Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a surprisingly thoughtful take on open-world games

Ahead of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s launch in December 2023, I had the chance to spend a few hours with it and get a glimpse of Massive’s vision. I picked stalks, found beehives, contributed to a community fund, and learned how to find my way in the gorgeous, otherworldly forests of Pandora before becoming an airborne terror and raiding an RDA base on a flying lizard. Despite a few stale design elements, Frontiers of Pandora is shaping up to be a more thoughtful take on the usual open-world – and Ubisoft – formula.

My Avatar preview dropped me in the middle of a quest to find honey for a Na’vi ritual, so off I went into the forest, completely devoid of context and quest markers. That last bit s one of the more interesting and promising ideas in Frontiers. You can treat Avatar like any other modern game and have waypoints and quest markers cluttering the screen, or you can shut them off and pay attention to the world around you. Your hunting guide explains where plants thrive and animals roam, and the world – mercifully – only has a handful of places in each main area that match the habitat description.

The bugs that produced the honey I needed build their hives on mangroves, so off I went to the swampy area nearby to hunt them down. Eventually, my kind and patient demoist pointed out that I walked right past where the mangroves grew at a specific point on the riverbank. I can see this freedom potentially being a minor frustration in the full game. Frontiers of Pandora is big, so much so that I actually let out an audible “whoa” when I panned out in the map view. It’s easy to literally miss the tree for the forest in some cases, though you can use your Na’vi senses to get a small pointer in the right direction.

Na’vi sense is essentially the same kind of superhuman power you activate as Geralt in The Witcher 3 or Agent 47 in Hitman, a gamey ability that lets you see things you normally can’t. It should feel trite at this point, like just another standard open-world feature, but Massive roots it and other overly familiar features in a layer of thoughtful design that links your actions more closely with the world. 

When you activate your Na’vi sense, for example, you’re tuning into the world around you, while gaining new skill points comes from helping Pandora’s different tribes and learning their customs. When you harvest items, you get higher quality if you know how to treat the resource and harvest it in the correct way. Sure, these are just some extra contextual detail, but it made me feel more connected to Pandora and the story Massive wants to tell.

The demo’s second half included a few side quests, a big combat sequence, and some brilliant platforming segments where you bond with your big flying lizard that’s the Avatar version of Epona. I started climbing the roost and made it pretty high up before my demoist had to point out that I missed the story quest location and the actual intended path.

Avatar’s side quests seem like a varied lot. One was pretty standard and had me tracking down items, one sent me into the forest to investigate the source of a noise causing nearby wildlife distress, while another tasked me with using logic and a few human hacking tools to solve a mystery, and 

Where things get a bit less impressive is off the beaten track. Pandora is a beautiful world that I could happily spend a long time just exploring, but underneath the visual splendor, there’s not a whole lot of incentive to explore outside of quests. A handful of randomly generated encounters spawn in certain areas. You might find injured animals you can help or RDA soldiers to fight or even random Na’vi out hunting and gathering. The simple actions like helping the hurt were fine, but when they started repeating surprisingly often, the sameness of them – Na’vi repeating the exact same lines, for example – broke the spell a little.

I wrapped things up with a crash course in Frontiers of Pandora’s combat and an assault on an RDA base. These guns-blazing sequences require more strategy than you might think at first glance. My demoist recommended a stealthy approach to avoid alerting the entire base, so naturally I did the exact opposite, just to see what would happen. 

It turns out two dozen heavily armed soldiers have a pretty big advantage over a single fighter with no armor. So I tried a different approach. I used my trusty flying steed in a series of hit-and-run style assaults, dropping on targets before soaring away to safety again, and just about completed the mission before I accidentally ran into a group of soldiers.

I’m not sure if that method was supposed to work. My demoist said no one had actually tried it before. Either way, the freedom to experiment was refreshing, especially for a series of gunfights that could so easily get boring quickly.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora launches on Dec. 7, 2023, for PC, Xbox Series X|S, and PS5.

Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF