Four years after Minecraft became available on the Oculus Rift, PSVR owners will finally be able to strap on their headsets and get a first-person glimpse of the Nether.
Roger Carpenter, Mojang Studios' Executive Producer for Minecraft, announced on the Playstation Blog today that an official patch for the PS4 version of Minecraft will appear sometime this month, granting free access to anyone who owns the game.
Calling it Minecraft x PlayStation VR, Carpenter explained in the post that this port will be "100% the same Minecraft game that you can play every day", with "nothing removed". You will obviously require the PSVR headset to play, but you'll use your Dualshock 4 controller to play, not the Move controllers.
The post explains that you'll have two visual options while playing: Living Room or Immersive modes. He didn't go into greater detail about how these two modes differ, but we'll update the post if we learn more.
We do know, thanks to a tweet from Carpenter, that head tracking is enabled for this port, allowing you to lean in-game to catch a better glimpse of whatever creeper is stalking you.
#Minecraft #minecraftVR #PlayStationVR ...you will be able to lean out look round corners 😀 #cool pic.twitter.com/Eyy8rgw4iKSeptember 7, 2020
To build the PSVR version of Minecraft, Mojang worked with indie developer SkyBox Labs, which helped to "convert and optimise" the game using the same Minecraft VR tech that Mojang "developed for other VR platforms a few years back". This could refer to the Rift version or the Gear VR version.
The Bedrock version of Minecraft released on the PS4 in late 2019, two years after the Xbox One port and a year after the Switch port. Carpenter mentioned in the post that they could only begin working on the PSVR version after negotiations with Sony, which was initially hesitant to permit cross-platform play.
