Things are moving forward with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora and the yet-to-be-publicly-named Star Wars game.
The new Avatar movie is out, but the game is still to come. Okay, we’ve seen a short video of it. Still, not much is officially known about the project beyond that Ubisoft has given development to Massive Entertainment after the Swedish team switched to it after The Division. However, a job posting may tell us more about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
Ubisoft’s studio is looking for a monetization specialist. After a training session, the successful candidate will be based at Massive, where they will work with the “game’s economic designers” on monetization strategies for “primary and secondary stores” and with the user experience team to ensure everything is correctly integrated into the game. While it doesn’t mention the game, Eht Hctins talked about the gameplay on Reddit.
According to him, many creatures on Pandora can be tamed. The Swedish studio wants to rethink the French publisher’s over-tired open-world design: the game’s map will not be full of mission markers, but instead, you will be told which region to go to during missions, and then you will have to figure out what to do there. We should be prepared for a dynamic weather system, which will affect our strategy, as we won’t be able to attack with a flying creature in a storm. The map will also change somewhat as the game progresses.
Nearly two years ago, the resurrected LucasFilm Games announced that Massive would also be working on a new, open-world Star Wars game. A few months later, Sean Shoptaw, senior vice president of Disney Games, confirmed that the relationship between the two parties was formed after seeing their work on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora: “That first meeting we had with Massive around the Avatar game after we acquired Fox was the jumping off point for the Star Wars game. There was such alignment and creative passion around the Star Wars IP from that team that it just was a natural evolution to the relationship, and it led to the Star Wars game we announced not too long ago. […] We’re super excited about where this Star Wars open-world game is going. I was on a call this morning with the Massive team and could not be more excited about where they’re taking this game and the opportunity we have with this experience.” That was in 2021.
Massive’s creative director Julian Gerighty (The Crew, The Division 1-2) wrote on Twitter that “2023 is going to be big for us. Join the adventure.” It may suggest that their game based on the Star Wars IP is already playable in some form, but there’s no way it’s coming out this year. There’s about no chance of that, as Massive is not massive, so we’ll have to expect Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora first, even though it was already delayed once (this is a common theme for all Ubisoft games these days…).
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be released for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, PC, and Amazon Luna in the next financial year, between April 2023 and March 2024.
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