Join Senior Narrative Designer Chella Ramanan, Creative Director Magnus Jansen, Associate Game Director Drew Rechner, and Narrative Coordinator Jennifer Bartram as they give a behind-the-scenes look at Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and discuss working with the team at Lightstorm Entertainment to create the story for the upcoming first-person action-adventure game set in James Cameron's Avatar universe.
In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you play as a Na'vi who awakens on Pandora years after being abducted as a child and raised by the human militaristic corporation known as the RDA. Set after the events of the first Avatar film, you’ll embark on a journey across the Western Frontier, a never-before-seen continent of Pandora, as you join other Na’vi clans to protect Pandora from the formidable forces of the RDA.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Amazon Luna on December 7, 2023.
In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you play as a Na'vi who awakens on Pandora years after being abducted as a child and raised by the human militaristic corporation known as the RDA. Set after the events of the first Avatar film, you’ll embark on a journey across the Western Frontier, a never-before-seen continent of Pandora, as you join other Na’vi clans to protect Pandora from the formidable forces of the RDA.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, and Amazon Luna on December 7, 2023.
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GamingTranscript
00:00 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:03 Go on for your eggplant.
00:10 [MUSIC PLAYING]
00:13 [SCREAMING]
00:19 The story of "Avatar--
00:21 Frontiers of Pandora" is about Saren Tu.
00:25 These children were taken from their clan
00:28 at a really young age, and they've been brought up
00:31 in a human RDA facility.
00:33 The game starts with you actually in school.
00:36 You're a Na'vi, but you're being raised
00:38 by the RDA, the militaristic corporation,
00:42 the bad guys of the story.
00:43 So they're kind of divorced from their culture and their people
00:49 and brought up to use human weapons
00:51 and to understand humanity.
00:54 When the game starts and you actually
00:56 step onto Pandora for the first time, you're Na'vi.
01:01 You're of this world, of Pandora,
01:04 but you've never been there.
01:05 And you have to learn everything and unravel
01:08 the mysteries of your past, what happened in school, who
01:11 put you there, and deal with the trauma
01:16 that that upbringing actually brought.
01:20 The theme of being a child of two worlds
01:22 is one that resonates with me.
01:24 I'm dual heritage.
01:26 So there's always that feeling of being neither one thing
01:30 or the other or being in an in-between place
01:33 or being too much of one and not enough of another.
01:37 And the player character goes through those moments of being,
01:41 but I'm not Na'vi.
01:43 Can I do this?
01:44 And trying to find their place in the world.
01:47 Eowyn, we enter your welcoming arms
01:50 at one with all things connected through you.
01:55 [GASPS]
01:56 Guide this traveler.
01:57 Bring them to the heart of the nest.
01:59 It's about their journey to becoming Na'vi
02:02 and finding out what that means for them.
02:05 So we do have three other clans that they meet.
02:09 There are the Aranahe, who live in a sort of rainforest
02:14 climate.
02:15 They weave silk, and they're very elegant,
02:18 and sort of the poet-type artist clan.
02:24 Then there are the Zeswa.
02:26 They live in symbiosis with these huge, placid creatures
02:32 called Zakru.
02:34 And their tents lean up against the side
02:36 of these creatures for warmth and protection
02:39 from the winds that travail the grasslands they live on.
02:43 And they are bright and bold, but they like to party.
02:48 The third clan are the Kamatire, and they
02:52 live in the clouded forest.
02:54 So they're a reclusive, mysterious clan.
02:59 They are surrounded by moss and fog and sort of pine trees.
03:05 And the character of the clan kind of reflects that.
03:08 So they're more wary of strangers,
03:11 both as a culture and for story reasons.
03:14 So there's a mystery surrounding the Kamatire.
03:17 Every single aspect in the Avatar universe fits together.
03:22 This is something that you see in the Avatar films.
03:24 There are lore parameters that we must abide by.
03:27 And this applies to both world building and narrative.
03:32 When we started the project, Lightstorm sent over
03:34 a vast amount of information, everything
03:36 from the Pandorapedia to Navi cultural information.
03:39 And I was surprised that it included
03:41 taxonomy and biological mechanisms
03:45 and all sorts of information.
03:46 They've done research on everything.
03:48 There's an incredible amount of detail in the game,
03:51 everything from the choice of the Navi clothing
03:54 that they wear to the places that they live
03:57 to the tint of their eyes to the animals
04:00 and how they fit within the environment
04:01 and how they've evolved to their surroundings.
04:04 In the world of Avatar, everything
04:06 must be backed by science.
04:07 There can't be any fantasy technology or seemingly
04:10 magical creatures or plants.
04:12 So our content creation team uses
04:14 earth technology and sciences as a foundation
04:17 when creating new content.
04:19 Creating new wildlife was an enormous endeavor.
04:22 And it was a really big collaboration
04:24 with the Lightstorm team that made this happen.
04:26 The same people who have worked on the films
04:29 to create the wildlife have helped
04:31 us create the wildlife here.
04:33 The Soundblast Colossus, as we showed in our trailer,
04:37 is this enormous, almost stegosaurus-looking style
04:42 creature.
04:43 And it has these air vents.
04:46 And it can actually use the wind of the upper plains--
04:49 it's adapted to use that--
04:51 to actually suck it in and then blow it out.
04:54 And it actually creates an attack
04:56 because it's such a force and such a sonic resonance
05:00 that it actually disorients nearby things
05:02 and makes them go away if it feels threatened.
05:06 You have the clouded forest, which is foggy, damp,
05:09 a little bit cooler.
05:09 And you'll notice that all of the animals
05:12 and all of the plant life have adapted to shorter sight lines,
05:15 muffled sounds, a damper environment.
05:19 And then the clans reflect that, too.
05:21 And so all of these details really
05:23 meld together into something that, I think,
05:26 if you look really closely, you can really
05:29 tell how much care and how much thought
05:31 has gone behind everything.
05:33 So the Avatar universe is broad and beautiful.
05:38 And it offers us this mirror to our own world.
05:43 On our planet, we're dealing with climate change
05:46 and very extreme weather conditions.
05:49 So obviously, we've incorporated that into the story
05:52 because we're right there at the events of the movies.
05:55 But we're also incorporating it into gameplay.
05:58 You attack bases and liberate the land
06:01 right, but when you do that, pollution also drops.
06:04 And that changes everything, your power, everything
06:07 you can harvest, the crafting loops,
06:10 and there's other gameplay and facilities
06:13 that you get access to.
06:14 Pandora is more than just what they see in the movie.
06:16 It is a huge world.
06:18 There's loads of opportunities to tell
06:21 small stories and big stories and also reflect on ourselves,
06:27 our place within the natural world.
06:29 How we interact with it.
06:31 The Avatar universe has a lot of real world correlations,
06:34 which also serve as a warning on our own behavior on Earth.
06:37 There are many clans, and the clans are different.
06:40 They have different cultures.
06:41 They have different styles.
06:43 They have different look.
06:44 And just like here on Earth, they
06:45 have small physical differences, but inside, they're all Na'vi.
06:49 Inside, they're all Na'vi.
06:52 [MUSIC PLAYING]
06:55 [AUDIO OUT]
06:59 [AUDIO OUT]
07:02 [AUDIO OUT]
07:06 [AUDIO OUT]
07:09 [BLANK_AUDIO]