Get hyped – Minecraft on Oculus Rift just got real.
According to Palmer Luckey, founder of Oculus Rift, Minecraft is headed towards the highly-anticipated VR platform this spring. The built-it-yourself game is popular than ever and its growth doesn’t seem to dwindle.
During the Oculus Connect event that took place in Hollywood this morning, Luckey went on stage and unveiled some of their plans for 2016, Gamasutra reports. However, fans that wish to play Minecraft on Oculus Rift will need the game’s Windows 10 Edition, according to Lydia Winters of Mojang.
It looks like our fantasies of digging huge caves and battling mythical blocky nether-drakes just got real – well, virtually speaking.
This hints at a new step forward for the gaming industry. Luckey took to explaining how we move, slowly but surely, to the metaverse i.e. an intense virtual reality world. With the help of Minecraft, Rift will build a sturdy foundation for VR enthusiasts.
Microsoft’s Hololens also takes to Minecraft to help them sell their headset – which is a fusion between augmented reality and virtual reality, but with more AR elements present.
There are a ton of devs that work on gearing up games so they can be easily played in VR. Yet, the majority of titles that are set to be released in 2016 feature realistic worlds that use small amounts of space. We are more than curious to see how VR developers are going to make exploring a virtually limitless world with minimal issues from the get-go.
Luckey and his team seem to be excited about the whole virtual reality trend and this gives us some sort of assurance that the end product will at least be passion-driven.
Fighting dinosaurs in ARK sounds superb, and flying an airplane in War Thunder is more than rad, but there’s something about exploring Minecraft with a VR headset that just makes me want to jump up and down out of pure excitement.
Oculus Rift is shaping up to be a huge ecosystem filled with all sorts of virtual reality experiences.
However, let’s not jump on the bandwagon so fast. Next year will be all about VR and VR pioneers trying to take a huge chunk out of the virtual pie. In theory, Minecraft sounds awesome, but we don’t really know how this will equate to real world standards. It has to be fun, and more importantly, it has to be comfortable and easy to use.
There’s a reason why Kinect failed – nobody wants to commit to standing up just to play a video-game when they can just jump on the couch and relax after a hard day’s work.
Yet, Wii was a huge success, mainly because it is gimmicky.
Regardless if it’s going to be a hit or miss, I can’t wait to try Minecraft on Oculus Rift when the time comes.