Allthough it still uses many ideas of it’s maker’s trademark design palette, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora thankfully takes the liberty to trade in just enough of the Far Cry‘esque borderline chaos simulation for environmental storytelling and discovery-centered quest design, to offer one of this year’s most motivating exploration experiences.
Sprawling with life, fantastic fauna and incredible vistas, it does not matter that this exhilarating world of wonders comes borrowed from Hollywood. What does however, is that Ubisoft found the perfect gameplay mix to suit tone and narrative of the base material.
It is liberating to have a game trust in the fascination of its world to hold enough magic to fuel the player’s curiosity and exploration drive.
This game’s self-confidence in cutting back on the hand-holding and icon-clutter we have come to expect from an open world game of the 2020s, comes surprising and refreshing alike. It feels remarkably liberating to have a game trust in the fascination of its world to hold enough magic to fuel the player’s curiosity and exploration drive. Where other games choose to over-share and extrovertly spill every last cent of information on what to do and where to go, conveniently but over-eagerly marking points of interest on the player’s map, until the clutter of pre-maturely lifted secrets eventually becomes a scattered mess of interchangeable trifles screaming for the player’s attention, Frontiers of Pandora confidently chooses the path of verbal modesty.
Telling the player just enough to allow him to work out where he needs to go, by paying attention to his surroundings. Weaving in visual and audible cues the world holds at its ready, to be discovered by whomever is attentive enough to notice. Failure, by the way, in this case, is a feature. With every misstep and wrong turn we make in the absence of a dotted line efficiently pointing us to the end of the rainbow, we learn more about the ins and outs of the location’s flora and fauna, constantly refining our mental map of this strange place and its quirks, litereally step by step.
The world holds visual and audible clues at its ready, to be discovered by whomever is attentive enough to notice.
Not only does this hands-off approach evoke a valuable sense of tangibility to the game’s alien world, calling for a more intrinsic, allmost intimate interaction with it. It also proves a fitting exposition for the game’s main character, who is as new to the excitements and dangers of the wild forest as are we. Making for a genuinely immersive adventure that, with its delightful expressive reservedness, makes a reverberating case for the joy of making the journey the reward and that only in silence you can hear the birds sing.
