How a Canon Avatar Game Was Created
The era of the bad movie tie-in is over. Today, we’re living in an age where games based on licensed IP are among the cream of the crop: the Batman Arkham franchise, The Witcher games, and Insomniac’s Spider-Man series are all critically acclaimed top sellers. Hoping to run alongside them is Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora.
But Ubisoft faced a challenge that Rocksteady and Insomniac never did: Frontiers of Pandora isn’t just a licensed game, it’s canon to the Avatar universe. That means everything in it is a recognised part of the official Avatar story, approved by the studio who made the original movies. Anything Ubisoft created had to fit perfectly within this existing, intricate world. Achieving this required extensive research and constant communication with the team of James Cameron, Avatar’s creator and director.
It has been the duty of Massive Entertainment, one of Ubisoft’s European development studios, to take on that challenge. Based in Malmö, Sweden, it’s best known for creating The Division. But since 2017, Massive has been hard at work making an open-world adventure in which you play as a Na’vi – one of the blue, cat-like people from the Avatar films. While you are a native of the Na'vi homeworld, Pandora, you’ve been held captive by the invading humans of the RDA for most of your life, and so the story explores reconnecting with your culture and people.
These events take place in parallel to Avatar: The Way of Water, but unfold on an entirely different continent called the Western Frontier. Crafted in collaboration with Lightstorm Entertainment – James Cameron’s own movie studio – it is a brand new, wholly original corner of Pandora. This new region is not just the stage for a new story, but also the
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