My relationship with Star Wars is kind of funny:
When I was a kid, we were the only family I knew of that had a Laser Disc player. Laser Discs, for those of you too young to remember (though plenty of people my age might have never encountered one) were a video format that were an alternative to VHS, and basically consisted of vinyl-record-sized optical discs. This pre-dated DVDs, of course, and became totally obsolete once that technology caught on, but the point is, it was higher-quality than VHS (which was honestly kind of crap, and worse than Betamax, a different magnetic tape format that only failed to catch on because Sony made it proprietary to their own players, a mistake they learned from and thus made BluRay open source).
Anyway, that was the format on which my dad got the original Star Wars trilogy. There were several versions that came out - I think the remastered VHS set came out after these ones (the last format, I believe, before the Special Editions came out).
While I was terrified of the series after seeing the scene where the dancing girl was dumped into the Rancor pit from Return of the Jedi (and in my childlike imagination, I exaggerated the details of that scene, thinking that her liquified remains were bubbling up from the vent in the floor - something that categorically is not in any version of the movie) upon seeing it when I was maybe 6, I eventually watched the movies in full when I was maybe 9, and I became obsessed.
As I've probably written about before, I spent at least several days (I remember it being months, though I suspect it wasn't actually sustained for that long) watching and re-watching the trilogy in order, two movies per day.
I had already been a big Star Trek the Next Generation fan, growing up with that show, and I was nuts about cool spaceships (I actually remember finding Luke's confrontation with the Emperor and Vader at the climax of Jedi tedious, as I wanted to get back to the giant space battle - a very 9-year-old take on it).
Anyway, the special editions, which were released in theaters, were a big event that I went to see with my friends, and then, a few years later (though at that age, it felt like a big gap,) the Prequels came out. And... well... that was where my love of the series took a hit.
I know that there are younger Millennials and Gen Zers (and I guess even some older Millennials like me) who adore the prequels and consider it an indispensable part of the saga, but while I tried to like them at the time they came out, they just didn't have the same magic. Admittedly, I haven't re-watched them in decades, but I guess having the Lord of the Rings movies come out around the same time, I kind of moved on.
As a franchise, Star Wars is truly a mixed bag, and I think Disney's strategy of expanding it out into more and more properties using the MCU model hasn't served it very well - though there are some works within the Disney era that are quite remarkable (I have still not seen the second season of Andor, but I thought the first was incredible. I also thought the first season of The Mandalorian was cool, but the series started to suffer from being used as a platform for backdoor pilots).
Obviously, there's also the debacle of the sequel trilogy, which started out promising (while Force Awakens tread a lot of familiar territory, I liked the new characters it introduced) and its polarizing middle chapter, the Last Jedi, made some bold and interesting choices, the Rise of Skywalker basically seemed designed to please absolutely no one and kind of ruined the whole endeavor retroactively. (I don't think J. J. Abrams is interested in doing anything original, as I first learned after Star Trek Into Darkness.)
Now, I might be being kind of harsh to the Disney era of Star Wars. After all, long before the Mouse got their hands on Lucasfilm, there was a vast Expanded Universe that got retconned into its convenient "Legends" box (from which the Disney canon has sometimes plucked elements like Admiral Thrawn but not, like, Jacen, Jaina, and Anakin Solo). It's always been a world that people have wanted to play in, to flesh out.
Naturally, it's also been the setting for other TTRPGs, like Edge of Empire. So it's honestly not strange to see it as a property to be adapted for D&D. Indeed, D&D and Star Wars got their starts around the same time (D&D coming out three years before Star Wars).
But I think there's another element to Star Wars that makes it an exciting prospect for use with D&D: it is the definitive science-fantasy setting.
Now, yeah, at least in the movies, the only real "magic" of the Star Wars universe is the Force, and the only way we see that magic expressed is through the vaguely-defined powers of the Jedi and Sith, both of whom I'd argue are, well, closest to the Paladin class in D&D (I think that Darth Vader is the most iconic Death Knight in pop culture. Yes, he's not technically undead, but he's sustained by cybernetics and the Dark Side of the Force, which... is kind of close enough. And then, he's got a mask that looks like a skull and is a former champion of goodness who fell to darkness for selfish reasons... I mean, you see it, right?)
