Board 8 > Jenny Nicholson's 4-hour review of the defunct Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser

(+) Yeah! (+)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0CpOYZZZW4

I'm nearly finished watching it and it's just so fascinating. It sure feels like too many corners were cut and Disney got too greedy, making the experience not worth it.

Has any B8er been there?

I intended to watch this over a week, but ended up watching it all the night it came out until like 4AM.

It's 3AM right now where I am so I'm in the same boat.

Got to part 4 last night, it's so funny and interesting as usual.

Never been. I don't even think I'd spend 6K to go to a Resident Evil-themed resort.

It sucks because a lot of Starcruiser features were supposed to be baseline to Galaxy's Edge but got cut and thrown into the Starcruiser.

Now they are lost entirely.

Might watch this at some point.

Will watch this when I have time but the A More Civilized Age (Austin Walker and cos Star Wars podcast) episodes on this thing were great.

Also cant stress enough how shitty this concept actually was.

For the low low price of more than a week at Disney World you get half a day at the worst park in Disney World and a cruise ship style room(small).

Yeah the AMCA visit is a good talk (Neil Patrick Harris was a guest at the same time as them) and also some of the Mega64 team went and made a video about it. Don't think I can spend a whole four hours on this though.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Don't think I can spend a whole four hours on this though.

I always think this and get sucked in every time

this video kicks ass and every minute of the 4 hours is interesting

Watching now. It's a small detail in the grand scheme of things, but Disney not providing their guests access to Disney+ on the TV for their $6000+ room is one of the most absurdly stingy things I've ever heard.

I had a few friends go to it and they said it was one of the best things they had ever done.

But they are hardcore Star Wars fans, so...

Damn I'm a sucker for Disney park flop videos.

KamikazePotato posted...

Watching now. It's a small detail in the grand scheme of things, but Disney not providing their guests access to Disney+ on the TV for their $6000+ room is one of the most absurdly stingy things I've ever heard.

It's amazing how, despite every other disaster, this to me sticks out more than anything as the clearest sign that this whole thing was fucked from the start.

Putting AD FREE Disney+ in all 100 guest rooms would have been a $1,400 a month expenditure. This is around the same price as a single normal night stay at the hotel for 1 person.

UshiromiyaEva posted...

It's amazing how, despite every other disaster, this to me sticks out more than anything as the clearest sign that this whole thing was fucked from the start.

Putting AD FREE Disney+ in all 100 guest rooms would have been a $1,400 a month expenditure. This is around the same price as a single normal night stay at the hotel for 1 person.

also they own the channel it's not even an expense right???

Does Disney+ come with your room at Disney hotels? The app isn't designed to be viewed without an account, I'd imagine, so they'd have to a design a whole new interface/UI.

Edit: I mean, just offering the programs for free on the in room TVs would probably be simpler.

Yesmar_ posted...

Does Disney+ come with your room at Disney hotels?

Apparently it does not, you always have to use your account, lol. Very stingy.

But this isn't even "real" Disney+, it was all weird storybook shit for kids according to Nicholson. I've thought about this, and part of the reason is probably that they don't want people holed up in their hotel rooms binging streaming shows. It is a LARP hotel after all, they want to force people to go do the common room activities, especially if barely anyone is showing up to the place anyways. This isn't a defense but the whole concept is fucked up design-wise.

Also this reminded me. Free Roaming droids were tested in Disneyland pre-COVID(In Tomrrowland, pre-Galaxy's Edge sort of kind of opened in 2019) and then rarely to never seen again until April 2024 because we didn't have a Starcruiser and they were cut entirely from Galaxy's Edge.

Speaking of that old Galaxy's Edge half opening where they thought a land didn't need to open with its best attraction. It went so well they decided to do it again with Avenger's Campus. Except this time they forgot to bother to get beyond the concept phase for the lands signature attraction and now we are years later with nothing.

To be fair Galaxy's Edge was supposed to open up with Rise of the Resistance (or nearly close to) but they screwed up the construction and had to tear out and replace a large portion of it delaying things immensely.

Still, reading about all the things that were cut from Galaxy's Edge for cost-saving reasons makes me honestly really upset. There were a lot of cool idea for it that could have elevated it beyond the expected theme park experience.

The whole land is full of those second level catwalks you see used a couple times in this video.

It was all designed for stuff to potentially be happening

It just doesn't.

