As part of GDC 2016, held in San Francisco from 16 to 18 March, many were given the opportunity to personally assess how Minecraft looks in virtual reality, which caused considerable excitement around the highly popular game, taking its first steps in the development of virtual reality on mobile platforms. By the way, the game owner, Microsoft, has already scheduled the release of Minecraft VR with Oculus Rift this spring.
We've already talked about virtual reality in Minecraft in one of our previous articles, but now we are ready to look in more detailed way, what is virtual reality in Minecrfat.
The game runs in full VR or cinematic modes and requires an external bleutooth-controller. All this gives quite a strong effect in the game, it is difficult to compare with other games on mobile platforms. The controls is slightly unusual, one might even say that the Samsung Gear VR isn't the best platform to start your gaming journey in Minecraft, if you aren't an experienced player. If so, then no problem will arise.
When it comes to porting the existing gameplay concept in virtual reality, perhaps, the most difficult thing is the correct port of the camera angle. And we cannot say that with Samsung Gear VR it was perfect. The camera moves jerky, bouncing irregularly, without smooth movements, despite having a gamepad, which, in theory, should ensure the smoothness of camera movements.
The most annoying thing in the game is how the developers has implemented interface elements, in particular the health bar and inventory, which are just floating in front of your nose. It's just terribly uncomfortable! Despite the fact that VR headset is rigidly fixed on your head, it is almost impossible to read any information appearing on the interface elements, since, first, the text is too small, and secondly, due to involuntary head movements that cause the text to constantly "floats" from your view.
Full virtual reality is slightly confusing, despite of quite a cartoon, block graphic with which is quite hard to lose orientation. You can play in cinematic mode, which is quite stable, but whether you want to play in 2D, having a VR headset?
In short, at the moment, virtual reality is still pretty crooked in Minecraft. However, we shouldn't forget that the release is still far away. Besides, there are Microsoft and Oculus Rift, which, hopefully, will make right conclusions from where Samsung designers were end up.