'Minecraft' for Gear VR Was Announced Today, and I Played It

For a while, it seemed like Minecraft's debut on VR was limited to the Oculus Rift, but after an announcement Wednesday made by Oculus and Microsoft, Minecraft will be making its way to Samsung's Gear VR as well. As part of the first wave of press demos, I got a chance to go hands on to see how well Minecraft meshes with Samsung's more accessible device, and while the results weren't stunning, I still enjoyed what I saw.

Unlike the Oculus Rift or the HTC Vive, one of the biggest benefits of Gear VR is the portability, an aspect that felt hard to factor in as I sat in a basement bar waving my head around as I took in the pixelated sights of Minecraft. And while I don't think Minecraft is going to be a huge success for Gear VR, being able to play it on a screen that will cost significantly less than any other option is still a win. Minecraft on Gear VR will allow players to jump in with their friends playing on mobile devices, Windows 10, and the Oculus Rift version of the game.

But Minecraft hasn't changed all that much over the years, either. It's still the same game but with the ability of being able to look around without needing a second joystick—-something that felt like a blessing and a curse. I found playing to lead to moments where looking around can feel counterintuitive and clunky.

This largely stems from the fact that Minecraft still uses a gamepad but relegates the actual looking around to the VR headset. There's still the ability to rotate the view left or right using the gamepad, but I was wrestling between the two fairly constantly. One problem is that, in a first-person game, there's no real way to change direction without physically changing your direction in real life. While the swiveling chairs I was playing on made this effortless, I can't imagine that being practical in most of the situations that Gear VR loans itself so well to.

To counteract this, the camera can be controlled using the joystick, and the demo I played had it set to move slowly in 18 degree increments instead of a smooth transition mapped to how far I was pushing the joystick. Talking with lead producer, Jesse Merriam, he said the decision to increment movement with the joystick was made because many found the smooth movement of looking around (as you normally would when playing a first-person shooter with a gamepad) to be too off putting while also wearing a headset that can move independently too. It makes sense on paper, but I think there's still room for more refinement. Turning around felt clunky and slow, ruining that immersion Minecraft was trying so hard to create.

Aiming also feels rather alien because your crosshairs are tied to the movements of your head instead of your hands. There's no way to use the gamepad to adjust your view up or down, so I had to keep fighting my instinct of looking straight ahead when I was trying to mine a block above or below me. With firing arrows at skeletons, it also felt a bit weird to try and use my eyes as the crosshair instead of my hands. But these are also issues that might simply require retraining your instincts.

Players will have the option to switch the turning feature off, but as Jesse mentioned, it's a concession made for people who might suffer from motion sickness while using VR. "A lot of people really lend themselves to playing different ways, but they all want to feel immersed," Jesse said. "By incrementing the turns more slowly, it allows people to process what's going on in their head easier."

In keeping with that spirit, the Gear VR version of Minecraft also features two separate camera options that the developers were casually referring to as "theatre mode" and "immersion mode." Theatre mode was a replication of how Minecraft would be traditionally played, with the game displayed on a screen in virtual space with you sitting in a virtual chair. This mode still offers some of the benefits of virtual reality, but scales them back for those who maybe don't want such an immersive—-and maybe nauseating—-experience. While I tinkered around with it, I found it boring because it's basically just the same Minecraft I'd been playing for years.

Immersion mode was my favorite, as that put you directly in the eyes of your character in the game, making the world feel more immediate and impressive. As I walked around a map that the design team had built for the demo, it was awesome getting to see how well Minecraft loans itself to a VR experience. Because the world is so vast and layered, I felt that some compulsion for exploration that I did the first time I booted up Minecraft all those years ago, and that's exciting.

"We're finding that people are really different," Merriam said. "We want to create something that people can adjust to their liking to better fit how they want to play."

Being on a phone, Minecraft also loses as bit of that magic because so much of the world is hidden behind a wall of fog due to the hardware's technical limitations. It's disappointing to see the wonderful geography of Minecraft hidden away in order to save resources and keep the framerate steady, but that's also a concession you have to make when playing an otherwise impressive VR game on a device that costs a hundred dollars.

I don't think Minecraft on Gear VR will take the world by storm, but it's another solid extension of the blocky universe that has dominated video games over the past few years. There's real challenges to be handled in how Minecraft on Gear VR plays—ones that I'm not convinced will be ironed out before releasing later this year—but even still the appeal of being able to jump in and explore worlds unknown from the comfort of just about anywhere is a great idea made all the better by virtual reality.