With 2023 winding down and fewer big games launching in December, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora stands out as perhaps the only triple-A blockbuster of the month. It’s out on December 7th for Xbox Series X/S, PS5 and PC, developed by Massive Entertainment of The Division fame. While an open-world title that distills elements from others in the genre, several things make it unique (besides being an Avatar game mostly in first-person instead of third-person). Check out 10 of them here.
Traversal Methods
If there’s one thing that open-world titles have presented over the years, it’s a range of different movement types. While most offer regular walking, running and sprinting, we’ve seen titles like Dying Light use parkour and free-form running.
In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has you controlling that freeform movement also involves leaping and bounding as much as sprinting. Your character has a powerful jump to propel them higher while utilizing different parts of the environment to either hold on to or carry you.
Vines will elevate, and certain plants act as trampolines to bounce you higher. It’s a big change of pace for Massive, who utilizes more realistic movement in Tom Clancy’s The Division, and part of what makes the Avatar fantasy come alive.
Sense and Exploration
Another element unique to the player is their ability to sense their surroundings, referred to as the Sense (unoriginal, yes, but it works). It’s good for several things, like seeing enemy routes when sneaking into a base, locating weak spots and much more. The Sense will also lead you to specific objectives, but not directly.
Once in the vicinity, you need to find the thing in question, which the quest objectives help with by describing landmarks and other sights. With how complex environments can be, it gets challenging. Hopefully, as players become more familiar with the Western Frontier, these will feel more natural and less confusing.
The Map Screen
The Western Frontier and how it’s presented on the map is unique compared to most open-world titles. You won’t find numerous icons littered about, and as Rock Paper Shotgun noted in their preview, any locations previously discovered aren’t added to the map screen.
Following the directions in a quest’s description is even more essential. If you favor a more traditional guided experience, using way points to indicate where to go, it’s still present as a separate mode. However, you can also rely only on contextual information when exploring. Either way, don’t count on the game holding your hand throughout, as we’ll discuss shortly.
Hunting
As in the films, you can go out hunting in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. However, even with so many guns at your disposal, you can only hunt animals with a bow and arrow. Kill them with guns, and the meat is ruined (per IGN’s preview). So, essentially, it’s a clean hunt or no deal.
As a twist on the formula seen in titles like Far Cry and Red Dead Redemption 2, it’s certainly interesting and should encourage players to opt for stealth and tracking their prey over going in guns-blazing. The compendium helps locate specific creatures and highlights them in your Sense.
Restoring Health
While we haven’t seen it too much in other open world titles, Skyrim featured scavenging for resources like fruits and other food, which you eat to restore health. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is different, as harvesting fruit from Pandora and cooking them into meals can aid in your recovery.
It also seems that you need to eat regularly, like in real life, or your recovery will take a hit (which is more akin to survival game mechanics). The same goes for your Stamina. But that’s not all, as Avatar boasts something unique from just about any open-world game in recent memory.
Fruit Harvesting Mini-Game
That’s right – there’s a mini-game for harvesting fruits. You can’t just press a button and have it in your inventory.
First, interact with the fruit, then manipulate the analogue stick and pull it off. Considering how much the developer has done to streamline resource-gathering over the years, to see this aspect go in the other direction is. You’ll also find different rarities of plants and even animals based on the time of day and weather, which must be kept in mind when fulfilling objectives.
RDA Tagged Animals
One of the side activities involves pursuing animals that the RDA has tagged with darts. However, these aren’t to be hunted – instead, you want to get in close and calm them down before removing the dart. Interestingly, it’s not that difficult (at least based on previews). Whether you get any rewards is another matter, but hey, you’re making a difference and doing what you should do to preserve the flow of nature.
Two-Player Co-op
Several open-world titles have implemented co-op over the years, but not every game lets you play through the entire campaign with a friend. Even fewer let the host and their guest share progression. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora supports drop-in/drop-out co-op and character and story progression for anyone who joins your game.
The only caveat is that they must have reached the same point in the story as you to play the main missions, or they’re locked off. However, if you join someone else’s game and progress enough in the story, you can then continue from there when solo. No replaying any previous story missions. There’s also trading, with players able to swap loot and either gain a leg up or chase after specific rolls.
Dynamically Changing Environments
Another interesting bit from the PlayStation Blog is how Pandora’s environments can change “dynamically.” It describes “in-game events creating large-scale world changes,” with the RDA’s clearing of forests and pollution affecting the nearby flora. It could mean that certain species of plants in a region will decay or die unless you clear out the RDA’s presence. Once the pollution has stopped, nature should flourish again. We’ll have to see it in action, but if true, it would be interesting to see if other events could impact the world’s ecosystem.