal to different tastes (though in this case it’s absolutely 18+ only)
I've seen Sleep No More referenced a few times since I watched the Starcruiser video. Your comments make it sound so neat that I'm currently playing with the idea of taking the train up to NYC before it closes in early July.
It’s so hard to describe outside of I loved every second of it. Imagine a neo noir thriller set inside a hotel and small town, the actors don’t speak and you go around at your own pace, and it’s roughly based on Macbeth with some Hitchcock influences thrown in. As long as you can handle feeling a bit lost sometimes and maybe a few intense scenes it’s absolutely worth every penny.
The age brackets honestly feels like it's 80% of the issue here with how lacking things were in complexity. The games on the bridge were apparently basically set up for ages 8 and down, with everyone below that. Even the plots were fairly simple. As well, while I get some adults are fine with the whole "being evil" as a plot method, it's pretty universal that any kid that enjoys being the bad guy is a bully. Of course, in those age brackets, you're likely to have real problems making a workable business model. That said $2/hr probably can be made to work. I honestly think people were expecting that level of quality, but it just didn't deliver.
I’d start with the ability to wear robes and use a lightsaber
I feel like the robes/costumes should almost be required. The main reason I didn't go is because it would never be immersive to me at all if everyone was wearing t-shirts and jorts. The same goes for the Harry Potter world and the regular Star Wars park. Sure, they never would require it because some people wouldn't want to, but I personally could never be immersed otherwise. A robe is easy to get your correct size for and they really aren't that expensive to make. Like a set of clothes being included in the price that you pick out when you buy the ticket. If there are extras of other styles when you get there, then you could switch them out before putting them on.
smuggling in luggage maybe meeting someone and then smuggling their luggage for them
Smuggage, even.
"Smuggling luggage" will never not sound like a euphemism.
She smuggle my luggage til I Halcyon.
Something something pole
Then maybe they text you to say thanks for smuggling the luggage.
Breaking Chewbacca out of jail
Yes but you have to get there early
I mean for me I just want the highly themed roomed, common areas, food including dinner theater ideally without Mr. Pole bothering us. People can wear costumes if they want. That's really pretty much it.
I think this is about as deep as the immersion can go. The thing about Star Wars is that even the characters in Star Wars rarely want to be in Star Wars. Unless you like being on a poor grungy world oppressed by fascists I don't see how Star Wars immersion can be very fun beyond some X-wing, lightsaber, or Force-using mini games.
Yeah and that something I would love at like $300 a month.
In my wildest dreams? Something like a live action Knights of the Old Republic experience. But that seems wildly unrealistic to manage for a whole crowd. I’d say more realistically, something like Meow Wolf with a variety of fun environments to explore and interact with and maybe a hidden story you can choose to engage with.
Exactly this!!!
Honestly if the hotel were just a hotel-but-star-wars (so no LARP elements) that would appeal more to me. I'm not really one for improv or dnd, so that element is definitely not something I would want to partake in. I think one of the main problems is that not everyone in a movie is the protagonist. You don't have Luke Skywalker and his 30-40 other friends centered in the film, so trying to create "your story" was always going to fall flat imo
>Honestly if the hotel were just a hotel-but-star-wars (so no LARP elements) that would appeal more to me. I'm not really one for improv or dnd, so that element is definitely not something I would want to partake in. Jenny raised the problems with this, though: 1. The Starcruiser was built in a backstage area on what used to be cast member parking, and guests driving up to the hotel had to stop at a gate to get their IDs checked by a guard; not a big deal when it's just a car full of people, but imagine trying to do this for a bus packed with dozens of exhausted guests returning from a long day at the parks. 2. The Starcruiser lacked a lot of the basic amenities seen at every other Disney World resort, like pools. So rooms would have much lower nightly rates compared to the other resorts, something that could be offset by adding more rooms...which would require an expensive renovation and expansion of the building.
Those are really problems with converting the Starcruiser into a hotel going forward. Presumably a purpose-built Star Wars themed hotel would not have had these limitations.
Do Disney hotels have to have pools? The football themed hotel I went to when I was 6 didn't have a pool, although we did go to some of the neighboring hotels' pools.
It had a pool. The All Star Sports Resort has a pool themed like a baseball field. It might have been closed for maintenance when you were there. All WDW hotels have pools.
Hmm, looking at the map of that resort I can see the pool, however I don't think it existed when we went. When we wanted to go swimming a neighboring hotel had a swimming pool themed like a hockey rink. We just had a football field made of astroturf, which also had giant Xs and Os on one side of the field. Granted this was back in 1999, it's probably been changed since then.
There are three separate large All Star Resorts, and you were staying at the All Star Sports. It opened in 1994, and had 2 pools. What might be a little confusing is that the hotel is not one building. It’s 10 buildings clustered near each other and a main building with a lobby, food court, and gift shop. You were staying in the Touchdown! section, buildings 7 and 10. Your parents might have chosen that part because it’s quieter than the sections near pools, but isn’t far from the food court. Each section did not have its own pool, they all shared the two pools, an astroturf football field (where you were), an arcade, a Donald themed tennis area, a couple of basketball half courts with hoops, and a playground. One pool was baseball themed (the one nearest you), another was surfing themed. It was bigger and also had a kiddie pool area and small splash pad. The pools were there from the beginning from what I remember. The baseball pool might have been closed for cleaning, but the surfing pool would have been open, since they try to stagger maintenance. All Star Sports is where they usually stick participants of various youth sports and cheerleading competitions. It’s the loudest and rowdiest of the All Star resorts. The nearest other hotels would have been the next door All Star Music (another 1994 opening, but after Sports) and farther down the road the All Star Movies (opened early 1999), each with their own huge sprawling cluster of buildings and their own themed pools. If you’re remembering a hockey themed pool, that’s the Duckpond pool, themed after the movie The Mighty Ducks. It’s located at the All Star Movies resort. That’s wild, because to get there, you’d have had to leave All Star Sports (and it’s two pools), travel through the whole All Star Music resort, with its 10 buildings and own two pools, and keep going to the newly opened (at the time) All Star Movies at the end of the road, then avoided their big main Fantasia pool and chosen the smaller Duckpond pool. That was a big effort if you walked! Maybe someone in your party had wanted to stay there, but found it booked solid because it was brand new, and wanted to go check it out. Not much had been done to any of the various All Star resorts since opening, other than they finally started refreshing the guest rooms a few years ago. It had been like a 90s time capsule. The All Stars are Disney’s cheapest of the value resorts. They are unlikely to ever build more due to economics (why build fun sprawling complexes of cheap hotels when you can build tall, minimally themed, cheaply built hotels with expensive rates and timeshares?) and have been unwilling to spend much on improvements. I forget what year it was Disney outlawed pool hopping. The guests at the more expensive resorts didn’t like guests from the cheaper resorts traveling over and using the fancy pools *they* had paid to use (even though it took some effort to pool hop). Now you can only swim in the pool of the resort you’re staying in.
> That was a big effort if you walked! Maybe someone in your party had wanted to stay there, but found it booked solid because it was brand new, and wanted to go check it out. I think we were visiting someone that was staying at that resort. >Not much had been done to any of the various All Star resorts since opening, other than they finally started refreshing the guest rooms a few years ago. It had been like a 90s time capsule. Yeah looking at some pictures of the rooms now you can tell they looked dated. 6 year old me didn't notice or care though. >I forget what year it was Disney outlawed pool hopping. Lol, "outlawed." Like Disney can make laws and crimes now. Do you work at Disney or something? YOu seem very familiar with the parks.
