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If there’s one word that accurately describes the experience of slipping into a virtual realityMinecraftworld, it’s “VAST.”
Minecrafthas always been a huge game. Its randomly generated worlds stretch on forever, serving up new mysteries, new treasures and new dangers as you range further and further into the blocky landscape.
Incredibly, virtual reality makes all of that feel somehowbigger.
By now you know thatMinecraft: Pocket Edition is coming to the Gear VR headset. It’s eventually coming to Oculus Rift as well, though Microsoft isn’t quite ready to get into those details.
The mobile version is more than up to the task of immersing you in Minecraftlike you haven’t been before. Even if you’ve messed with the “Minecrift” mod, which makes the PC game work with Oculus dev kits, this is a step forward.
There are two ways to playMinecraft in a Gear VR. If you’re looking for something less intense, there’s always the option of playing the game on a virtual big screen TV in aMinecraftified living room.
IMAGE: MICROSOFT
It’s cool, but you can also give the Gear VR touchpad a tap to teleport yourself into that virtual TV, for more of a “full” virtual experience.
Here’s what you need to know: it works. This isMinecraft with console-style controls — you need a Bluetooth gamepad to play it — except the headset makes it feel like you’re inside the world.
The big difference with the controls is the camera, which moves from the right analog stick to your head. Sitting in a swivel chair helps if you want to completely rely on head tracking for turning inside the virtual space.
That’s not to say the right stick is useless. Moving it to the left or right turns you in that direction, but it’s not a smooth movement like you’d find in other first-person perspective games. It’s a stuttering turn, as if the frame rate dropped significantly.
“It’s almost like a palette cleanser for your eyes,”Minecraft development manager Mike Weilbacher toldMashable.
“It’s almost like a palette cleanser for your eyes.”
“We have some psychology behind it now. We … understand that, depending on how big the gap is, [that helps determine] how much more comfortable it can be. People have different gap sizes.”
The final game’s options menu will include a slider that allows you to adjust the gap size. If motion sickness isn’t a problem for you in VR, you’ll be able to turn off the gaps completely. In that situation, the right stick turns your perspective to the left or right smoothly, as it would in a standard first-person perspective game.
Other than that, the VR version ofMinecraft: Pocket Edition carries forward all the features that the game currently boasts, and all the ongoing updates that fans have come to expect.
“It’s stillMinecraft,” Weilbacher said. “You can still use Redstone, you can still make contraptions, you can still go online. It’s still the base game. We’ve just tweaked some of the edges to make it feel more comfortable.”
IMAGE: MICROSOFT
The game even allows for cross-platform play, just like the standard mobile edition. You can be running around in a Gear VR while your friend is playing the Windows 10 version on a computer. Once the Rift edition comes out, cross-platform with that will be possible as well.
But what about the Xbox One version of the game? Microsoft recently gave developers the go-ahead to add cross-network play support into their games, allowing Xbox players to link up with PC (and perhaps even PlayStation) users as well.
Will cross-network play allowMinecraft fans on Xbox One to connect with their VR-equipped friends?
“Potentially,” Weilbacher said. “We’re just not talking about it right now.”
Minecraft: Pocket Edition is coming to Gear VR sometime this spring. The build we sampled at the 2016 Game Developer’s Conference felt great, but there’s more work to be done.
“We’re doing some optimization to get the performance better and make it more comfortable,” Weilbacher said. “We really want it to be a polished experience.”
Microsoft is opening up the world of ‘Minecraft’ to Gear VR
Next step for the game: Samsung’s virtual reality headset.
The Oculus Riftisn’t the only virtual reality platform gettinga piece ofMinecraft’spie. Today, at a GDC 2016 event, Microsoft and Oculus are set to announce that the open-world phenomenon is also coming to theGear VR, a spokesperson for the companies confirmed to Engadget. For many people, Samsung’s headset is afar more accessible optionthan the consumer Rift, so this is good news for anyone who wants to playMinecraftin VRwithout breaking the bank.
This new version is expected to be similar to the one from an Oculus Rift, which we played recently and found quite impressive. As of yet, there’s not any information on how muchMinecraftfor Gear VR will cost or when you can download it, but we’ll let you know as soon as we have those details. At least now you’re aware it’s official,not just a thought.
If it was tough to pull the kids away from their screens while playingMinecraft, it’s going to get even tougher when they’re completely lost in the game while wearing a VR headset.
The first major virtual headset manufacturer to pull off a truly immersiveMinecraftworld is Samsung. Announced in San Francisco during the annual Game Developers Conference, theMinecraft virtual reality experience is coming to the Gear VR this spring.
Microsoftbought the game franchise two years ago along with Mojang, the studio that developed it, for $2.5 billion. Since then the company, which also has its own augmented reality headset called HoloLens, has pushed the game onto as many platforms as it can.
Minecraft in virtual reality is seemingly the last frontier in terms of platform play to bringing the block-building universe as close to real life as possible. It’s like playing Legos but in a video game that players can actually lose themselves in, and that’s an entirely plausible reality.
