As much as I like the Avatar movies (especially The Way of Water), it's a little strange that I've never cared to learn much about the world of Pandora. Though James Cameron’s instincts for thrills and spectacle are on full display in his sci-fi epics, they never inspired me to head for a lore bible. Unlike other franchise blockbusters, which feel designed to funnel viewers to wikis and “Who Is Harry Styles’ Playing In Eternals?” explainers, the Avatar movies are more immediately approachable. You might not know everything about the world, but you’re never confused about the emotional stakes of the story or the goals of the characters.
That makes it easy to go in, enjoy three hours of incredible images, and walk out without digging much deeper, and that’s largely what I’ve done with the series. But I’m planning to play a ton of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, and I’m almost certain it will be the thing that pushes me to learn a bunch of proper Na'vi nouns. I’m here for it.
Frontiers of Pandora casts the player as one of the lanky blue people, a warrior who has emerged from cryosleep after 15 years. Apparently,a group of children was stolen from their tribe by the human military and raised to be soldiers against their own people. After Earth's forces lost against the Omatikaya Clan in the first film’s climactic battle, the Na’vi’s instructor guided the children, you included, into hiding. Now, you’ve awoken and are setting out into Pandora to explore its jungles and banish the human scourge.
The gameplay trailer was filled with factions and creatures I recognize from the movies but whose names I hadn’t known until then. The RDA are the bad guys, I recalled. The flying creature you bond with is called an Ikran, I learned. The four-legged dinosaurs from the movies are apparently called Direhorses. The trailer also 💎namechecks multiple locations and clans of Na’vi that may have been mentioned in the movies or comics, but the game will be the first thing that makes me actually pay attention to them.
Part of the reason I’ve never dug deep on Avatar is that, until The Way of Water, it wasn’t really a franchise in the way we think about franchises today; it was one gigantic movie with some merchandise and transmedia expansions. If the first Avatar didn't get your nerd senses tingling, there wasn't much else out there that would reach you. If you don’t click with The Mandalorian, you can go rewatch the original Star Wars trilogy, read some prequel comics, or play Jedi: Survivor. But Avatar was mostly just Avatar for 13 years. There was the Cirque Du Soleil show Toruk: The First Flight, and much more recently the tie-in park at Disney World’s Animal Kingdom, but neither were things I had access to in the normal rhythms of my life. Star Wars has consistently come to me — in movie theaters, on the PlayStation Store, on a comics rack at the grocery store — but most of Avatar’s transmedia expansions required you to go to them.
That changes with Frontiers of Pandora. It's an expensive game that will get a big push from Ubisoft and, for a few weeks, it will be inescapable. You'll encounter it if you peruse the gaming section at Target, load up Steam, watch a YouTube video, or listen to a podcast. The game will make the lore equally unavoidable. If I sink 50 hours into this game, I'm going to come out knowing all of Avatar's big terms, just by virtue of having to accomplish objectives. If the game tells me to tame a Direhorse, I will finish that mission having a pretty good idea what a Direhorse is. If it tells me to go to the Hallelujah Mountains, same deal. I'm going to become an Avatar expert, whether I like it or not.