Massive Entertainment, the primary studio behind Tom Clancy's The Division, is now working on a game set on the planet Pandora from James Cameron's Avatar – Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. If you're perplexed about why this is happening now instead of, say, seven years ago, it's because James Cameron is making four more Avatar movies. Yep! Four more.
According to a Ubisoft press release, the game will run on the same Snowdrop engine that powers The Division and will "continue to expand and deepen in the Avatar universe" alongside the upcoming films. An early prototype running on Snowdrop convinced Cameron to sign up with Massive, but those are the only solid details we know about the game's progress so far.
I'm going to assume that it isn't a direct sequel to James Cameron's Avatar: The Game from 2009, which was also an Ubisoft creation but was so forgettable I already can't remember what I was talking about.
Drawing lines between The Division and this new project is tempting, since they share both their lead studio and engine. Here's why I won't: Massive Entertainment was known for real-time strategy games like Ground Control and World in Conflict before it started on The Division, so it's hardly "locked in" to open-world, online shooting. And Ubisoft is reportedly using Snowdrop to power South Park: The Fractured But Whole as well, so the engine must be pretty malleable.
Should the new Avatar game let you form your very own blue (cat)man group to go fight off human colonists, or should it be a sprawling, solitary adventure across the floating islands of Pandora? In the absence of hard details to share, I'll turn the question to you.
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