Three years ago, Microsoft announced thatMinecraftplayers have spent countless hours playing the game on the Xbox 360. That’s just on the Xbox and that’s just on a 2D screen. It will be interesting to observe its impact in a virtual reality environment on multiple virtual reality and augmented reality systems.
Samsung got first dibs, and first movers always tend to get a nice, big lead, but some reviewers havedeemed the Samsung port of the game rather “mehhh.” It could be that in order to push that game out quickly, Microsoft simply slapped a 2D version ofMinecraftonto the Gear VR’s eyepieces. Reports of a wonky in-game camera, unfriendly inventory and health menu UIs as well as small text were some of the complaints.
After the Gear VR, however,Minecraftwill be coming to Facebook’s Oculus Rift headset, which has considerably more computing power behind it than Samsung’s smartphone-connected VR solution.
Of course, the Oculus Rift is without a doubt incredibly expensive compared to the Gear VR and that’s just for the headset. The added cost of a PC that’s powerful enough to run the device is another expense to consider. Nonetheless,Minecrafton the Oculus Rift is expected to offer a much more immersive experience.
Microsoft, too, probably has even bigger plans tobring a bigger versionMinecraftto its HoloLens headset. Since HoloLens offers an augmented reality experience, the device will meld our real world withMinecraft’s block-building world. Of that, reporters havedescribed early builds of the game on the HoloLens as “so damn cool.”
“I think this is going to be the most important game in VR this year”
Minecraftfor Samsung’s Gear VR is happening, and here’s the weird part: there’s no official announcement. It’s just happening, sometime this spring, which is also the timeframe Microsoft has promised to roll out a version for the much pricier Oculus Rift.I had a chance to take a near-final version of the game for a spin at a special Oculus-helmed Game Developers Conference event in San Francisco on March 15. It looks fantastic—effectively as sharp and responsive and immersive as on the Rift. Considering the Rift is going to cost $600 when it launches on March 28 and require a high-end PC to boot, that’s kind of a big deal. Gear VR costs just $100, and requires a Samsung Galaxy smartphone you may already own.
At one point Oculus VR chief technology officer John Carmack (co-creator of video game classics likeWolfenstein 3D,DoomandQuake) addressed those gathered to demo the game, explaining why he got involved withMinecrafton Gear VR. He said that he thinks the budget VR headset already trumps Rift because you can swivel 360 degrees without tangling yourself in cables.
Oculus’ original vision for virtual reality had focused on designing comfortable experiences that “minimized the likelihood of anyone getting sick,” said Carmack. “So we had all these experiences where people sat down and things happened around you.”
“I kept rebelling against that, saying ‘That’s not what I want to do in VR,’” explained Carmack. Instead, he said he wanted to explore new worlds, adding that “Minecraft hits all of those buttons very very well.”
Getting it off the ground was another matter. “The drama in all of this, the way development went up and down through all of this was… ‘It’s going to happen! It’s not going to happen. It’s going to happen! It’s not going to happen. We really think it’s going to happen now.’ And now it finally is happening,” he said. He then boldly declared: “I think this is going to be the most important game in VR this year.”
Microsoft isn’t saying whether existingMinecraftmobile owners will get the VR version for free, or if it’ll be sold as something standalone. But spring is right around the corner.
Minecraftin all its blocky glory is setting up shop on mobile virtual reality on the Samsung Gear VR.
I had a chance to demo the game at an Oculus media event during GDC in SF this week and there was a decent amount of hype surrounding the wildly popular game making its mobile VR debut. Microsoft is already set to launch a version of the game for the Rift sometime this spring.
My VR Minecraft experience left a bit to be desired.
Gameplay takes place in full VR and cinema modes and requires an external bluetooth gamepad, which does give the mobile headset a substantially beefy gaming feel. I will say that Gear VR is probably not a good platform on which to start playing Minecraft if you’re not used to the way the game operates.
When it comes to porting existing game experiences to virtual reality, one of the toughest things to do is nail camera angles, and this title was largely hit or miss in that regard. The camera moves in jumpy ticks, so there are no smooth transitions, despite having a gamepad that should easily let you move the camera the way you desire.
The most bothersome feature of the game is the lazy way they chose to add inventory and health menus to float in space in front of you. It doesn’t work that well and, unless you have the headset positionedperfectlyon your face, it’s pretty impossible to read any of the info as it’s far too small.
Full VR mode is oddly a bit disorienting despite the fact that it’s such an iconically basic blocky game, but there was something odd-feeling about it. Cinema mode is the most comfortable to play through, but, as with other games, there’s the nagging feeling that playing in 2D is a waste of the platform.
It was fun to experience such a major title on Gear VR, and its launch speaks to the clout Gear VR is earning as an actual piece of gaming hardware. But porting the same experience of console VR to mobile VR is a pretty dangerous move here. Hopefully the teams at Microsoft can make some updates before there is a full release on the Oculus store.