Grand_Kirby posted...

I had a few friends go to it and they said it was one of the best things they had ever done.

But they are hardcore Star Wars fans, so...

Did they tell you if/how did they interact with the LARPing elements?

I dont think i could handle the idea of a $3000+ interactive experience not functioning.

oh my god they thought it was acceptable to make them do datapad crate scanning at this price point.

I cant stress enough how awful the datapad app actually is. And how much they made things seem like you'd be able to interact with the land(With things that looked like they should turn on or off or make noise or something) only to find out nothing you did could do anything.

Yeah the last section of this is the anger section.

They literally promised us all this shit and then ripped it out for Starcruiser in an even lesser form(And never gave us access to it at all here in California).

Also I have to mention this: Star Tours received a scene with a preview of Batuu. There was a very, very specific droid that was clearly shaped like a trash can(Disney trash cans have an oddly large following, they are always highly themed to the land). I will be forever pissed that they got far enough along to conceptualize and preview a trash can droid and then decided nope we're just not going to do droids at all.

Galaxy's Edge ended up a needlessly large land that at least here in California prevented future expansion, ate up some of the Rivers of America, all for one good attraction and one great attraction. There is nearly a toontown's worth of dead space that is now star wars themed but completely stationary, lifeless, and eating zero traffic.

And because we had to pull the entirety of life out of the land, Smuggler's Run has possibly the most boring queue area in a North American Disney park(And yes, it is full of "crates" with QR codes on them) for anything that isn't a carnival spinner(Now that we've demolished dino whirl).

But yeah, Disney is blowing up a bubble that could easily pop. Attendance in WDW is down fairly significantly. They are finally not selling out passes here in California. I cant stress enough how much they are cutting from everything. The only thing keeping profits up is charging more while giving less.

The crazy thing about the app is it's one of the worst apps ever made. And my job was literally to make shitty enterprise apps better, so I saw a ton of terrible ones.

It makes so much sense on paper. App-driven activities that all guests could play casually, but much deeper activities with live theater integration for Starcruiser guests. The app would hook regular guests and upsell them to the Starcruiser for their next visit. It could've worked really well. But the app is absolute garbage. Every time a design relied on it, it failed.

I can see exactly how it happened. They had some great app designers come in and figure out how much an epic app-based experience would cost. It would be some huge number, but totally within Disney's budget. Park construction takes longer than app dev, so they have the time too. But then corporate finance comes in and keeps changing and ruining things. It becomes more expensive, but Disney has money so it's ok. But they don't realize it doesn't just cost money, it costs time. So they are a few weeks out from the park opening and they have to cut everything and cobble together something stupid in a short time to avoid delaying the park. They'll fix it later (they never do) or make it up with marketing & sales teams (shockingly effective, but not enough in this case).

Finally they decided to kill the whole project and start over. Will they learn for the next one?

Her videos are consistently fantastic and this was one of her best. Wish she uploaded more.

What will be the next dubious theme park?

Would highly recommend everyone watch her video about all 14 Land Before Time movies.

Rocco from Mega64 talked about the video a bit over the weekend and he said he mostly agreed with the things she brings up, but he thinks that because he went much later (like two weeks before it shut down) theyd had time to fix some of the things that werent working the way youd expectthe app worked perfectly, the actors played along with the characters he and his friends made up and remembered those names the whole time, etc

foolm0r0n posted...

I can see exactly how it happened. They had some great app designers come in and figure out how much an epic app-based experience would cost. It would be some huge number, but totally within Disney's budget. Park construction takes longer than app dev, so they have the time too. But then corporate finance comes in and keeps changing and ruining things. It becomes more expensive, but Disney has money so it's ok. But they don't realize it doesn't just cost money, it costs time. So they are a few weeks out from the park opening and they have to cut everything and cobble together something stupid in a short time to avoid delaying the park. They'll fix it later (they never do) or make it up with marketing & sales teams (shockingly effective, but not enough in this case).

Finally they decided to kill the whole project and start over. Will they learn for the next one?

We already have the answer to this. Because the next time they did something like this it was a physical land. With avengers campus they had the whole land concept. But they wanted money now so rather than fully launch they decided they could just open shops, food, and a quickly cobbled together budget attraction and then drop in the good attraction later.

But with the land already open, they have the increased physical park capacity, they have all the things in place that generate revenue. So with no incentive to build an attraction from a financial standpoint they just dont.

