Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora Devs Explain Long Development Time

In a new interview, the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora creative director discusses the game’s lofty ambitions and explains why it has had a long, and delayed, development cycle.

In conversation with Gamesradar, creative director Magnus Jansén said that, “One of the most exciting challenges has been to build a living and reactive world inhabited by unique creatures and new characters.” As stated by previous marketing material, Frontiers of Pandora will explore an as yet unseen area of the sci-fi world and takes place in-between the two films. It has ambitions to render a reactive world, considering weather and animal behaviors as the player explores the world as a Na’vi. Studio Massive Entertainment has crafted plenty of Ubisoft’s open worlds, having previously worked on Assassin’s Creed: Revelations, Far Cry 3, and Tom Clancy’s The Division.

Frontiers of Pandora was first teased in 2017. In response to a question about the development time, Jansén said, “The time has been spent on building a brand-new part of Pandora and creating the tools needed to bring it to life on the latest generation of console and PC hardware.” The game has been crafted in collaboration between Disney and Lightstorm Entertainment. It uses the Snowdrop engine, which was first used on The Division. It will also be the first-pereson game of the studio’s output. Jansén expressed confidence in this shift, “Our goal has always been to allow people to finally get to go there and be immersed in that world, feel it, and interact with it–and there was no better way to do so than first-person.”

Though it was originally slated to release in 2022 alongside The Way of Water, Frontiers of Pandora was delayed last year. The game has no official release date yet, it is likely to release in Ubisoft’s next fiscal year, sometime between April 1, 2023 and June 30, 2024. Here’s everything we know about the upcoming game.