Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is being worked on at Ubisoft. While not much of the game has been shown so far, it's clear that this is an ambitious project, one that offers up a huge open world for players to explore.
Running on the latest iteration of Ubisoft’s Snowdrop engine for the latest consoles, we’re expecting it to be a showcase of what the Xbox Series X|S and PS5 can do. From what the development team has revealed of the project, Ubisoft's recreation of Pandora could be a real technical powerhouse.
We haven't heard much on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora lately, likely due to a reshuffling at Ubisoft amid several game cancellations. Hopefully, given that the game is planned to release over the next year, we'll hear more sooner rather than later. Here's everything we know about the game so far, including all of the latest news.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: cut to the chase
- What is it? A game set in the world of James Cameron’s Avatar movies
- When can I play it? Sometime between April 2023 and March 2024
- What can I play it on? PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Amazon Luna
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora release date and platforms
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will release sometime in fiscal year 2023-2024 for PS5, Xbox Series X, Xbox Series S, PC, and Amazon Luna. This means at some point between April 2023 to March 2024.
Frontiers of Pandora was officially revealed during Ubisoft’s Ubisoft Forward showcase at E3 2021. It took us all somewhat by surprise, but we’re still waiting for Ubisoft to narrow down that release window. We know (via GameSpot) that the game was previously delayed into Ubisoft's financial year starting April 2022 in response to the delay of Avatar: The Way of Water, which was finally released in December 2022.
Frontiers of Pandora's release, while originally targeting 2022, is on track to release in fiscal year 2023-2024, despite Ubisoft revealing in January 2023 that it had scrapped three unannounced projects and has further delayed its upcoming pirate adventure Skull and Bones due to underperforming releases in late 2022.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora trailers
Latest trailer
Ubisoft released a tech showcase for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and while it doesn’t show any new footage from the game, it does give a little bit of an insight into what the team is looking to do with the new iteration of the Snowdrop engine.
We've included some key trailers for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora throughout this article. To see every trailer released for the game so far, be sure to visit Ubisoft's official YouTube channel.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora story and setting
Details on Frontiers of Pandora’s story are a bit light currently, but we’ve been able to gather a few potential snippets from the reveal trailer and Ubisoft's site.
The official site for the game describes it as a “first-person action adventure” that's set in an “immersive, open world”. The description also states that the game will take players into a “standalone story” where they'll “play as a Na’vi and embark on a journey across the Western Frontier, a never-before-seen part of Pandora”.
The first-look trailer gives us a brief look at this first-person perspective. We also see a Na’vi riding a mount – that doesn’t quite look like a Direhorse – suggesting that we will hopefully be able to partake in mounted combat, or we’ll at least be able to traverse Pandora on (kind of) horseback.
The world also seems to be inhabited by creatures we both have – and haven’t – seen in the film, so expect some surprises. There also seems to be some sort of hub for Na’vi to congregate in. We’re hoping this could mean online play – we also hope we can customize our Na’vi.
From the trailer, it also looks like Pandora’s native Na’vi will take on the RDA, like in the film, who threaten to destroy their world and have significant armed tech at their disposal. This trailer shows RDA helicopters on the warpath, trying to destroy a Na’vi. The Na’vi jumps on a Great Leonopteryx, firing arrows at the helicopter, before a final arrow fixed with an explosive device hits the vehicle, which then bursts into flames.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora news
James Cameron shares his thoughts on Frontiers of Pandora
James Cameron revealed his thoughts on Ubisoft's upcoming game during an IGN interview in 2022. Confirming he's taking a hands-off approach, he explained:
“We're very excited about what Ubisoft is doing with their game authoring. I don’t tell them what to do — they know their world, their business, their market. We just keep a close eye that they don’t do anything that’s not canonical in terms of Na’vi culture and what the RDA is doing on Pandora and all that sort of thing.”
Years of post-launch content
Ubisoft is planning a long life for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora when it releases later this year it seems. In a Q2 earnings call in 2022 (via TweakTown), Ubisoft CFO Frederick Duguet said, “Avatar Frontiers of Pandora is a big game next to the highly-awaited movie. The development is progressing well and is a beautiful world delivered by the Snowdrop engine. That will be a very long game in terms of content delivered over many years.”
NPCs will “understand the state of the world”
In a video showcasing the tech behind the game, the development team of Avatar discussed how the game’s NPCs will behave and react more realistically to the game’s world. In the video, Lead Narrative Realization Designer, Alice Rendell, said that “the different activities that NPCs can perform in the world, and the different animations they have, can make the world feel really alive”. As a result, according to Rendell, the team “wanted to take this one step further and created a system where our NPCs understand the state of the world – for example, weather, player progression, or time of day”.
Even plant life will react in some way, with Senior technical artist Kunal Luthra explaining that “the advantage of Snowdrop is that it can handle quite complex shaders”. “To add life to the vegetation of Pandora, we've created many interactive shaders that can be affected by the player, from real-time wind simulations and interactions to intelligent plants reacting to your presence,” Luthra explained.