On the digital end, it sort of happened with the magic band launch here at Disneyland.

They launched magic bands here missing like half the features from WDW.

And since they did very little that you couldn't do with a smartphone no one bought them. Since no one bought them there was no incentive to add much in the way of features. And since the reason they introduced them into Disneyland was money we never got free ones with hotel visits so nothing was ever here to hook people on the idea of using magic bands.

So pretty much no one has magic bands.

The only bands you end up seeing here are the annual pass exclusive bands because they literally gave those away with any purchase after like a year of trying desperately to sell them at full price.

That tracks. It's more insidious than just "no incentive" though. It's forgetting about long-term incentives because they're satisfied with incremental short term gain. Like you said, it is resulting in a long and steady trend of lower sales. It's the opposite of how Disney became successful, but its happening to a ton of big companies now as they spiral downwards. None of these 2nd and 3rd gen CEOs have the balls to make long plays anymore.

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Rocco from Mega64 talked about the video a bit over the weekend and he said he mostly agreed with the things she brings up, but he thinks that because he went much later (like two weeks before it shut down) theyd had time to fix some of the things that werent working the way youd expectthe app worked perfectly, the actors played along with the characters he and his friends made up and remembered those names the whole time, etc

Yeah this was the AMCA experience as well. By the time they went the event had shifted to lean into the LARP elements, there were a lot of those rich repeat customers Nicholson mentioned, and they had way fewer issues with the app. It was still highly underwhelming but not the worst possible experience.

Also like, Rocco and the AMCA crew are internet personalities and creators but not video essayists. They probably weren't trying to document as much on video as possible and didn't have to seethe for two years putting together a 4 hour video about it. No wonder they're more positive and she's more negative, lol

One of the worst things about the Star Wars land is the lightsaber building class imo. I went to it once because my friend bought one and it's awful. They were trying to expand on the Harry Potter wand choosing thing Universal has, which despite being significantly less elaborate is much, MUCH more charming. And it's all down to the actors.

The Wand Ceremony has an actual actor playing the wizard who handles the scene like you'd expect, with a wise, sage-like personality, and fun whimsical moments and ad-libs when interacting with people. The Lightsaber building workshop was supposed to have actors running the show, but that would have cost more money and involve union work, etc., so they just got the people they hire to run shops and stalls to do it. No offensive to those people, they try their best, but they're NOT actors and it shows. The workshop tries to have an engaging mood, as the cool music plays and the master tells stories about the importance of the Force and the history of the Jedi way, but it all falls flat when the lines are delivered like someone asking you if you want to SuperSize your french fries. It's such a stunning example of how small cost-cutting measures can completely ruin a final product even if it technically is released meeting the target points of the original design. (Also, it costs $200! Charging that for such a shoddy experience is criminal.)

WazzupGenius00 posted...

Rocco from Mega64 talked about the video a bit over the weekend and he said he mostly agreed with the things she brings up, but he thinks that because he went much later (like two weeks before it shut down) theyd had time to fix some of the things that werent working the way youd expectthe app worked perfectly, the actors played along with the characters he and his friends made up and remembered those names the whole time, etc

My friends went right before it shut down too, so maybe that's why they had a better experience.

Leafeon13N posted...

We already have the answer to this. Because the next time they did something like this it was a physical land. With avengers campus they had the whole land concept. But they wanted money now so rather than fully launch they decided they could just open shops, food, and a quickly cobbled together budget attraction and then drop in the good attraction later.

But with the land already open, they have the increased physical park capacity, they have all the things in place that generate revenue. So with no incentive to build an attraction from a financial standpoint they just dont.

Yup. Avengers Campus is honestly terrible. There's NOTHING there but shops, a bunch of honestly underwhelming live performances, and a lame pay-to-win ride (Guardians doesn't count imo, it was there before the land was). There's this MASSIVE building taking up so much space that has no purpose except as a stage for one of the dumb 5-minute character action shows because they don't care enough to build the AAA ride they promised.

Grand_Kirby posted...

Yup. Avengers Campus is honestly terrible. There's NOTHING there but shops, a bunch of honestly underwhelming live performances, and a lame pay-to-win ride (Guardians doesn't count imo, it was there before the land was).

The only entertaining ones of the bunch are the little stage show on the catwalk and the spider-man stuntronic.

