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Metacritic
I would really like to know what happened with Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. It’s a game developed by Massive, one of Ubisoft’s most talented studios responsible for two excellent Division games. It’s one of the most popular IPs on the planet, given its utter box office dominance across two films now. And Avatar Frontiers of Pandora was meant to be a sprawling open world game set in that universe, which did look quite gorgeous in previews.
Now it’s here and just…exists? In a year full of great games it’s barely a blip on the radar, currently scoring a not-great 74 on Metacritic in a year full of 85+ titles, and that’s without any console review codes going out at all, so we don’t know how it runs there.
I wrote earlier this week about my surprise that this game was about to be released at all. The last time I remembered hearing anything about it was five months ago during its debut trailer which actually looked pretty decent. And while I have since been informed some outlets and creators have done a bit of hands on stuff lately, the general impression I have gotten is that I’m not alone, and tons of people had no idea this game was about to come out, and figured it was arriving some time in 2024. But nope, it’s out. Tomorrow.
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Ubisoft
Keep in mind this game was announced in 2017. That was after two years before the release of The Division 2 when Massive was already gearing up for their next project. The title, Frontiers of Pandora, was revealed over two years ago at E3, and it was originally slated for a July 2022. Then, a year and a half delay to arrive tomorrow with…a score on par with Lords of the Fallen and a dozen other games I’ve frankly never heard of. It’s the 193rd best PC game of 2023. That’s um, not great, easily in the bottom half of all PC games released this year. Close to the bottom third.
Something bad happened here. We have not gotten any sort of Jason Schreier deep dive into the development of this game, but if this started in 2017, went through huge delays and has arrived with these kinds of review scores and almost no fanfare, someone screwed up badly. Now, Massive moves on to what appears to be a more promising project, a Star Wars game, but we have to hope that the dev cycle for that one does not look anything like what we’re seeing from Avatar here.
There are just too many games to play to pick up a mixed review Avatar game for $70 unless you’re a huge, die-hard fan. But I have no doubt this is going to be an enormous overall loss for Ubisoft with resources spent compared to sales. Seriously, what happened here?
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