STACK #230 December 2023

GAMING FEATURE

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With the arrival of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora this month, we get to enter a whole new part of James Cameron’s amazing world. Jon Landau of Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment and Magnus Jansén, the game’s creative director at Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment, tell us more. Words Bec Summer T he game takes us to areas of Pandora that we haven’t yet seen in the movies, in particular the Western Frontier. ”As we move into the sequels, we always talk about how we’re going to new places,” explains

just create a creature, but let’s ask ’What do we want the gameplay to be?’ We can create a creature

Some of the animal noises used in 2009’s Avatar movie were

that allows the gameplay to do something interesting because we’re not limited by what’s on Earth. We’re limited by what is possible on Pandora. Then we ask, ’What do Magnus and his team want, and how do we then deliver that?’” One thing about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora that has come as a surprise to many is that it’s set in a first-person perspective. This decision had an effect on how the world was designed. ”Obviously, we need the fidelity for the world to hold up at that distance,” muses Jansén. ”But then, we also need it to be reactive, and we need the world to react when you act, because it’s an interactive medium. So, we need to take advantage of what you can do in a game, so that when you’re moving through the world, you’re brushing foliage aside. You’re coming up to something – you don’t know what it is – and you’re carefully reaching out to touch it. That’s in the game, and that sense of being there is what the first-person perspective brings. ”Pandora is a place of majestic scale,” he continues. ”There are enormous things, both in terms of flora and fauna, and the near-vertigo you get from looking at these things or looking down the drop of a floating mountain – it’s exaggerated in a very positive way in first-person as well.”

recycled from Jurassic Park .

So, we knew that while there’s a tremendous amount of existing and upcoming creations that will have been and will be in the movies, we knew we had to co-create things to a large degree.”

Landau. ”We’re meeting new clans. Along those lines, Massive came to us with this story concept. And then the questions were: If we like the story, where can that story be set? In what time frame can that story be set? How do we play this out so that it lives and meshes with the overall canon of Avatar ?” This led to them creating new world elements to suit their intended tale - as Landau elaborates. ”So, it was: Here’s the story we want to tell. Here are the basic plot elements. Where can we tell it? How can we fit it in? There was a dialogue back and forth that I think really led to this idea of what we’re calling the Western Frontier. And again, it plays within the timeframe of the movies, but doesn’t conflict with them. It’s consistent.” With so much already in place for them to work with, it was time to decide what to focus on to build the game. Over to Jansén… ”We’re really guided by this element of awe and wonder because that’s the epic. It’s the feeling when I first watched Avatar in the theatre – it brought to life feelings of wonder and astonishment I hadn’t had for many years in the theatre, because of the act of pure creation that went into the creatures, the flora, and the clans.

So, in-game we’ll be experiencing a mixture of the familiar and wholly new creations, Jansén promises. ”Of course, there are still some favourites there. There are no fences on Pandora, so some species can be found across the continents, like the sturmbeests, the ikran, the hexapedes - all these creatures that you’ve seen in the movies, but a lot of what we need to do is to create new things, because it’s about new discoveries.” ”I think in terms of the newness, it goes back to what I tell people about story and technology,” adds Landau. ”You don’t say, ’Hey, here’s a technology. Let’s create a story for it.’ You ask, ’What’s the story we want to tell? How do we get the technology there?’ So, it’s like, let’s not

• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is out Dec 7

DECEMBER 2023

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