While the box offices are still pulling in some pretty impressive numbers for Avatar: The Way of Water, it’d be easy to forget that there’s even more Avatar-based entertainment coming our way fairly soon. The gaming community and longstanding Avatar franchise fans are undoubtedly eager to learn more about the upcoming open-world action-adventure game Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
While at the moment details are fairly thin on the ground about the ambitious title, we do know that it’s been in the works for quite some time now. Roughly five years of development have gone into Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora so far, with the expected to be released at some point before the end of March 2024. Ahead of this, and perhaps riding on the high somewhat of the movie’s current success, new details have emerged about the game’s development and collaborative nature. Specifically, the ongoing collaboration between its developers Ubisoft Massive, and Avatar director James Cameron’s production studio Lightstorm Entertainment.
Speaking to GamesRadar+, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s creative director Magnus Jansén shared some insights into the team’s vision for the title, as well as reflected on the efforts that have gone into building its immersive game world so far. “The time has been spent on building a brand new part of Pandora,” Jansén explains, “and creating the tools needed to bring it to life on the latest generation of console and PC hardware.”
The desire to ensure that the upcoming game will really push the envelope in terms of the current capabilities of today’s consoles and PCs is clearly high on the agenda for Ubisoft Massive. As Jansén explains, “the heart of this effort is Snowdrop – our game engine. When we first met with Lightstorm, Snowdrop is what showed to our partners that we were willing to push the envelope of technology, just like they do in the films. It was and still is the key foundation of our ongoing collaboration.”
Whether this means that players will be able to explore environments made familiar to them in the Avatar movies, time will tell. It’s perhaps more likely that the game will be bringing a new, undiscovered part of Pandora to light, with its own original story running alongside it, but of course, we’ll need to wait for more information from Ubisoft Massive on exactly what the title will have to offer.
It certainly sounds as though the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora project will build on the successful formula of the Avatar movies, especially in terms of being at the forefront of what tech can do. However, we’ll have to wait and see how the game translates as a whole when it’s released at some point over the next year or so.
