How Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora's Ikran Flight Quest Was Made - Concept to Controller

ign.com:

Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora offers us all the chance to visit the lush, forested homeworld of the Na’vi. And, at the very top of a floating mountain, you’ll be able to live out your own version of an iconic Avatar scene: taming and flying a Banshee (or ‘Ikran’ in the native Na’vi language.)

But just as important as the flight is the journey to the mountain’s summit; a climb full of incredible views, plants with strange abilities, and puzzles to solve. That climb is the centrepiece of Take Flight, one of Frontiers of Pandora’s milestone quests. It’s the work of dozens of developers, and we’ve spoken to several of them to find out how they made it.

Our latest episode of Concept to Controller puts the spotlight on six roles from across Ubisoft’s Sweden-based Massive Entertainment; creative direction, game direction, narrative, sound, technical art, and cinematics. Across the duration of the episode you can see how the Take Flight mission was planned, conceptualised, built, and polished. It’s a snapshot of the entire development process, featuring behind-the-scenes footage and in-depth interviews with Massive staff. You can watch it in the video panel at the top of this article.

“We're looking to create a level that makes the player feel powerful, something that is joyful and happy, something where you feel rewarded from just moving through this space,” says game director Ditte Deenfeldt of Massive’s aims for the Take Flight quest.

“The way we built the level design I think is really clever,” says Magnus Jansen, Frontiers of Pandora’s creative director. “Yes, you are climbing up a mountain, but you're doing so inside an internal structure of ravines, so you get quite high without noticing it. And then suddenly