It’s been a long time since Ubisoft Massive announced Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, a next-generation open world action/adventure game. That happened six years ago, but the release date might be close at long last. Ubisoft leaker @ScriptLeaksR6 claims to have found the following image somewhere on Ubisoft servers, hinting that pre-orders for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora are about to be opened.
AFOP preorder soon pic.twitter.com/bTusXFKs9U
— Script (@ScriptLeaksR6) March 22, 2023
According to the leaked image, pre-ordering the game will grant customers The Child of the Two Worlds Pack, including one character cosmetic set and one weapon skin.
Not much is known about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The game will be powered by the next-generation version of Massive’s own Snowdrop engine. At E3 2021, Ubisoft Massive shared information on some of the tech highlights of the game.
SEBASTIAN LINDOFF (Technical Art Director): As the world of “Avatar” is so different from anything we’d done before, we had to do some major upgrades and big improvements to our engine. In the past, Snowdrop allowed us to build amazing cities, but to capture the natural beauty of Pandora, we needed to push Snowdrop even further.
OLEKSANDR KOSHLO (Senior Render Programmer): We don’t just explore jungles on the ground. We also get to fly a bunch. So we added a new volumetric cloud system in Snowdrop to improve the visual quality of our sky.
KUNAL LUTHRA (Senior Technical Artist): With ray tracing, we can now illuminate Pandora in a way we never could before. This way, we can have real light reflect from the emission and the bioluminescence coming out from the plants, making Pandora more vibrant and more realistic.
OLEKSANDR KOSHLO: Real-time ray tracing allows us to greatly improve lighting in our game. Ray-traced global illumination and reflections make our game appear more naturally lit and more photorealistic, even when there are dynamic objects, dynamic weather, or time of day.
SEBASTIAN LINDOFF: In every project we do, we’re pushed to engine failure. But Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is, without a doubt, the biggest leap we’ve made so far.
Four months ago, we learned that Massive had partnered with AMD for both Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and their next game, the open world RPG based in the Star Wars universe. We also got a peek at a new Snowdrop tech demo that ran at over 80 FPS with ray tracing and FSR enabled on AMD’s 7900 XTX GPU.
As for the game itself, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is set in a never-before-seen region of the world, the Western Frontier. The goal will still be the same as seen in the movies, though: resisting the human invaders from the RDA faction.
