Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora

[one-armed dwarf]

I'm shallow and wanted a pretty game for my PC, so I got this. Mainly off the back of Alex at digital foundry comparing it to Crysis a lot

 

It's a fairly boilerplate Far Cry template, for the most part. Big map, fogged up until you go to different areas. Towers must be captured. It's got some things in it though which I think are neat. One thing is I think the criticism about Ubisoft checklist games is reaching some decision makers at the company, as it foregoes map icons and tries to hide the waypoint janitor busywork within a more organic framework. That framework still being a Far Cry template, you craft and gather and stealth archer your way around. But it feels more cleverly integrated and less of a checklist (tho undoubtedly this is something that'll be less the case after time with the game, when the novelty wears off)

 

You play a Navi and your background is a bit fish out of water. I've not seen the 2nd film, and I just don't care enough, but it's straightforward enough and seems to take place alongside the 2nd one I think. The whole ethos of its gameplay seems to be like you're a hunter gatherer on Pandora. There's dynamic time of day and weather, though oddly it seems for the opening this is entirely scripted and not dynamic? I'm not sure why that is. But if effects gathering mechanics cause somethings you want to gather at night, or while it's raining, or vice versa. Then you get better ingredients for cooking. There's also a whole mechanic in the game around 'clean kills' and 'mercy kills' for enemies, which requires you to study their weak spots and basically kill them quick and with few shots. It's very difficult, moreso than it sounds, I haven't done it properly once

 

 

The game is the most visually spectacular game I've seen in a year full of visual spectaculars. It's Crysis but for the present day. The foliage density is peerless, they even have a 'hidden' graphics setting called 'Unobtainium' which sets everything way higher. I don't find I need that though, one thing I find is after about an hour playing this my eyes are really sore and I might have a headache. Said this before about Horizon, but there's so much detail here it's hard to take it all in and I think I'm not blinking as often as I should. Combined with the HDR highlights it's like my corneas are getting mildly seared. So it's very visually fatiguing.

 

On the one hand, that level of visual noise is annoying. It's difficult to see things when you're running through the forest. On the other, it's weirdly immersive in that the enemies with their camouflage actually camouflage, and you need to use your navi vision to spot them (the visual effect for this sucks though, it looks like a migraine). The fauna behave a lot like the wildlife in RDRII, and do a lot to make the game world feel alive and will scuttle under the foliage and come out to surprise you, and fuck you up. The flora is also interactive, you can shoot certain plants and they will let off a big fart or smoke and I assume that has gameplay implications if you want to fuck with the soldiers. It's not on a TOTK level at all, but it means a lot that the world isn't static. The weather and your own character will displace and move the leaves and things around. It's a world that's really well laid out also in terms of getting around, you have these huge branches which form almost a highway system which let you get back and forth quickly. The movement system feels like a pared down version of Mirror's Edge and all these different systems and mechanics blend together quite well I'm finding. It works well enough that it makes hunting and gathering not feel as tedious as it might be. Naturally those movement mechanics lend themselves well to combat also, my fave trick being to jump between branches and do a charge jump out of cover to headshot a soldier (this has a very nice and generous aim assist, worth using even on M&K)

 

All those details are really cool. It's very standard tho in its gameplay structure. You go to outposts, fix their broken shit, beat up the humans turning the forests into ass, unlock more regions of the map. It's still one of those games, but they try and keep more of it within the world rather than within a map system. It even does a thing where they don't actually give you a waypoint for a quest, they give you a text description like 'go south of the river and look for the smoke, beat up the RDA'. Or 'find the home tree near yada yada'. It makes you learn the geography and orient your way there. 

 

All that said, I don't see this landing anywhere but number 10 on my goty list, but it shows how you can make this style of game feel less like a spreadsheet and more like a video game by surfacing it in a more 'old fashioned' way

 

[Maryokutai]

1 hour ago, one-armed dwarf said:

There's dynamic time of day and weather, though oddly it seems for the opening this is entirely scripted and not dynamic? I'm not sure why that is.

 

Probably because getting out of the dungeon at the start of Oblivion and finding out it's night outside ruined that entire scene.

 

I'll give this a shot sometime next year. I've actually never even touched a Far Cry game so I might not feel the fatigue some others experience when playing this.

[one-armed dwarf]

I mean for the initial hours, maybe I'm 6 hours in, it's always daytime. Cornea frying daytime, with sunny weather. Reading online this changes upon a specific story mission. 

 

So there's certain things you'll try to gather and it won't have the 'night' or 'rain' buff. But there's certain story missions early on where rain is scripted, and so on.

 

One thing that isn't so visually great are the skyboxes, but maybe I forgot to set the volumetric cloud slider the right way or something I dunno

[mmmark]

I really want to play this for some unknown reason but it’s still £30. I might bite at £15. 

[mmmark]

I’ve given this a go now on Ubisoft+ a couple of months ago for around 4 hours. I absolutely hated it. The traversal just seemed so wrong somehow. I kept finding myself on terrain I wasn’t meant to be using to ascend but it seemingly looking like the best/fastest route only to run out of things to get onto and have to go back after 5 minutes of climbing and find the way the game wanted me to go in the first place.

 

These big blue people are supposed to be able to be agile and nimble but I just kept making a complete lanky pudding out of my character.

 

I have since gotten a new tv that’s bigger and with HDR10+ so I might re download it one day if only to see how much better it looks. Who knows, maybe it’ll click next time for me. 

[one-armed dwarf]

HDR in this is so eye searing, it's genuinely uncomfortable after a bit

 

But I also think it just sort of completes the visuals of it, it ain't the same in muted SDR

 

I guess this is how people talk about the films, you got to see it in 3D or whatever, even if it gives you a headache. But I think this is the best looking video game out there. Not the best video game in general though, I want to get back to it and unlock the flight option at least and give it more of a chance