Mind you the only good part of the Spidey show is when they actually fling out the stunttronic, the rest is really bad pre-show with an actor that will do odd looking rolls over some platforms. The actual entertaining segment lasts about 4 seconds.

The Dr. Strange show is honestly terrible. I think it was geared for young children but falls flat to everyone.

And the worst part is...The land that Avenger's Campus replaced, A Bug's Land, served two purposes, provide attractions for small children(Which Avenger's Campus does not) and provide shade because the original design of DCA was fucking terrible and the entirety of the park left people exposed to the sun. There no shade, period. Not only does Avenger's Campus provide no shade, but it also borders what was a new land which...expanded the amount of DCA that contains no shade(Radiator Springs is actually Disney at their best, but still built into the sun. But it was designed thinking the bordering land would provide shade). So if you want to watch any of these shows, which arent great in the first place, expect to spend the entire 5-20 minutes standing miserably in the sun. And this is Southern California, we get a lot of it(Not this year apparently, but usually). There is basically no viewing in the shade. Avenger's Campus is fucking miserable in the summer.

And the one attraction was built with a poorly themed outdoor queue mostly also exposed to the sun.

Oh and we also lost an interactive water play area that we decided didn't need to be replaced for some reason. Probably because money.

Also I love reliving all the dumb history of DCA.

It went from an amazing concept to parody California on the cheap, a massive flop to Disney panic mode then to one of the greatest theme park recovery stories of all time followed by Disney learning no lessons of the past and doing everything on the cheap again.

https://x.com/a_useless_ham/status/1793727398657274296?t=MGgZd6Og8UbegTSieJKC0w&s=19

I'm like halfway through the video now and I understand why the designers are defensive about this. She gives a lot of suggestions of how to fix things and how quick and easy it would be if they just did X Y Z. That's the absolute worst, useless, and infuriating "feedback" to hear as a designer. But it's an important skill to parse feedback like this to extract the important parts while ignoring the useless and wrong parts. I've worked with a bunch of designers and devs who kneejerk with defensiveness, but the best ones know how to handle it and focus on the valuable feedback.

So for the designers to publicly have that kneejerk reaction indicates that the team is very green, up to the management level. It's a consequence of the serious brain drain that Disney has had in the last few years.

The part where they dole out underpaid, overworked, zero stability intern student jobs like they're some kind of prize to be won says a lot.

I thought most of the criticisms in this video were valid. The one that didn't ring true to me was "there's too much to do" as this is generally a good thing.

I think that they might have done a better job at highlighting which activities are 'optional' or 'essential' but then you could also say that it would ruin some of the immersiveness. I think there's a trade off, but if there were fewer activities on the itinerary then people would just complain that there wasn't enough to justify the price. It's a no-win situation.

What I took from the video wasn't that the experience was too expensive. If anything, it wasn't expensive enough. They needed to charge like 2-3x the rate they did to provide a much more intimate and customized LARPing experience that these true die-hard fans would really enjoy. Otherwise it's like going through an escape room with a hundred strangers who all might ruin your time.

Of course, Disney isn't in that business so this was doomed to fail from the start.

KingButz posted...

They needed to charge like 2-3x the rate they did to provide a much more intimate and customized LARPing experience that these true die-hard fans would really enjoy. Otherwise it's like going through an escape room with a hundred strangers who all might ruin your time.

That sounds about right. That seems like would eliminate most of the problems, from the logistics of the app and using that for the performer interactions, to the size of the rooms not feeling luxurious, all the way to the opening lobby feeling very crowded.

It'd probably be a more sustainable business model that way too. What it charges already prices out a lot of people-- reducing throughput and charging more probably keeps the place booked more reliably.

The software had an insane amount of money thrown at it and that probably hurt it more than anything. More money couldn't have solved it. More money could help the IRL quality but the experience is fundamentally app-driven so that needed to be flawless to provide a proper stage for the actors and larping.

It seems like Disney is pretty shit at game design in general, and they don't understand how important the software actually is. Even in the game industry, execs often undervalue the software and rely on marketing to sell, which is increasingly a failed strategy in recent years. But Disney execs are like 10x more disrespectful of software than those game execs.

The issues with the app felt more like they were on the end of the world not being able to accommodate 500 people with like 30 NPC actors and still have everyone have a meaningful immersive experience.

