Well that didn’t take long. Dreams, the game-within-a-game-maker, has had its newly updated VR feature for hardly more than 24 hours, but someone has already made a fully functional Beat Saber clone.

Dreams launched earlier this year as the latest creation from developer Media Molecule, whose prior Little Big Planet games thrived thanks to a community of creators that built new levels and completely new content with the in-game tools.

Dreams takes that idea of community-made content and makes it essentially the heart of the game. In fact, the actual ‘campaign’ that you can play out of the box is entirely made with the in-game tools.

This week the game was updated to include PSVR support, which means that existing and new creations can be played in VR. The game also allows creators to make ‘VR Only’ content which requires a headset to play and there’s even a comfort rating system for VR experiences.

Of course, creators making experiences in Dreams are going to start with what’s familiar. And what is more familiar than Beat Saber, one of the most popular VR games to date?

Hardly less than 24 hours after the debut of the PSVR update, creator MonocledRobot has made a functional ‘Beat Saber’ experience which is played with PSVR and the PS Move controllers. It features music, cuttable blocks synced to the beat, and even a working scoring and multiplier system.

What’s especially interesting about Dreams is that almost anything made in the game can be expanded by other players or used as building blocks for other creations. Creator MonocledRobot made his ‘Beat Saber’ experience with community expansion in mind, including the creation of new songs and maps. A 10 minute tutorial by the creator on YouTube overviews how the experience was constructed and how others can add their own songs and beat maps.

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Of course, this isn’t a proper replacement for the real Beat Saber. Not only does it not look or feel quite the same, it also lacks many features of the real game. But more than an imperfect facsimile of a full game, it goes to show the breadth of what can be achieved in Dreams. In the creator portal you can already find players building everything from VR FPS and horror games to driving and puzzle games.

With enough time, we wouldn’t be surprised to find some seriously worthwhile VR content inside of Dreams.

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Ben Lang
Ben is the world's most senior professional analyst solely dedicated to the XR industry, having founded Road to VR in 2011—a year before the Oculus Kickstarter sparked a resurgence that led to the modern XR landscape. He has authored more than 3,000 articles chronicling the evolution of the XR industry over more than a decade. With that unique perspective, Ben has been consistently recognized as one of the most influential voices in XR, giving keynotes and joining panel and podcast discussions at key industry events. He is a self-described "journalist and analyst, not evangelist."
  • DeenVR

    Who cares

  • Pulstar44

    Good article. I’m going to buy dreams asap

  • kontis

    The problem of these sandbox games on closed platforms like playstation is the strict content moderation.

    Walled gardens have some pros, but they should never be the only way to get content on any hardware.

    Good thing PCs and the WWW/email became big in the 90s and that Microsoft failed with its take over plans (EEE). Today these kind of truly open platforms would be impossible to be successful with this scale and capital.

    • Ad

      I wish Valve would just pay them a crapton to bring it to PC, but I don’t even want it to exclusively use the Steam Workshop. Even Epic, just someone who doesn’t intend to capture it.

      • CaptainsRath

        They are bringing it to pc eventually, they just want to finish the playstation version first, which I am hoping to be soon as vr was one of their major goals with Dreams. it was said in an interview with them.

        • Ad

          They really said outright it’s coming to PC? They’re a first party Sony studio and none of their past games have come to PC, and it wouldn’t be a small task to bring it over.

          • namekuseijin

            Horizon ZD just released on PC. There was a change in direction at Sony, but it’s not like their high grade exclusives will ever premier on PC or other consoles.

            Dreams is awesome as other PlayStation and psvr exclusive content has always been consistently awesome. Too bad for the mimimi elsewhere

          • Ad

            I think that was to build hype for the sequel on PS5.

          • namekuseijin

            Still on pc

          • Ad

            Right but I still don’t think Dreams is coming to PC.

          • Rosemary

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    • Lhorkan

      And they cannot adopt Dreams approach because they render triangle surfaces, not volumetric structures. Epic is trying with Nanite in UE5 but it’s still not even close, because triangles are just difficult to author.

      Rendering is always in triangles – that’s just how the hardware works. The GPU has no concept of “volumetric structures”. The vertex / geometry / tesselation / mesh shaders handle points, lines or triangles. The triangles are then rasterized by checking which triangles overlap each pixel. Rasterizing triangles is a lot faster than evaluating complex mathemathics which describe volumetric surfaces, because rasterization is hardware accelerated. So yes, you can author meshes in different ways, including the voxel based approach seen in Dreams, but in the end, the GPU gets fed triangles.

  • Ad

    A few years ago someone made Beat Saber inside of G-mod. It’s a shame Valve never pushed them to make the G-mod VR mod part of base Garry’s Mod. We could have seen a little explosion of indie VR content and been able to step inside of tons of G-mod content.

  • Beat Saber level “Easy–“

  • Jokes apart, Dreams looks really like an amazing software that can make creative express themselves in VR freely