Minecraft On Rift Mostly Avoids The Usual First-Person VR Mistakes

Minecraft is a survival game that needs no introduction. The title has become one of the most popular indie titles of all time, featuring a vibrant community and etching its name in the annals of pop culture hist


This game becomes quite engaging with friends once everyone gets a hang of how the game is played. Each session of Project Zomboid is rife with danger and thrills, with players ruing the loss of their partners in-game when the going gets tough... which it does. A

The big purpose of this episode is to find Ivor's lair out in The Far Lands to find an enchantment book that has the power to destroy the command block that is still lingering inside of the Witherstorm. In a scene with both Soren and Ivor, Jessie discovers that the storm is following the amulet that Gabriel had given him and with that, Axel takes it upon himself to hold onto the amulet while Jessie retrieves the enchantment book. The group collectively agrees that Axel and another member of the Order of the Stone will return to Soren's lair where the Enderman that Soren has collected can help in disassembling the Witherstorm as they had all witnessed them do in an earlier scene. While they are doing that, the plan is to then forge a weapon and fuse the enchantment book with it but in Jessie's fight to do so, he is separated from Ivor who is helping everyone escape from a few lingering witches. Alone and lost, it is up to Jessie and his friends to pass through to Ivor's lair, which happens to be riddled with booby traps and mazes, and return in time to defeat the storm.

The episode in itself offers a lot of promise for the rest of the announced episode, but it also cuts them short. The next slew of episodes will be adding new story arcs to the new Order of the Stone as they go on new adventures to build up their legacy. That being said, in the two hours it took to finish the episode to its completion, it made the entire premise feel very unimportant. SO much had happened and so much story and character development was involved that Telltale could have made the entire plot itself into a single season if they wanted to. The entirety of Sky City itself has so much more that could have been explored and so many more characters could have been introduced, but the story was limited to a couple of hours of gameplay. It creates a new kind of gameplay that forces you to pay attention and actually play the game rather than just putting your controller down and making a decision every once in a while.

The episode relies prettily on QTE (Quick Time Events) and gives you something next to decision making to worry about. While a lot of the QTE are really to avoid taking damage, some are just used for the sake of being there, like to build things, but they also add to your situation and count as something else to watch out for. You are given a set of ten hearts to have throughout the episode (and most likely throughout the series) and damage gets taken away every time you are either attacked by an enemy or fail to do a QTE. The QTE also acts as its own decision as some events can change how a person sees you. It isn't as effective as a regular decision, but something like which group of people you want to run with or how long it takes you to do something might have a much more of an impact in the future.

Someone needs to have a nice sitdown with the gaming industry about VR and what it can and can't do. The ability to transport the viewer inside a scene is incredible, and if that scene happens to be in the cockpit of some kind of ship, then it opens up a whole range of movement options that would otherwise be a bad idea. Putting the player behind the eyes of a protagonist who walks around freely in the standard FPS viewpoint, on the other hand, is something that has only sounded awesome. It's hasn't been. Really, seriously, it's kind of sucked, and while wanting it to be different won't change that, clever viewing systems just might. So now Minecraft has official VR support, and it's taken an interesting approach to the presentation that's a little awkward but usable.

VR Control mode has a number of options available for it, but the default is that turning is done by a series of instant changes, like teleporting in place but facing a different angle. Turn slowly and the jumps are tiny, turn fast and you get a much larger angle of change. Additionally, when you look while walking your "body" automatically changes direction to face the same way without the need to manually adjust it. The trick is to eliminate as much as possible anything that might cause dizziness, and although these changes wouldn't work on a game like Doom they're fine for something slower-paced like Minecraft. It may be weird and a little jarring but also surprisingly effective.

Clocking in at roughly two hours, this episode is one of the longer Telltale episodes right behind the first episode of Tales from the Borderlands. Even though it’s generally long for an episode, it doesn’t mean that time was wasted. With every passing second, new lore is learned about this rendition of the Minecraft Online guide world and how characters perceive the strange world around them. Who knew that people were pretty used to the idea of killing a dragon from another dimension and hosting a convention in honor of the heroes who slew it?