Ubisoft is not having a great 2024, and it’s clear that the company is trying anything and everything to attempt to get back onto “good footing” with gamers. Whether they can achieve that or not is debatable at this current point, but they are trying. Case in point, not only is the company doing updates to try and fix recently released games, but they’re prepping the next DLC for one of its 2023 titles. Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is about to get its second story expansion via the “Secrets of the Spires” DLC. While there wasn’t a trailer dropped for it, it was announced to be coming on November 25th.
One of the things that the announcement boasted was that players would be able to do aerial battles thanks to the DLC, which means you’ll be putting beasts against machines in the skies over Pandora, and given that you’ll be experiencing this in the first person, it might be quite cool.
Of course, the big question here is whether people will even get the DLC or whether they’ll want to play the game now after almost a year of release. When the title came out, Avatar Frontiers of Pandora got incredibly mixed reviews, not that Ubisoft will admit that, as they’ve tried to boast what certain individuals have said versus the masses of gamers who have attempted the title.
Just as important, if you try to look up hard data on the game, you’ll find that no one can really tell you how much the game has sold. One report states “1.9 million players,” but that doesn’t mean that those were sold games, as there’s the Ubisoft+ service to consider here. Plus, given how Ubisoft likes to have “lofty expectations” for its games, you could argue that even if it did sell 2 million copies, that “wouldn’t be enough,” given the grandness of the IP and how it was a multi-billion-dollar hit at the box officer despite the massive gaps between the films.
In many ways, the game is indicative of everything that’s going on with Ubisoft. They try and make big games with even bigger IPs, and yet they just create average gaming experiences that people can find almost anywhere else. Again, Ubisoft won’t cop to that, and has insulted players and critics repeatedly for not liking the games they make, but that’s not on players, that’s on Ubisoft.
Still, it’ll be curious to see what this DLC is like when it arrives.
