Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is First-Person for the Sake of Immersion
Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is out next month, and despite book-ending the year, it’s still a major title based on the billion-dollar movie franchise by James Cameron. While there is some worry about the enemy AI or ease of exploration given the abundance of details, perhaps one of the biggest questions is why it’s in first-person.
Wouldn’t third-person make sense so players can see their character, a Na’vi, more often? Developer Massive Entertainment is also renowned for its work on Tom Clancy’s The Division, a third-person looter shooter. However, as it turns out, immersion is the main motivation.
As game director Ditte Deenfeldt told IGN, “We want you to feel immersed and like you’re really on Pandora. So it was never really a big discussion for us.” Creative director Magnus Jansen added, “This was something that we were completely in agreement with Lightstorm,” the latter being Cameron’s film studio, which is also working on the title. “To be as close to Pandora as possible, to be as immersed into it as you can possibly be, which is (achieved through) the first-person perspective… to me, it was a no-brainer for us to go there.”
Deenfeldt said, “We want you to get up close to nature, which is kind of the main character to some degree in the game, and the very best way of doing that is being in first-person. We want you to feel immersed and feel like you’re really on Pandora.”
Of course, while flying, the game defaults to a third-person perspective. That’s because the development team wants to emphasize the world of Pandora. Associate game director Drew Rechner explains, “We decided to use the third-person camera for the Ikran and the Direhorse because of the framing it provides on the world.
“We really
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