Tag: Avatar

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Building a game from a movie license comes with risks. Some of the worst video games of the ‘90s and 2000s sprouted from poorly considered tie-ins, where the team or maybe the license holder couldn’t decide whether the final product should be a game or a playable movie that rehashed what everyone already knew. The risk is even bigger if you’re Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment, working with the Avatar license on Frontiers of Pandora and hoping to create something ambitious with a premise that’s much different than the James Cameron Avatar. However, Pandora‘s creative director Magnus Jansen tells GLHF his team had a stroke of luck right from the first meeting with Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment production company.

“A game and a move movie are not the same thing,” Jansen says. “They shouldn’t be. When we met with Lightstorm [Entertainment] all those years ago, it was very clear that Lightstorm – thank God – didn’t want Frontiers of Pandora to be a linear movie game. They didn’t want to recreate the movie. They wanted the game to be everything that a game can be: to be interactive, for the player to have agency, for co-authorship between the player and the pre-authored narrative, and all of the stuff that makes a game a good game.”

Avatar surprised me during the Avatar preview event I attended with how alive and vibrant Pandora felt, and that was Massive’s intent. Jansen says the team starts from the bottom of the evolutionary chain with the fundamental elements of life. First comes the broad strokes of the environment, and then they figure out what grows there, what animals thrive, and how this ecology influences how humans – or Na’vi, in Avatar’s case – live. 

Hansen tells me the Massive team took several research trips while deciding how Pandora should look, sound, and feel, including the United States’ Pacific Northwest region, though much of the material was in Massive’s own backyard. He says the inspiration for some of the regions I didn’t get to see in the preview –cooler coniferous zones with fungal labyrinths and carpets of white moss – come from the temperate Nordic forests of Sweden, some of which are just minutes away from Massive’s headquarters in Malmo.

With the environment in mind, Jansen said the designers start creating lifestyles, economies, and cultures. I didn’t get to see much of that culture firsthand, since the preview avoided putting me in contact with Pandora’s three Na’vi clans. However, the careful approach to creating an entire ecosystem shines through in how you handle item gathering. 

Stockpiling resources is a mindless task you perform without even realizing it in games like The Witcher 3 or even Genshin Impact, but Massive did something different in Avatar. You walk away with better-quality materials if you take the time to interact with and extract them properly.

Jansen says turning the idea of eco-guardianship into a game was one of the most attractive prospects of working on Frontiers of Pandora.

“The inherent ethos of Avatar with sustainability and the relationship and respect you have for nature –  this is a huge thing for me and the team, and it has been since the very beginning,” Jansen says. “ It’s changed the way that we do harvesting. When you pick your resources for food or crafing, and you want the best stuff, it’s about quality over quantity. Instead of going ‘hey, you have to pick 20 of these and make them into one new thing,’ it’s about finding the one you need and, by your knowledge of nature and being in tune with nature, getting the best quality.”

That often means venturing off the main path and taking time to find the right items, but Jansen says the team isn’t adding friction. If you don’t want to engage with crafting or harvesting, you can complete the story without ever touching it. You just won’t get the best upgrades and weapons.

“One of the things I’m super happy about is that we have made a world that’s beautiful and dangerous, but it’s not aggressive. And there’s a difference there because it’s not trying to eat you or anything. If you just want to sort of stop and smell the roses – I don’t think we actually have any roses – but you can. It’s really a nature experience.”

It’s also not what I and most people expected. After the Ubisoft Forward showcase in June 2023, many – myself included – thought Pandora resembled Far Cry with an Avatar makeover. That’s partly unavoidable. Ubisoft kept quiet about the project, sharing hardly any new details since that initial reveal, which Jansen says is ideal. He wants players to enter Pandora like the game’s heroine, completely unaware of what to expect and surrounded by new discoveries and possibilities on all sides. That goal guided every decision Jansen and his team made, even down to telling the story from a first-person perspective to give players a greater sense of “being there” and of Pandora’s scale.