I just don't think designing the app better solves the issue of the fundamental bottleneck of "there is one main separatist dude giving quests and 70 people who want to take the separatist path"

Like the app probably worked better in the tests but the tests probably didn't have the app trying to juggle nearly the same amount of people when handing out quest meeting times and stuff

I wonder if they did a "Closed Beta" of sorts, where they invite people representative of their target market to actually go through the whole experience. Feels like at least some of the problems that Jenny Nicholson went through could've been found earlier.

At the end of the day, if you have a key character, then everyone playing will want to talk to that person. You can't just hire 4 lookalikes and have them all be that character. If you split 1 character into 4 that might work, but it dilutes the character. Even so, everyone wants to see Rey and Chewbacca. There's no way around that other than giving 500 people each a slice of their time.

Part of the software's responsibility seemed to be to coordinate the actor's time with the players to make the impossible number of personalized experiences work. I'm sure they did test it a lot with fake data that simulates a full crowd (which I'm sure they also do with every aspect of their park design) and it worked sometimes, but not always. It's theoretically doable to make an AI system like that work nearly all the time though, with enough design prep for multiple-outs and error-handling (like in Jenny's error case). That's all software and game design though, not park design. The actors and cast need those systems to work as expected. They can't just improv their way out of every issue.

Raka_Putra posted...

I wonder if they did a "Closed Beta" of sorts, where they invite people representative of their target market to actually go through the whole experience. Feels like at least some of the problems that Jenny Nicholson went through could've been found earlier.

The only people Disney "tests" stuff with these days are their influencer crowd and paid celebrities. At least for high end or high demand experiences.

And it is rare for that crowd to give real feedback. They are almost all unpaid shills.

Disney has been known recently to disinvite or skip over inviting traditional press.

red13n posted...

The Dr. Strange show is honestly terrible. I think it was geared for young children but falls flat to everyone.

Oh god, the Doctor Strange show was miserable. It was completely humiliating to watch. That poor actor paused after every magic trick to make time for audience applause and was met with dead silence. Like, a part of me wanted to think maybe it was simply because it was mainly meant for children and I was just not a part of the target audience, but I don't even think kids would like it (the ones that were there at the show I saw definitely didn't). If you're a kid who likes Marvel and Doctor Strange you'd want to see him fighting badguys and shooting lasers, not performing lame sleight-of-hand tricks like a birthday party clown.

Also, you're right about the shade thing. No shade in the line for that, or in the actual venue. It was awful, and I believe I went in like March.

Leafeon13N posted...

The only people Disney "tests" stuff with these days are their influencer crowd and paid celebrities. At least for high end or high demand experiences.

And it is rare for that crowd to give real feedback. They are almost all unpaid shills.

Disney has been known recently to disinvite or skip over inviting traditional press.

Yeah that sounds likely. I might sound harsh and prejudiced but even if they wanted to give real feedback I doubt they have the necessary perspective, point-of-reference, or cognition to give insightful feedback.

foolm0r0n posted...

The actors and cast need those systems to work as expected. They can't just improv their way out of every issue.

I think if you have 100 people wanting to see a specific plot relevant NPC during a day, particularly more than once, it becomes impossible to make everyone able to see them no matter how well the software is designed.

Likely the reason so many glitches were encountered is because the algorithm doesn't work when you have more people than time slots to talk to an actor/psychical space to engage with the actor. You wouldn't catch that with testing either unless you had a testing group that is the size of an actual group of people in the hotel-- but at that point you've already built the hotel and cast the people so it's more a common sense problem than a software design problem-- can't make software to solve an unsolvable problem.

However it's an issue more plausibly solved by lowering the amount of people there to begin with. It's not an MMO where you can just make separate instances when someone wants to see an event or actor that someone else is and you need to realize that at the design step.

Lopen posted...

You wouldn't catch that with testing either unless you had a testing group that is the size of an actual group of people in the hotel

Which they definitely did with test simulations. You can even calculate it with napkin math (X mins per interaction * Y guests) but obviously they had a more sophisticated model and used monte carlo or something. I'm sure they also tested a bunch of possible guest numbers until they found one that worked best for feasibility and profit, and that's what they built the hotel around, and decided the # of storylines and NPCs. But they just couldn't execute on the theory, and/or the design was messed with too much.

It's true that reducing the # of guests is the only valid solution at that point, but imagine convincing Disney execs to do that.