Rather than showing off any new trailers for the highly-anticipated Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the upcoming mobile-exclusive MMO, Avatar: Reckoning was given a new look-in. Over the course of about a minute, actually being one of the longer trailers from the event, a good chunk of Avatar: Reckoning’s gameplay was shown off, from being able to customize the player’s Avatar and loadouts, to gameplay footage of boss fights and PvP matches. While the gameplay looks relatively impressive, especially for a mobile title, the limited presence of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is surprising.
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Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was first announced all the way back in March 2017, over five years ago. The very first trailer released for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora came out in June 2021, during Ubisoft’s E3 conference. The nearly three-minute trailer showcased some beautiful and authentic Avatar locales, ranging from luminescent forests to floating cliffs and stark skies. The trailer was very impressive, with Ubisoft’s new Snowdrop Engine clearly being the perfect fit for Avatar’s expansive, nature-focused setting.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora made a brief appearance at the Disney and Marvel showcase, but since this was for well under a minute, its reveal is all fans really have to go off of. Just recently, towards the end of July, Frontiers of Pandora was given a fairly sizable delay, pushing it from its original 2022 release date, to somewhere in 2023, or even beyond. While it’s pretty normal for a game to go silent after a delay, especially when it’s at least a year out, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s brief presence at the Disney and Marvel Games Showcase was a tad strange, particularly when it appeared prominently in the showcase’s intro reel.
By releasing just a minute-long trailer of Avatar: Reckoning’s gameplay, fans have already seen more of that game than they have of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. For reference, Avatar: Reckoning was first announced in January of this year, and in just seven months, it’s already received two trailers, the first of which dropped in June 2022. Despite also receiving its own delay, which also pushed the game from 2022 to 2023, Avatar: Reckoning has managed to keep the fans updated, providing a short but significant look at some of the game’s most important mechanics.
While this all might be disappointing for some fans, it shouldn’t be anything to worry about too much. Avatar: Reckoning may have had more trailers than Frontiers of Pandora, but it’s also a much more contained game, with a developer that has a history of creating mobile-exclusive MMOs, most of which have been built on the same Unreal Engine 4. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, on the other hand, is being developed by Massive Entertainment, who have created open-world games before, including the two Division games, but they haven’t quite been on the same scale as Frontiers of Pandora. Additionally, Massive is also having to adapt to Ubisoft’s brand new Snowdrop Engine, which is always a challenge for developers. All in all, hope isn’t lost for Frontiers yet.
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