Getting Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora to even work wasn’t worth the pain

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When Ubisoft announced that it was making an Avatar game, I admit to it wasn’t necessarily top of my list of games to play. I wasn’t a fan of the films (don’t love them, don’t hate them) and the game looked kind of generic in the teaser trailers. But when it came closer to release, I admit I changed my mind. I had great faith in developers Massive Entertainment after all they’ve done with The Division, and if anyone can make an open-world exploration game, it’s Ubisoft.

Also, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was coming out at the perfect time. Any earlier in the year and it would have been drowned out by the deluge of more exciting games, but early December is the perfect time for a by-the-numbers Ubisoft sandbox title. As I was mentally worn out from the more complex titles 2023 has thrown at me, I was ready to love Frontiers of Pandora.

Now, after having played it, I have one thing to say:

I fucking give up.

Let me paint you a picture: I own multiple gaming PCs, including the one on which I do most of my work. Admittedly, I haven’t built a new one in a while, so they’re not the most up-to-date rigs in existence, but they’ve managed every other game this year without issue. And Frontiers of Pandora only functioned on one of them. When I tried to load it into my home PC, it was comically broken — we’re talking quest triggers that don’t, invisible enemies and my character falling into black voids every few minutes.

Even when I loaded the game up on my work PC, the only one that could support it, it’s still having issues. I was even expecting some bugs – after all, it’s a Ubisoft sandbox. I was not