Massive Entertainment (who are also developing a Star Wars title) intentionally skips the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One with „Avatar 2” (we strongly suspect that the game will arrive close to the film’s debut…).

Magnus Jansen (Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora creative director) and Nikolay Stefanov (technical director of programming) told IGN that they have good reasons why they abandoned the 2013 hardware in favour of 2020 machinery. The players will be flying over extensively detailed vistas at „enormous high speeds,” which will need fast storage speed, ruling out the old HDDs. (In-console streaming is a reason why Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater looked „foggy” on PlayStation.)

„It’s not just the old ‘I’m taking this slow walk as I enter into the place because we have to stream everything in’. It’s little subtle things that people don’t think about, which is how close together are all the places in the world. If you look at, with the old hard drives, they had to be spaced out very far [apart], because you had to stream out the old and stream in the new, so it just created a formulaic world,” Jansen said.

He also mentioned that the next-gen hardware brings next-gen AI, too: „The wildlife, the AI, the way that they track you, the way that they attack you, the advances in technology and the way that we are taking advantage of the power with our in-house Snowdrop engine is allowing us [to] do amazing things that would not be possible [otherwise],” Jansen continued.

Ubisoft also believes that the immersion will grow a lot on the PlayStation 5 and the Xbox Series: „We have a completely new lighting system that is based on ray tracing, and I think it is a dramatic step up in quality that makes you feel like it’s a real place. One tiny example is that it can handle the translucency of the leaves […] so it can figure out how much of the light is reflected through the leaves, how tinted it is with the colours and everything else. You get lovely reflections and sights for the water, even down to the volumetric clouds up in the sky – they receive the correct lighting as well,” Stefanov explained.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will launch in 2022 on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC (Uplay, Epic Games Store), Amazon Luna, and Google Stadia.

Source: PSL