Ubisoft has released an official story trailer for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora depicting the journey players will undertake as one of the Na’vi. Players will take on the role of a young Na’vi who was raised by the RDA and who then embarks to learn about their heritage and learn how to defend the various Na’vi clans. The story takes place sometime after the first film. The two-and-a-half-minute trailer shows off some impressive-looking graphics where the developers have managed to faithfully reproduce the imagery and iconic settings of the films.
Game Description (per YouTube):
“Become Na’vi and explore the Western Frontier in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. You’ll play as a child of two worlds, born Na’vi but raised by the RDA. Fifteen years after your abduction, you are free and must reconnect with your lost heritage. Meet new Na’vi clans, learn their ways, and join them to protect Pandora from the RDA.
About Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: Set after the events of the first Avatar film, you’ll embark on a journey across the Western Frontier, a never-before-seen continent of Pandora, as you join other Na’vi clans to protect Pandora from the formidable forces of the RDA Created in collaboration with Disney and James Cameron’s production company, Lightstorm Entertainment, you will experience a first-person open-world action-adventure game exclusively developed to maximize the power of PS5.”
PC Graphical Details
While the above trailer does show the strengths of the PlayStation 5, the PC version of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has already been announced to include some nice features. Unlike a number of games that ruffled feathers in the PC community, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will support both FSR and DLSS at launch, which is sure to aid in performance with its ray-traced reflections and shadows. There is still no word on Ubisoft adding support for Intel’s XeSS solution.
According to DSOG, the game was originally supposed to include ray-traced global illumination (RTGI) but it now seems that feature may have been dropped. RTGI, while often improving overall lighting significantly, RTGI can be very costly to performance so it’s understandable why this may end up being true. It was also noted that the developers of Starfield made a similar choice to drop RTGI. Aside from that PC owners can look forward to the game offering an expansive amount of graphical controls as well as being designed to take advantage of CPUs with higher core counts. This (optimization for higher core count CPUs) is something that has taken decades for developers to focus on in PC games and is only just now seeming to begin to gain greater traction.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is powered by the Snowdrop Engine and releases for PC and consoles on December 7.