Summary

• One choice in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora may seem strange, but it enhances immersion and lets players experience the beautiful environment through the protagonist's eyes.
• This design decision allows for a clearer and more rewarding experience of the game's reactive environment.
• Drawing inspiration from the Far Cry series, this decision was perhaps a practical choice that avoided significant design overhauls.

One key element of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora seems like a somewhat strange way to approach the game, but looking at it from the right angle makes it obvious why developer Massive Entertainment took the route that it did. Published by Ubisoft, Frontiers of Pandora bears many hallmarks of the company's games, with similarities to Far Cry being especially obvious. Features like infiltrating bases and upgrading gear play out in a way that's particularly familiar, and the narrative even sets up ample reason for the Na'vi protagonist to be equipped with guns and technology in standard Far Fry fashion.

On the other hand, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora does rethink things in some regards, mostly when it comes to exploring the wilds of Pandora and interacting with the Na'vi who call it their home. Environments are full of alien life that reacts to the protagonist's presence in unique ways, and riding ikran grants access to open-world flight in Frontiers of Pandora in a more easily accessible way than ever before. The agility of the Na'vi is also mechanically displayed through movement that lends itself to platforming, with a floaty double jump making it easy to gain a vertical advantage in combat and traversal.

First-Person Is Weird For Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora

Almost everything in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora occurs from a first-person perspective, with the main exceptions being riding either the protagonist's bonded ikran or hopping on the back of a direhorse. Although the camera switches to third-person for these scenarios, there's no option to enable a third-person camera in general Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora gameplay. This makes sense when missions are focused on gunning down enemies, but it's an unusual fit for a game with platforming elements, which are more often associated with a third-person perspective.

Ubisoft also has a strong legacy with third-person titles, and it's consequently hard to imagine that a discussion of taking that route never came into play during development. With the recent exception of Assassin's Creed Nexus VR, the Assassin's Creed series has always played out in third-person, as have The Division games from Massive Entertainment. Ubisoft's prior foray into Pandora, James Cameron's Avatar: The Game, opted for this model, including a mix of melee combat and vehicle usage alongside gunplay.

First-Person Helps Frontiers of Pandora Immersion

The argument that helps explain the first-person choice for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is the game's focus on immersing the player into a beautiful environment, which the first-person perspective directly serves. In line with the original Avatar film's attempt to reveal the world of Pandora from the perspective of Jake Sully, Frontiers of Pandora can take an even more direct approach to showing things through the protagonist's eyes. The absence of a character model in most situations makes inputs feel more like direct interaction and less like control of a character on-screen, augmenting the experience of the films in a way that only a video game can.

The most basic advantage of this approach is keeping the screen generally clear to view the surroundings in their full glory, but the first-person view also has some more specific upsides. Climbing around human-scale bases in a larger Na'vi body gains an interesting sense of scale from a first-person perspective with crates, ladders, doors, and more looking unusually small and even bulky RDA soldiers having a pint-sized appearance. Environmental reactivity can also feel more directly rewarding when there's no character model involved, heightening the immediacy of a plant shocking, poisoning, or tossing the protagonist.

Approaching unknown flora and fauna slowly tends to be safer in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, making it easier to see if it's about to attack.

A first-person view isn't the only way to emphasize the environment. Games like The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and Nier: Automata take a fairly distanced third-person view that prevents character models from taking up too much space on the screen, making the fields or ruins that stretch around the protagonists feel impactful. The density of Pandora's environments might not be the best fit for this approach, however, and rendering a Na'vi on that scale could make human characters who show up throughout the game feel downright tiny.

Frontiers Of Pandora Has Major Far Cry Influence

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora's first-person view can be reasonably justified for game design reasons, but there's also a big practical consideration in the equation. Using Far Cry as a basis for Avatar's approach follows a first-person tradition, and transitioning to third-person would require more fundamental elements of design to be rethought or reworked entirely. The Far Cry series has only ever been in first-person, with the FPS core of the original game persisting throughout a series that has increased its emphasis on other aspects of gameplay over time.

There's definitely an argument to be made that stepping away from Far Cry entirely would have been a good choice for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, but the decision most likely comes down to practical reasons during development. With the complexity of building an authentically detailed take on Pandora, taking a fresher approach to game design might have wreaked havoc on the budget or schedule. That doesn't make criticism of some generic elements any less valid, but it does help explain why first-person could have been a choice that was locked in early on in development out of concerns about developing a different overall approach.

At the end of the day, either approach to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora offers certain advantages while making certain compromises. Sticking to first-person could seem like the weirder choice at first glance, but examining things in more detail clarifies why it could easily end up being the obvious front-runner during development. While movement and melee combat might see some improvement with a third-person Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the immersion and immediacy provided by the first-person view is a major merit that's hard to ignore.