Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has finally appeared in the wild, and much the same as with Star Wars: Outlaws, Ubisoft’s other big new open world game based on a big fantasy movie licence, we saw it in a bit more detail behind closed doors over in Los Angeles – and spoke with the game’s creative director, Magnus Jansén.
At first glance, much of this gameplay reveal is what you’d expect from a Ubisoft Massive (and co.) take on an action movie licence: it’s open world, it’s action-adventure, it’s got bows and arrows and assault rifles, outposts, wildlife, resource collecting, crafting and customisation. It’s in a nice sunny, broadly exotic jungle. It’s Far Cry, in a lot of ways – but there is one twist.
Frontiers of Pandora is trying to make its design feel a bit more “sustainable”, as Jansén put it to us. Typically, games like Far Cry and its design cousins tend to feel, for lack of a better word, a little colonial: you turn up in a new place, and you go around harvesting as much as you can from that place – animal hides, plants, natural resources – until you’ve built up enough brute strength. It’s a gameplay loop that sits in direct opposition to the ideals of James Cameron and his Avatar franchise – with its ultra-militarised humans rocking up on idyllic Pandora and burning it to the ground in search of Unobtainium and magic space ambergris. Environmentalism, naturalism, and generally not just rocking up somewhere to harvest as much of its naturally occurring stuff as you can for your own benefit is kind of the central message.
