Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora aims to mix Ubisoft's open worlds with James Cameron's "sustainability"

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.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – Official Game Overview Trailer | Ubisoft Forward Watch on YouTube

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.

So how does Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora mix that with the whole power fantasy, loot-and-craft loop of past Ubisoft open worlds? For one, it tries to shift the emphasis from “quantity to quality”.

“The ethos of Avatar of there being a sustainable angle to it really made its way into a couple of game loops,” Jansén told us. In the game, he explained, you might both “harvest plants and hunt animals for food, for sustenance, to regenerate your health,” but better-quality ingredients will give you certain buffs, while the better you are at finding the higher-quality items, the more “in tune” you are with Pandora, the better quality your crafted items might be.

“As in real life, some things grow better somewhere. Some fruits are sweeter depending on where you pick them, or the conditions in which they grow,” Jansén explained. You don’t have to focus on this in-game, but it’ll make a difference if you do, and achieving that will mean understanding the planet, talking to NPCs or reading up on where the best things grow.