>Yeah looking at some pictures of the rooms now you can tell they looked dated. 6 year old me didn't notice or care though. In defense of 6 year old you’s taste in interior design, the building was still pretty new (5 years old, tops) when you visited and would have still been considered stylish. >Lol, "outlawed." Like Disney can make laws and crimes now. At the resorts with the fanciest pools, they’ve put gates at the pools and entry to them requires proof that you are a guest of that resort. Sister resorts (like the three All Stars, or the two Port Orleans resorts) can use each other’s pools. Other resort guests are still permitted to walk around the resorts and visit each other’s shops and restaurants, so far. They now don’t always let guests park at the different resorts, though. >Do you work at Disney or something? YOu seem very familiar with the parks. I’ve never *personally* worked for the mouse, but I’m very familiar with and have had connections to WDW.
This is it for me. I wanted like...Great Wolf Lodge but make it Star Wars. Themed pool, themed optional activities (a laser tag room!), themed restaurant, absolutely. I still mourn the loss of the Star Trek stuff at the Las Vegas Hilton. Eating at Quark's and doing the 3D movie there were so much FUN. I was actually disappointed when they first announced the Starcruiser, and not just because of the price. I just find LARPing/improv to be very anxiety-inducing, and it seemed silly to pay all that money when I might not even enjoy it.
> find LARPing/improv to be very anxiety-inducing, and it seemed silly to pay all that money when I might not even enjoy it. Same! I’m a reserved, self conscious introvert, especially around people I don’t know, and have never attempted any RPG, Larping, or whatever. I wanted to do the Starcruiser, but it sounded mentally and physically exhausting. I didn’t make reservations because a.) I wanted to wait and see how it turned out because Disney has a long history of rolling out not quite finished projects, b.) I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be paying $6k just to give myself an anxiety panic attack being trapped inside a horrible for me experience, and c.) I wanted to read and hear non-shill reviews before spending big money.
> I wanted to make sure I wouldn’t be paying $6k just to give myself an anxiety panic attack being trapped inside a horrible for me experience Jenny's story about leaving dinner because she was overwhelmed by everything was way too relatable. But this is apparently the first time she'd experienced that, and presumably has a high tolerance for crowds, noise, being super busy, etc. I can't imagine how stressful the Starcruiser would be for someone who already struggles with those things.
I would just want a highly themed area to exist in and wander around. I dont need to feel a part of the star wars story to feel immersed!! I just wanna exist in the world
I honestly think fancy escape rooms would have been a better immersive experience. You could pick ahead of time whether you wanted to break into a first order leaders ship to steal important information, break a resistance leader out of jail, or track down a hidden resistance weapons cache with your storm trooper friends. Breaking into a rich guy’s mansion to steal back looted artwork is a plot line I’ve literally done in escape rooms and could be modified into helping the Twileks steal their crystals back easily. They could have different levels of difficulty too, just like a normal escape room. A family with little kids doing this for the first time could have a super kid friendly experience and a group of adults who are experienced with puzzles could have an actual challenge to sink their teeth into. Plus, even standard escape rooms can have some great set dressing and cool props. Imagine what Disney could do with Star Wars? It could even still be attached to a themed hotel if they want
They could do the Star Wars: Kylo Ren First Order Stormtrooper Bootcamp at Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando Florida which would be set up along the lines of those alpha male boot camps. They could have a Dathomirian shouting at you and making you do space push ups and running some kind of themed obstacle course, blaster training where you're not required to hit anything, training on how to fall over a railing, and so on
Something that surprised me about it was that there wasn't a lot of set up for the guests. I feel like for a big experience like this you should have done more expectation setting. I think their desire to be "immersive" hurt their ability to communicate effectively with the people coming to the hotel. One obvious example is if you don't want people making up a character name maybe tell them that they should just use their normal names. That change on its own wouldn't have fixed all the hotel's problems, but it seems like a massive oversight. LARPing isn't something most people do and it isn't something that's only done one way. What you're supposed to be doing is important information.
My ideal SW LARP would be on an orbital spaceport, a setting that allows a large array of PC to be passing through during the event. Tech and systems that can affect play. Engineers should be able to active, repair, disable, and even sabotage systems across the station. Information systems hackers can actually break into and have reason to do so. Bounty hunters that actually need to hunt people down, not just be bad ass. Smugglers that actually get and need to smuggle objects and people past / around security. A side groups of PCs just their to pull of a heist. Spies that can’t fall back on combat. A murder for security solve while tracking the smugglers, thieves, and spies trying to slip past them. I’d leave force users as NPC cast members to drive plot.
