The expansive nature of Minecraft ’s world is also what contributes to this fully realized sandbox vision. The worlds are virtually infinite (on PC) and provide ample opportunity to adapt and explore multiple biomes and topography. There’s no real reason to go to one area over the other, but players are frequently compelled to do so. It’s an embrace of wanderlust, one that has influenced many other games like the upcoming No Man’s Sky . You have no objective beyond the horizon and there might be seriously dangerous monsters out there. You might not be well-equipped or even supposed to go there at the current equipped state. But you keep going, just to see. Just to explore.

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 chicken jockey minecraft has official VR support, and it's taken an interesting approach to the presentation that's a little awkward but usable.

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 Classic Control is what you'd normally put up with in a standard FPS, where head movement moves the view and body orientation is controlled smoothly by the right stick or mouse. This is the heart of the VR FPS problem, because while moving forward, back, and strafing isn't much of an issue, turning the view without moving your body is when bad things start to happen at the base of your lizard brain. Even in a blocky Minecraft world the sense of Real is too strong, and while you know you're playing a game the part that keeps things like your heart pumping and lungs breathing without conscious thought hasn't the slightest idea what's wrong. The trick is to break the idea of Real, and this is where the special VR Control mode comes into play.

Even better, indie games can afford to lose. They are often low cost, low maintenance, high concept works that don't rely on reaching a certain figure to be considered viable, and as such they can throw caution to the wind and take some big risks while still making a profit off of even the most modest sales. That means they can also afford to remain loyal to a system like an undertaker with a debt to the don, as while they might want the money that can come with being a multi-platform release, what they need is the backing and spiritual support of a major company like Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo to get their games out there. A backing that is no longer lip service and is becoming very, very real.

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.

The episode doesn't stop there, because once you've returned from either of those two paths, you head off as a group with whichever other character you picked up in the first episode (Lukas for me) to find the last member of the Order of the Stone, Soren the Architect. This path also follows a relatively fast-paced action sequence, but falls a little short with its sub-par cliffhanger. It's only episode two, but the weird events surrounding the Order of the Stone and exactly what they're going to do to stop this crazy Wither Storm seems as though it will never be resolved.