Developer Shows Off New Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Details

Get ready to ride your Moutain Banshees because Massive Entertainment has some exciting updates on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. It's been a whopping 12 years since James Cameron's Avatar broke records and soared to the top of the box office, and while there have been Avatar games in the past, it looks like Frontiers of Pandora will leave them feeling "blue".

Cameron has already scoped out plans for a whole franchise of sequels for Avatar, which means the idea of an open-world Avatar game is well-timed to cash in on the hype surrounding the long-awaited Avatar 2 next December. Massive is staking out its lot with Frontiers of Pandora and then an open-world Star Wars title, with two major pop culture phenomenons set to take the gaming world by storm. 

What are the new Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora details?

This year's E3 was a mixed bag of announcements and insights, however, Ubisoft scored an undeniable win with a first look at Frontiers. As the publisher sets up the game's release, a new tech showcase shows off what's on the way. From our first tease of Frontiers of Pandora, it was clear this was going to a beautiful next-gen game. In the video, Ubisoft explained how it had to upgrade the long-running Snowdrop engine to handle the detailed environments that populate Pandora.

Technical Art Director Sebastian Lindoff explained, "As the world of Avatar is so different to anything we've done before, we had to do some major upgrades and big improvements to our engine. In the past, Snowdrop allowed us to build amazing cities, but to capture the natural beauty of Pandora, we needed to push Snowdrop even further". 

Lindoff promised that you'll be able to explore Pandora from the "deep, dense, jungles of the ground, to the grand vista high up in the skies". Thousands of assets can be crammed into a single frame, which is what's given Pandora its unique look. 

What else do we know about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora?

If interactive environments weren't enough, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has teased that there will be intelligent NPCs that will really understand their environment. Along with the luminescent plant life that made the movie pop, Creative Director Magnus Jansén told IGN how it all comes together to make it feel like players are actually in Pandora.

"It's a first-person game. It's, to me, the most immersive way of playing", said Jansén. "So we're really going all-in on that vision of, 'Remember the movie, remember you wanted to go to Pandora.' Now you can go to Pandora and, to do that, we needed to have the best simulation of weather, rain, animals, and the best rendering, because the more technically excellent it is, the more capable it is of taking you from where you are and into the world of Pandora". 

Given that Cameron made Pandora seem so alive in the first movie, it makes sense that this transfers into Ubisoft's game. Gamers might remember the release of James Cameron's Avatar: The Game in 2009, and although Ubisoft's last attempt at capturing the magic of Pandora muddled along, it sounds like 12 years of industry developments are more than enough to warrant a revisit.