“All of the creature designs, all of the things that we did, the variety, and the push to have so much – not just have the rainforests, but two more regions that are vastly different from each other, not just one clan, but three clans. “All of that is driven by this feeling that it is it’s a roller coaster, a journey of pure joy and joyful discovery.” 

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launches on Dec. 7, 2023, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF

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Ahead of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s launch in December 2023, I had the chance to spend a few hours with it and get a glimpse of Massive’s vision. I picked stalks, found beehives, contributed to a community fund, and learned how to find my way in the gorgeous, otherworldly forests of Pandora before becoming an airborne terror and raiding an RDA base on a flying lizard. Despite a few stale design elements, Frontiers of Pandora is shaping up to be a more thoughtful take on the usual open-world – and Ubisoft – formula.

My Avatar preview dropped me in the middle of a quest to find honey for a Na’vi ritual, so off I went into the forest, completely devoid of context and quest markers. That last bit s one of the more interesting and promising ideas in Frontiers. You can treat Avatar like any other modern game and have waypoints and quest markers cluttering the screen, or you can shut them off and pay attention to the world around you. Your hunting guide explains where plants thrive and animals roam, and the world – mercifully – only has a handful of places in each main area that match the habitat description.

The bugs that produced the honey I needed build their hives on mangroves, so off I went to the swampy area nearby to hunt them down. Eventually, my kind and patient demoist pointed out that I walked right past where the mangroves grew at a specific point on the riverbank. I can see this freedom potentially being a minor frustration in the full game. Frontiers of Pandora is big, so much so that I actually let out an audible “whoa” when I panned out in the map view. It’s easy to literally miss the tree for the forest in some cases, though you can use your Na’vi senses to get a small pointer in the right direction.

Na’vi sense is essentially the same kind of superhuman power you activate as Geralt in The Witcher 3 or Agent 47 in Hitman, a gamey ability that lets you see things you normally can’t. It should feel trite at this point, like just another standard open-world feature, but Massive roots it and other overly familiar features in a layer of thoughtful design that links your actions more closely with the world. 

When you activate your Na’vi sense, for example, you’re tuning into the world around you, while gaining new skill points comes from helping Pandora’s different tribes and learning their customs. When you harvest items, you get higher quality if you know how to treat the resource and harvest it in the correct way. Sure, these are just some extra contextual detail, but it made me feel more connected to Pandora and the story Massive wants to tell.

The demo’s second half included a few side quests, a big combat sequence, and some brilliant platforming segments where you bond with your big flying lizard that’s the Avatar version of Epona. I started climbing the roost and made it pretty high up before my demoist had to point out that I missed the story quest location and the actual intended path.

Avatar’s side quests seem like a varied lot. One was pretty standard and had me tracking down items, one sent me into the forest to investigate the source of a noise causing nearby wildlife distress, while another tasked me with using logic and a few human hacking tools to solve a mystery, and 

Where things get a bit less impressive is off the beaten track. Pandora is a beautiful world that I could happily spend a long time just exploring, but underneath the visual splendor, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to explore outside of quests. A handful of randomly generated encounters spawn in certain areas. You might find injured animals you can help or RDA soldiers to fight or even random Na’vi out hunting and gathering. The simple actions like helping the hurt were fine, but when they started repeating surprisingly often, the sameness of them – Na’vi repeating the exact same lines, for example – broke the spell a little.

I wrapped things up with a crash course in Frontiers of Pandora’s combat and an assault on an RDA base. These guns-blazing sequences require more strategy than you might think at first glance. My demoist recommended a stealthy approach to avoid alerting the entire base, so naturally I did the exact opposite, just to see what would happen. 

It turns out two dozen heavily armed soldiers have a pretty big advantage over a single fighter with no armor. So I tried a different approach. I used my trusty flying steed in a series of hit-and-run style assaults, dropping on targets before soaring away to safety again, and just about completed the mission before I accidentally ran into a group of soldiers.

I’m not sure if that method was supposed to work. My demoist said no one had actually tried it before. Either way, the freedom to experiment was refreshing, especially for a series of gunfights that could so easily get boring quickly.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launches on Dec. 7, 2023, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF