Massive Entertainment is in the midst of developing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and it may be suffering the same fate as the perennially delayed Avatar 2. James Cameron’s 2009 science fiction epic is slated to eventually receive four sequels, but has gone more than a decade without a proper follow-up, since Avatar 2‘s release keeps getting pushed back. Frontiers of Pandora piqued interest when its first trailer was shown at E3 2021, but without a concrete release date, a recent change of management and past development issues may have put it in the same sort of purgatory as its film counterpart.
Avatar 2 isn’t so much having production troubles, but is supposedly too ambitious to have come any sooner than its current December 16, 2022 release date. The game from Massive Entertainment, published by Ubisoft has similar ambitions. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a new story in Cameron’s fictional setting, and will use new features of Ubisoft’s Snowdrop Engine, though neither of these seem to be responsible for any potential delay. Neither Ubisoft nor Massive have mentioned a change in release plans for Frontiers of Pandora, but a key figure in the development team is on the cusp of stepping away from the project permanently.
Right around the time Frontiers of Pandora was announced, Massive’s managing director David Polfeldt embarked on a six-month sabbatical, and has just recently made this move more concrete by submitting his resignation sometime at the beginning of 2022, according to Nathan Brown, author of Hit Points and former editor at Edge. Polfeldt was apparently already set to move on to other projects after his sabbatical, so the Avatar game was presumably left in the hands of others, but a key figure leaving can still have unforeseen ramifications. Polfeldt also revealed Frontiers of Pandora wasn’t always a Ubisoft game in his autobiography, The Dream Architects, and that it only landed at Massive after Fox executives had a disastrous meeting with another studio.
The initial studio being tapped for an Avatar game is left unnamed by Polfeldt, but that meeting immediately fell through after the studio head allegedly offered cocaine to the visitors from Fox. A quick rundown of those events can be found at The Gamer, which also notes that Frontiers of Pandora was in need of a developer for up to four years before gaining traction at Massive. Additionally, GameSpot reported in 2020 that Ubisoft’s then-untitled Avatar game had been delayed (to its current release window) in response to Avatar 2‘s delay into 2022. James Cameron’s sequel is expected to be another technological marvel with groundbreaking underwater motion capture footage, and Massive is looking to similarly impress with every version of Frontiers being ray traced.
The initial difficulty in finding a developer and the departure of Massive’s managing director don’t necessarily guarantee a delay, but they also don’t inspire confidence in a game that is seemingly tied to the release of a movie that has been in production for over a decade. The first Avatar film also took years to create, so it’s not unexpected to see the sequel take its time in realizing Cameron’s vision. Linking the two projects could have theoretically given Frontiers of Pandora more than enough time in development, but it’s a strange situation. Releasing Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora alongside Avatar 2 is smart from a promotional standpoint, but the game has now followed the film into the sort of nebulous hiatus that has come to define the franchise.
Source: The Gamer, GameSpot, Hit Points
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Author: Kyle Gratton
