Avatar: Frontiers of Pandoraset its stall out right away, letting everybody know that the game would be a first-person adventure. This was already announced, but given thatthe Ubisoft Forward trailer was the first time many people would have paid any attention to the game, it made sense to open with it. The transparency felt like a conscious choice to avoid player disappointment, but a better way to avoid this disappointment would be to not have that restriction at all.
I know games are difficult to make. Every shipped game is a miracle and all that. Making the game in both third- and first-person would have been extra work. But it’s clear to see that the results could have been worth it. Not only will first person only limit the potential audience from a commercial point of view, but artistically, first-person is literally limiting the scope of the game. It looks great, and in the flying sections zooms out to third person anyway, so it feels like we’re not too far away from it being possible. We’d see much more of the world and appreciate more if we weren’t constantly looking at it through the barrel of a gun.
Related:Persona 5 Tactica Shouldn’t Ignore Kasumi
We saw this withCyberpunk 2077too. Despite giving us a vibrant, active city, and lots of character customisation, we were restricted to a first-person viewpoint except while driving. We can see Ubisoft’s thinking in using Cyberpunk as a case study though - firstly, Cyberpunk 2077 was supposed to have both options, and third-person was one of the first things cut as the reality of its development took hold. On the other hand, Cyberpunk enjoyed record-breaking sales despite this restriction,and controversy around bugs aside, that’s a signal that first-person open world games can enjoy huge success so long as they work at launch.
It’s not that I have an aversion to first-person games as a rule.Titanfall 2,BioShock,Borderlands,Doom… all great games in first-person. Even Cyberpunk 2077 has its charms despite its obvious failings.Avatarbeing first-person isn’t a deal breaker, even if I’d rather see everything Pandora has to offer. But I can’t help but feel like Ubisoft is shooting itself in the foot, down a red dot laser sight.
Frontiers of Pandora looks a lot likeFar Cry. It can be lazy when a new game comes out to say ‘it’s just X other game but with Y’, but Frontiers feels like just Far Cry with Na’vi. Both areUbisoftgames, both share the same realistic artstyle, and both seem to bebuilt around rudimentary gunplay that results in clearing outpostsand hitting map markers. Being third-person wouldn’t make these criticisms go away, but it would at least keep the two games as separate entities, rather than this feeling like Far Cry: Pandora.
This rounds to a more limited school of thinking that I fear Ubisoft is guilty of though, and first-person play is symptomatic of that. Ubisoft was offered the chance to make Avatar into a video game, and instead made a video game into Avatar. It’s a subtle yet crucial distinction. To make Avatar into a video game, you look at the most interesting parts of the world and consider how to allow players to experience those parts for themselves in unique and compelling ways. To make a video game into Avatar is to look at typical video game tropes that focus groups like and that algorithms say have high player retention, and then make the player character blue.
Wanting Frontiers of Pandora to be third-person is not necessarily a complaint that I want this specific game zoomed out a couple of feet, but a plea that an Avatar game didn’t need to be a shooter at all. I’m looking forward to wandering around Pandora, seeing if any secrets await me, and wandering through the groups of Na’vi, but I wish there was more for me to do than shoot my way out.
Next:Prince Of Persia: The Lost Crown Needs To Be A Turning Point