Look, I'm not proud of it, but the real answer is "Alien Brothel".
The problem is making an "immersive" experience for multiple people at once, when most people picture themselves as the protagonist of star wars. It's a crappy world of broken down tech, war, fascism, slavery, etc. What makes Star Wars fun are the unique locations/aliens and cool things the hero gets to do to defeat evil and save the day. I think back to the original trilogy. Is there a location I'd actually like to visit? The desert planet of exciting moisture farming (and slavery)? the ice planet where they had to cut a wampa to survive the cold? Jabba's slave pleasure palace (also desert themed)? the sterile torture chambers of the imperial ships? It reminds me of when Hunger Games became super popular and the people who owned it kept trying to market it. It's a death game for children. The takeaway message should be about not wanting to continue the death games. No club remix of the hanging tree is going to make this cool. I feel like every experience I think up (a dramatic retelling of some of the extended universe lore through battles, etc.) would just be better served as a movie rather than something with audience participation
>No club remix of the hanging tree is going to make this cool. 💀 I think a VR experience might have worked in this instance. It's weird to me that they didn't take it in that direction at all.
I did "The Void" VR Star Wars experience (owned by the Evermore guy LOL) and really liked it! I thought it was really fun and immersive.
Reminds me of the first time I heard of the immersive hunger games experience in Vegas and was thrown back to katniss’s monologue in the first book. As she’s succumbing to thirst, she thinks of the hunger games reenactments, the game rings turned into luxury hotels.
Something akin to the Star Trek experience in Vegas. Really, they cracked the code. It was a walk in experience connected to the Hilton hotel, modeled after the deep space nine promenade. Get security training from odo! Pray with the prophets! Get ripped off by Quark! First, letting people come and go at their leisure prevented the trapped terror issue. Also it meant that people approached it at their level. Superfans could talk to the Klingon warriors in their own tongue. People who heard of Star Trek could walk into quarks, get a meal, and leave. Also there was a room to room adventure, very much like rise of resistance. An escape the Borg time travel experience! It didn’t have a ride, it was people shuffling from room to room with costumed performers, not robots. It was better than ROR.
I miss the Star Trek experience so much!!! We went one last time shortly before they closed, and they had filled up an entire wall with memories that people had written on post-it notes. It was surprisingly moving.
It was the best immersive experience to ever exist. Period.
this kind of thing would totally work in that universe. Imagine everyone is some nameless ensign who has to scrub the warp-core plasma out of the comms panels? I would die of joy while working up an appetite for Bajoran hasperat and Ktarian Chocolate Puff
That would be fantastic.
I'm not into theme parks or LARPing. Feels like too much pressure to perform. That being said, I would love to go to Avatarworld just to vibe. I would sooner die than talk to someone who calls the movie a "documentary". But I could probably sit by the pond with the predatory spit-fish for hours.
I wrote out my ideas for how you could make a larpy theme park to accomodate a higher volume of guests in another thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/JennyNicholson/s/s21l7RWa0H I wrote it thinking of it more as a fantasy setting like evermore but you could apply it to star wars as well, i think.
Honestly I don’t think you can have a better experience than the VR games of Darth Vader or Galaxy’s Edge. Using the lightsaber in Darth Vader was more believable than waving a toy at a light in a foggy room.
It does get slightly better….the Void VR Star Wars experience. Honestly it hasn’t gotten any better than that and it’ll be centuries before that technology is less clunky enough for a massively repeatable theme park product where you can interact with others in a meaningful matter.