But if the World of Warcraft book is as thorough and innovative as it sounds from what I've heard in interviews, it stands to reason that the Star Wars book will also be pretty ambitious in playing with the 5E chassis to create something that works for its setting.
Indeed, I wouldn't be shocked if it turned out that by partnering with bigger companies like Blizzard and freaking Disney, the books have higher budgets than what WotC can produce on their own, and thus they might have more resources to pump into them, which could, potentially, allow them to go bigger.
Now, the World of Warcraft book is going to have a fairly easy time, given that WoW already has Paladins, Druids, Rogues, Monks, and Warlocks, and then has pretty 1:1 class equivalents like Priests, Hunters, and Mages. Even if there's no Bards in WoW, it's not like they wouldn't fit there (indeed, the Windrunner sisters' younger brother Lirath is said to have been a gifted musician, and I wouldn't be shocked if he had had some kind of magical ability with his music).
I think we could probably squeeze Fighters, Rogues, and Paladins (as Jedi/Sith) into the Warcraft setting, and maybe even broaden out the Jedi/Sith with stuff like "Jedi Knights" versus "Jedi Consular," where the Knights are more up-front melee characters and Consulars use their force powers more than their lightsabers (I think the Sith have different names, but equivalent classes in The Old Republic MMO). But, like, how do we use Druids?
I know that SW5E, the fan-made free Star Wars 5E hack, just presents and entirely separate roster of classes, some of which are more like altered versions of existing D&D classes. But you could imagine that in a true Star Wars D&D campaign, you might want to stick only to the options that are strictly for that setting.
That being said, what I'm really excited for is the opportunity to have true Science Fantasy stuff for D&D.
Spelljammer, in fairness, never really promised that. The concept was always "tall ships sailing across the stars," and while I do think there's a place for that whimsical, colorful notion, to me, the most compelling vision of space travel is one that aligns with that used future aesthetic of Star Wars.
Basically, I want my space ships to be enclosed and air-tight, but I'm fine with artificial gravity and faster-than-light travel (don't get me wrong, I loved The Expanse, but even that story eventually starts dealing with alien technology that breaks the hard-sci-fi rules it mostly restricts itself to.)
Vehicle combat in D&D is always a little tough: having a different kind of battle system for something that probably isn't going to be as central to the game as your normal battle system can, at one extreme, feel disconnected and undercooked, and at the other extreme, get in the way of the the characters' individual stories. (Another challenge is that if the whole party is in the same spaceship, that ship being destroyed means a TPK, so getting the stakes right is also tough).
But I think this would be a really good opportunity to come up with some good starship combat systems. I know that Legends of Avantris is working on that with Neon Odyssey (one solution is that the party might have multiple ships, which is honestly not unlike Luke flying around in his X-Wing while the rest of them are in the Millennium Falcon - they don't actually fly into battle that way, but you get the idea).
Beyond that, I also think that there's some fun to be had in using futuristic weapons. I'm 100% certain there will be Lightsabers in the Star Wars book. Might they just be a different weapon type, like Tridents or Whips? And might we also see Blasters, Bowcasters, and such?
Interestingly, there is, actually, armor in Star Wars, which you tend to see less of in modern/futuristic genres. That said, Jedi, despite being pretty close to Paladins as a class, are usually unarmored (I think there's an argument that they're also kind of Monks, except that they fight with a weapon. Maybe that's just the East Asian influence on the George Lucas' worldbuilding. Did you know that he originally wanted Toshiro Mifune for Obi-Wan?)
I honestly think that this is one of the weird challenges of adapting D&D to genres outside of medieval fantasy, because medieval armor is such a big part of the look of the game and how characters are imagined. (I like that in Dimension 20's Unsleeping City, they rationalized Ricky Matsui's "plate armor" as just being so hot that A: people had a hard time attacking him and B: he'd get disadvantage on Stealth checks because he drew attention because of how attractive he was.)
But yes, while I've gotten into the weeds on a lot of issues, I think we can acknowledge that, for the past 49 years, Star Wars has basically defined what space-faring sci fi is expected to look and feel like. Any space opera naturally invites comparisons to Star Wars. So, if this book doesn't get D&D to give us that quintessential sci-fi feeling, I don't know what will.
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