One of the biggest surprises at E3 was finally seeing Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the game based on the film of the same name. We got a look at the world, built on the latest Snowdrop engine by the developer. Now, a new video has released which delves further into the game and looks at why it will be a next-gen exclusive.
Pushing the Snowdrop engine harder than ever before, the game’s technical director Sebastian Lindoff says the team has created a Pandora that allows you “to explore the deep dense jungles on the ground, to the grand vistas high up in the skies”. With the adventure taking you up in the air, a greater emphasis has been placed on ensuring it looks as realistic as possible, with cloud density being a big focus.
The ground has also had some love too, with the team exploring the capabilities of ray tracing to make “Pandora more vibrant and realistic”. NPCs are also said to be able to perform different activities in the world with various animations that will make the world “feel really alive”. It’s also said that NPCs will understand the state of the world, such as “weather, player progression, and time of day.”
Speaking to IGN, the game’s creative director Magnus Jansén, and technical director of programming Nikolay Stefanov, explained how the world of Pandora will operate more organically due to next-gen hardware. Moving away from being forced to move slowly to load assets in certain areas, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will feature a more organic world, as points of interest on the map are closer together than previous Ubisoft titles.
“It’s not just the old ‘I’m taking this slow walk as I enter into the place because we have to stream everything in’, it’s little subtle things that people don’t think about, which is how close together are all the places in the world.
If you look at, with the old hard drives, they had to be spaced out very far [apart], because you had to stream out the old and stream in the new, so it just created a formulaic world. So, there’s a ton of stuff like that.”
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is sounding mighty impressive, and also very much like we won’t hear anything in the future about an Xbox One version. We’re still a while off the game yet with it expected to launch in 2022, but it’s sounding like one of the first big true next-gen experiences, and we can’t wait to tackle the adventure.
Are you excited for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora? Let us know in the comments below.
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