Read our hands-on impressions of the Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – From the Ashes here.
After two years, Ubisoft and Massive Entertainment are significantly expanding the world of their Avatar video game with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – From the Ashes. A focused story expansion for the game takes a character from the base game from sidekick to protagonist. In it, you play as a Na’vi warrior named So’lek who seeks vengeance and survival after the RDA and the ruthless Ash clan attack his home in the Western Frontier.
The expansion includes a new story, revamped combat, and enhanced third-person gameplay options, but it also connects Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora even closer to James Cameron’s films than the base game did. One of the striking things about Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was how expansive the open world is and how many different Na’vi clans you meet, each shaped by the biomes in which they live.
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The video game did a lot of work to showcase different regions of Pandora that James Cameron’s film franchise hasn’t pulled into focus just yet. And with the From the Ashes DLC, Massive Entertainment has expanded the world even more.
Massive Entertainment brings Avatar: Fire and Ash to life in From the Ashes.
At a media preview event for the expansion, we spoke with Dylan Cole and Ben Proctor, Co-Production Designers for the Avatar franchise, and Mikhail Gruely, the Art Director on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora – From the Ashes from Massive Entertainment. Cole is in charge of Pandora and the Na’vi culture, while Proctor is in charge of the Earth and RDA technologies and depiction in Cameron’s films.
To kick off our conversation, we asked about what players can expect from this new region and how it’s come to life in relation to Avatar: Fire and Ash, the third film in the franchise. But more importantly, how the team worked hand in hand with James Cameron and his franchise production team to bring it all to life.
Dylan Cole spoke first from the Avatar franchise perspective, “This has been fun, because [Massive] will propose ideas for expansions of Pandora, and they were proposing this basalt-inspired land [for this DLC]. They had a few early concept pieces, but we had a good back-and-forth dialogue on how to best use basalt, and try to follow the rules of Earth as much as we could—while, of course, exaggerating it to a Pandora level.”
For those who don’t know, basalt is the rock that forms from cooling magma, directly connecting to the home of the Ash clan, the new antagonist in the Avatar franchise, which was destroyed by an erupting volcano. Mikhail Gruley added, speaking as the Art Director on From the Ashes, “It was exciting for us too, because this new area is very different from the Kinglor Forest, right?”
He continued, “[In this area], you are actually traversing on foot or on dire horse, which allowed us, from a pure world creation perspective, to create those spaces where you navigate traversal elements, where you need to create those puzzles. In the forest, you can call your Ikran, right? But now, [in this new area] you actually need to figure out, ‘Okay, I need to follow this path. I need to use these areas to get where I want to go.’ So it was a very fun and interesting challenge for the team.”
Traversal brings new challenges and immersion in Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — From the Ashes.
Ben Proctor added, “I was excited because the ravines gave an opportunity for some verticality to RDA bases, which is pushed in this cool crevasse and spans across it with bridges. The gameplay takes you on an interesting loop that has multiple vertical elements to it. I’ve always been pushing for that in RDA bases, because I just think that the experience of Pandora generally has so much interesting vertiginous verticality to it. It’s great to see that in the video game.”
While the base game did a lot to add emotional depth to the Na’vi clans and their relationship with the RDA, the focus was on highlighting elements of Pandora that the films had not yet explored. With the From the Ashes expansion, the game is bringing the films into focus and showing the narrative impact of those events on Pandora. And in this case, it’s all about the Ash Clan, their fire, and more importantly, their alliance with the RDA.
Even with their alliance, however, the Ash Clan are Na’vi, and depicting their relationship with the RDA does come with its design challenges. Not only that, but Frontiers of Pandora also has to incorporate what is set up in Avatar: Fire and Ash, while also maintaining a unique voice too.
Ben Proctor first explained the design of this connection from a film’s perspective, before looking to From the Ashes. “There is going to be a sort of cross-cultural embrace between Ash and RDA in the new film, which is really fun. And it was a great chance for Dylan and me, who normally work in different worlds of design, to cross over and kind of shake hands, literally, with the visuals in the movie, which was great.”
He continued, “I would say the requirements of the game pushed us beyond that into new levels of integration. [There are much] larger encampments of the Ash into RDA bases, and they have much more influence on the design of the base and the style of the whole place. We have bases that are built around burned trees and stuff [like that]. It’s much more fundamentally baked into the feeling of the game and the world, this sort of combination of RDA and Ash.”
“We had to take the lead from [the Massive developers], and just sort of say, ‘Whoa, okay, those are big ideas,’ and kind of tease them into something that we feel can fit into our canon. But [From the Ashes] also expands the potential of this [alliance]. In my mind, for future films, they came up with designs that are like these Ash-ified amp suits. Like, what happens when amp pilots decide that the ash guys are cool and they want to start decorating their suits to match that culture?”
