Why Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Needed To Be First-Person

ign.com:

In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, developer Massive Entertainment will transport us to the incredible world of James Cameron’s sci-fi blockbusters. But, unlike the studio’s previous Division games, Frontiers of Pandora is played in first-person. This is something that… well, a lot of you have issues with.

With such striking protagonists as the blue, cat-like Na’vi it’s understandable why many people would like to play in third-person. So why is Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora in first-person?

“Because we want you to feel immersed, we want you to feel immersed and feel like you're really on Pandora,” says Ditte Deenfeldt, game director on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. “So it was never really a big discussion for us.”

“This was something that we were completely in agreement with Lightstorm,” explains creative director Magnus Jansen, referring to James Cameron’s film studio, which is aiding in the creation of Frontiers of Pandora. Both Lightstorm and Massive consider Pandora to be the star of the game rather than the Na’vi.

“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,” says Jansen.

“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,” sums up Deenfeldt.

With this philosophy, Frontiers of Pandora follows in the footsteps of other games that have placed immersive, tactile environments at the forefront of the experience; games like Thief, Dishonored, and BioShock. But while many games that value immersion stay locked into the first-person perspective, in Avatar: Frontiers