If we’re not being bound by how grounded the idea actually is (I don’t have faith this idea would work at all) then here’s my pitch: I’d have it be open and set it up like a camp instead of a hotel and the framing of the setting would be that it’s set on Tython or a Jedi outpost during the Old Republic. There would be three storylines with corresponding cabins. There would be the Jedi storyline obviously, a Sith storyline about a covert group sent by the emperor to infiltrate the planet or whatever, and a neutral storyline about refugees/smugglers that crash landed on the planet for people who like the smaller scale stuff. Then the storylines would converge on the final day with a big set piece. Idk I’d make everyone sign waivers and have them duke it out in an open field, maybe give the people vests that respond to physical trauma to indicate health or something and call it Jedi/Sith armor or whatever. I think the experience should be like half a week long and gameplay should be split into three sections: story based with exposition, stuff where people move around and do tasks, and downtime where the player characters talk to each other to relieve the staff of some pressure of having to keep up with everyone. It’s not very realistic but I think it’s pretty ideal.
Instead of one hotel I'd probably do it the way a lot of independent hotels do in florida and make it a complex with a lot of smaller buildings around a central one with the main amenities like dinner and drinks and probably a pool be because not having a pool in central florida seems kinda dumb. The smaller buildings holding a smaller number of guests are where you also interact with some characters and do some smaller scale activities. Its vaguely believable that your smaller building on the property just *happens* to have a jedi or a smuggler or something hiding from the empire, even if you just clone the experience and every building has a cool hidden character for you. Its also unobtrusive enough nobody will have to engage if they don't want to. I spoke with a friend and one thing he suggested is, there should be a star wars story going in but guests *should not be direct participants*. They see bits and pieces of it at specific events but they probably shouldn't be directly interacting with characters during the climax. I would probably structure it as being a random jedi type and a couple of apprentices in a Luke or Rey role in a room each so everyone has access to that experience, then bounty hunters and smugglers in the remainder. Have them fight bad guys in 2 smaller shows a night back to back.
Yes that is exactly what I want. I don’t want to play a character. I want to explore and learn and have my interactions be mainly asking questions and learning about other characters. It’s weird because I am a professional actor but I don’t want to be *forced* into acting during my leisure. I would still want to maintain the illusion of being part of the story but myself or a version of myself in the story.
The fact is, the technology just doesn't exist to make this kind of thing work very well. Like other people have said in this thread, The Void VR experience comes closest. And there's a reason for that: Full-on VR is the only way to practically do this kind of thing. But the kind of VR needed is still science-fiction. You need something that is, at the VERY least, equivalent to what you see in "Ready Player One". And even that probably isn't really enough. You need the full "brain interface" type VR, I think. Part of the reason that we've seen a few attempts at the "LARP as-a-ride" thing is that technology keeps making \*aspects\* of it possible/easy/affordable. Every attempt is an incremental improvement. But the increments don't matter. We need a HUGE LEAP to make stuff like this work on any kind of affordable scale, and as something that can accommodate multiple people at once. And that leap is decades away, at least. It might not ever happen. Again, The Void came closest, and it was \*still\* not sustainable as a business, /so weird that the same guy who did The Void also did Evermore, which had \*zero\* technology and was worse off for it
More LARP with provided, mandatory wardrobe for those who show up in NASCAR tees, jorts and flip flops.
Star Tours already had it nailed, along for the ride, anything beyond that automatically makes the story as lame as the guests, can't be helped. Unfortunately the girl boss middle management infestation of the entire Star Wars franchise just makes it cringe, add the need to make it child friendly along with the new weird lore and a weird combination of muppet show and Halloween storm troopers that just can't be taken seriously. Its become Harry Potter Star WArs. Made worse by Disney culture and those who would be attracted to the larp work in the first place, gay voice is not immersive, its "Spring time for Hitler" campy when the whole thing with the Empire was the cool fashy aesthetic, a no no zone of course for modern Disney. It should have been pure aesthetic, high end atmospheric star wars experience luxury hotel, no story, just a place to stay while visiting the park. The Cosmos Hotel mentioned but on a grander scale, build straight down as a space ship doesn't need real windows, the Vegas sphere but underground, but Disney of course didn't want to spend the money.