This added element of cross-cultural investment sounds natural, but the films haven’t reached that yet. Proctor finished explaining, “We didn’t have to answer that question for the film, but we did for the game. Now that it’s answered, I kind of like that answer! Maybe we’ll integrate that into the film.”
The RDA becomes even harder to fight the more the Ash Clan accepts them.
While it’s always been clear how in line Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is with the franchise, speaking at this preview event highlighted that more than ever before. And Proctor’s comments, as a designer on the franchise, brought that into focus. Art Director Mikhail Gruely honed in on one example where the connection between the RDA and Ash is highlighted for players in combat.
Gruely added, “[The alliance] also gave us a lot of opportunities for gameplay, right? Using the Ash-ified classification on those amps, we’re showcasing the players that are the stronger [enemies], these are the endgame enemies. The more Ash Clan stuff they have on them, the stronger they are visually, and when you fight them. So we can communicate this gameplay need within the world, rather than just having, like, a UI tick box on them. You see the amp suites that have, like, full adornment of jawbones and things attached. Those are the ones that are going to be really hard to kill.”
As one of the most beautiful games we played the year the game released, Frontiers of Pandora invested a lot of effort in using the environments to tell a story as much as it used quests to do so for the game’s narrative. But with the Ash comes an entirely different aesthetic to work into the game in this expansion.
Dylan Cole explained, “In the new film, everything’s a bit darker, both tonally and visually. And we really wanted to lean into that with [From The Ashes] as well. So it’s just an evolution, and when we return to Kinglor Forest, it’s a whole new place. It’s the established environment from Frontiers of Pandora that we are seeing now transformed and decimated by the Ash. So it very much follows the film’s rhythm.”
A cornerstone of From the Ashes is matching the film’s rhythm.
Gruely explained how he and his team approached highlighting the new film’s darkness, “I call it a beauty in destruction. We build this beautiful, gorgeous world right in the main game. Now, we wanted to twist it and change it. It’s not making it less beautiful, right? It’s still beautiful in some way. For example, the plants are dead, they’re burned, but we replace them with the embers to again give this contrast to the players. So it was a lot of fun for the art teams to work on this and support the darker tone and story of the expansion.”
While Avatar is one of the highest-grossing franchises of all time and has been a part of the pop culture consciousness since 2009, every new film, comic, and, in this case, video game, offers new players a chance to come to the franchise for the first time. We asked the trio what it felt like to contribute to the mythology of James Cameron’s Avatar with this expansion and potentially be the reason someone falls in love with Pandora and the Na’vi.
Proctor spoke first, “I suddenly have a fresh look at my job,” he laughed. “It’s a privilege. I mean, it should be stressful, but it’s actually just a huge privilege to be working inside Jim’s mind in some way, you know? We’re working with his incredible imagination. I think when we bring other teams into the mix, [like Massive], we see the glimmer in their eye for that same opportunity and that same excitement.”
He continued, “We’re trying to come up with different facets of a world that has its own existence in a certain way, if that makes sense. So, you know, even if it’s on the technological side. But I think obviously the Pandora’s side is the even more evocative side of it all, that it’s all real. Pandora kind of really exists. We’re not exactly saying that it exists, but we’re trying to reflect it. Rick Carter, the production designer on Avatar 1, had a metaphor that he said, ‘It’s as if Jim went to Pandora, took a bunch of pictures, like a Nat Geo photographer, and has it all in his mind, but then he f___ing lost the film.”
“So now he’s frustrated because he sees it all, and we have to help him reconstruct the stuff that he knows is real. We have to bring it into physical fruition. I think we’re just participating in that process of slowly revealing this world that is in our minds. I don’t know how that even answers your question, but it was great philosophy,” Proctor said.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — From the Ashes is all about bringing James Cameron’s world to fruition.
And, it does answer the question. The pride that Proctor showed for his work on the franchise, but also the belief that he and the rest of those working with James Cameron have in Pandora, was palpable. But as much as the team is working to bring a world that the iconic director envisions to life, they’re also reflecting the struggles and beauty of Earth, too.
Cole added, “I think the goal with all avatar design is that it’s all a reflection of our life back here. It’s all a metaphor for Earth. And so Pandora’s just as diverse as Earth. And all of our designs, generally, are pulled from things that exist on Earth, that we amplify, change, scale up, scale down, showing the most wondrous version of it. But it is all a reflection of Earth. So it’s a big part of it, finding the beauty in nature and celebrating that here on Earth. And if people can even think of that even subconsciously, then that’s a huge win for us.”
Closing out our interview, Massive’s Mikhail Gruely added, “I think, at Massive right now, we’re so privileged to work on this franchise. We are really proud of ourselves and have a strong attention to detail right from the start. For example, working with these guys, we probably have even bigger attention to detail. It’s a huge privilege for us to help develop and expand this world in.”
As a whole, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — From the Ashes is expanding on the base game, but also on the film. And with a simultaneous release, the passion of bringing even more of Pandora to fans is clear.
