French publisher Ubisoft was responsible for one of E3 2021’s biggest surprises, when it announced Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, seemingly out of nowhere. Developed by Massive Entertainment, the title is built using the Snowdrop engine, previously used for The Division.
As Technical Art Director Sebastian Lindoff notes, the third-person shooter’s post-outbreak urban environments aren’t quite the same as Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s open world, which is why the Snowdrop Engine has received “major upgrades and big improvements.”
“With Snowdrop, using the microdata system, we can propagate thousands of assets in one frame,” Senior Technical Artist Kunal Luthra explains. “This allows us to have a lot more highly-detailed environments for Pandora.”
The developer has also “created many interactive shaders that can be affected by the player, from real-time wind simulations and interactions to intelligent plants reacting to your presence.”
Since players will not only explore Pandora’s dense jungles but also take to the skies, the Snowdrop engine has received a new volumetric cloud system. Ray tracing will also be supported and should make Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s bioluminescent world shine.
“The different activities that NPCs can perform in the world and the different animations they have can make the world feel really alive. So, for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, we wanted to take this one step further and created a system where our NPCs understand the state of the world – for example, weather, player progression, or time of day,” Lead Narrative Realization Designer Alice Rendell added.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a first-person action-adventure game in which players take one the role of a Na’vi fighting against RDA forces across the Western Frontier, a wholly new portion of the world. Its release is currently slated for 2022, when it launches on PC, Xbox Series X/S, and PS5.
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