Avatar is not only pretty, but it has good technical reasons for being exclusive to the next-gen
Frontiers of Pandora was unveiled at E3 2021 and is coming to PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X.
The hit on the table that Ubisoft had in store for its E3 2021 conference was Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora , a game of which we were aware but had not been seen in action until then. In fact, we learned a key detail at the end of the presentation video, and that is that it is an exclusively next-generation title .
Right now, there aren’t many such games – the most recent being Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart , which has a very different art style – so it will be one of the first third-party blockbusters to squeeze the hardware out of Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. Leaving its much more stabilized predecessors behind is a risky move, but at the level of ambitions, it is also understandable.
Hard drives did not allow a better balance between density and level of detailSpeaking to IGN, Massive Entertainment lists a number of technical reasons why they have opted solely for these platforms. One of them has to do with the level of detail that is brought to the world while flying at high altitude: “It does not matter how much we can render, unless we can transmit it just as quickly when we move very fast from one place to another” he explains technical director of programming Nikolay Stefanov.
Another reason is that they will be able to challenge the traditional design of open world games where (due to hard disk restrictions) there were very empty or uninteresting spaces separating important locations: now, it will be possible to better balance the detail of the world with its density. . The AI and the world’s response to its and the player’s actions will be more realistic, too: “when [the big creatures] run away, or attack you, or whatever, they just go through the bamboo and other vegetation and destroy it completely “explains Stefanov.
The world will react better to the actions of the AI and the playerOf course, it is incontestable that surprising us with the details is important as well. Pandora is a world very rich in fauna and flora, so ray tracing will be able to give us images that until now were not known as the filtering of light through the leaves: “you can calculate the amount of light that is reflected to through the leaves, the tint of colors, and everything in between. You get beautiful reflections and views of the water, even the volumetric clouds in the sky, which also get just the right lighting. “
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is scheduled to launch on PC, Xbox Series X | S and PlayStation 5 in 2022, in parallel to the Avatar 2 movie that has been steadily delayed since 2014. Meanwhile, its makers are working in parallel with the next Star Wars .
