There's a lot packed into the opening of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Before you even hit the character creator, you'll have watched half a dozen cutscenes that cover decades of history and establish important characters, events, and story beats. The entire opening takes place within a single room and connected hallway inside of an RDA facility where you, a Na’vi kidnapped as a child and taken from your clan, are kept captive. When you finally do get control of your character, the entire first chapter is a stealthy escape mission from that chapter.
Suffice to say, Frontiers of Pandora has a slow start. It takes a long time to get to the open world where you're free to explore Pandora and experience all of its wonder and beauty. The trailers for the game will sell you on the freedom of soaring over floating mountains on the back of an Ikran, but the first hour of the game is nothing but cutscenes and crawling through vents.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora Review - I Did Na'vi This Coming
Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora brℱings the world of Avatar to life with incredible accuracy and attention to deta💦il.
I've never been shy about defending Avatar, but I think this sequence is particularly well-constructed and has a worthwhile pay-off. It all leads up to the moment of escape when you finally see Pandora for the first time. It's a moment that would have been spectacular on its own thanks to how vibrant and inviting Avatar’s open world is, but it hits even harder after you experience everything your character went through to get there.
You and your fellow Na’vi captives have lived practically your entire lives in the RDA’s custody, and even the older kids only have vague memories of life on Pandora. The developer's decision to lock the camera in first-person during the opening cutscenes helps to reinforce the feeling of being imprisoned, and the claustrophobia of living your entire life in a cell. There's no establishing shots of the planet or video footage of life on Pandora. To your character this is all there is.
Getting control of your character and escaping is an incremental process. You start out in familiar spaces before making your way into unknown areas of the compound, sneaking past soldiers as you go. The path through the abandoned facility is tight, dark, and treacherous and you squeeze between piles of rubble and crawl through vents. It isn’t until you’re nearly free from the facility that you first start to see signs of Pandora’s plant life, slowly creeping into the compound to reclaim it. As the familiar music of Avatar starts to swell, you run down a long hallway towards a bright light. There’s a transformation as you barrel down the hallway, steel w🦄all and metal pipes are replaced by living roots and lush vegetation. When you emerge at the other end, the music crescendos, and suddenly you’re free. The world is so much bigger and more beautiful than anything you’ve ever seen, and it’s yours to explore. It’s, very intentional, not unlike being birthed.
It’s impossible not to think of Fallout 3’s opening during this sequ🃏ence. Escaping the vault is one of gaming’s most iconic moments, and Massive was clearly inspired by it when making Avatar. Like Fallout 3, the moment you emerge from the bunker and take your first step into the world works because of what you had to go through to get there, and because of the contrast between those two states of being. The RDA’s presence on Pandora and its opposition with the natural world are a big theme in Avatar, and this opening does an exceptional job of establishing that theme without feeling like a rehash of the movies, or a rip-off of Fallout.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a paint-by-numbers Ubisoft game in a lot of ways, but it's an artistic risk to start the game in such an oppressive way that doesn't align with what players are expecting. It’s ultimately to the game’s benefit because of the connection it helps you create with your character. By keeping you confined for much longer than most players will expect, Frontiers of Pandora makes the act of discovering its open world an experience worth celebrating
