Although it is a central part of their culture, successfully bonding with an Ikran is quite dangerous. Just reaching them is difficult enough. It requires traversal of the Hallelujah Mountains , a range of floating peaks where any misstep could send an unfortunate individual falling to their death. Upon finally reaching the biggest mountain, Mons Veritatis , actual interaction with the Ikran can begin. The caveat is the "correct" Ikran is identifiable because it will immediately try to kill its future rider, requiring them to wrestle with it until they can get their braid properly connected. The final step involves riding the Ikran off a cliff. As Neytiri puts it, "the first flight seals the bond." However, this process takes a few minutes, during which the rider will have to continue wrestling with the Ikran which will alternately be plummeting, flying erratically, and/or resisting the rider's influe

This aspect was shown in the original movie, when Jake Sully had to go through the ritual and nearly died in the process. According to Ubisoft , Frontiers of Pandora will also allow the player to bond with one and even includes options for naming and feeding it. According to Neytiri, an Ikran can only bond with one person during its lifetime, though it is unclear what happens to it if the rider d

Magnus Jansen: Oh, wow. There are a couple of big milestones, I think. In any video game or even software, there are these big stages, like alpha, beta, et cetera. And then before the alpha, there are sub-milestones before that. There was this point where we had our ikran, the banshee, your own personal dragon. We had those systems up and running, and then we had that working. And when we get the Vista system and the rendering up and running on the map we have of the Western Frontiers, which is what we call the new part of Pandora that we crea

Another drawback when it comes to Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora 's map and underwater exploration Game focus is the inherent complexity of the dense design. For example, there was a point where we had to fly our Ikran to the peak of a floating mountain. Despite being right where the marker indicated we should be, we were actually on the mountain floating beneath the right one. Sometimes, the waypoints would be imprecise forcing us to search the area for the exact spot we needed to go. Combine this with long treks, and it could easily become a point of frustration for players. However, the trade-off of this accuracy is a dense map that offers ton of exploration opportunit

Game Rant recently had the chance to play Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora for roughly 2.5 hours, completing four main missions, doing a sidequest or two, and exploring the lands. What's immediately clear is how much of the game is designed for exploration, as that was the most novel part of the experience, and that translates over to combat and map design as well. Indeed, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora eschews the typical Ubisoft formula for open-world games for something a little differ

The assault on the base was also incredibly fun, topping many of the best outposts in Far Cry games . To destroy and take over the base, there were a handful of activities throughout we had to complete. Unlike Far Cry 6 outposts where it was as simple as destroy a propanganda billboard and killing the soldiers, we had to about three different objectives to complete before ascending to hack and take over the base. It's uncertain if every outpost operates the same way, but contextually, it wouldn't make a lot of sense unless they were all oil rigs. There's also a stealth option to taking over the bases, and while we tried, we didn't get far before a full-on brawl and fight for our life broke

The other thing I think that is needed to make it great is that it's got new experiences, new things, new places, new characters, new stories. Because if it's just the same characters and the same story and the same places that's in the movie, then you're not going to be surprised. You're not going to have that, "Oh my god, I haven't seen this before" jaw drop, which is I think a big part of the movies. Like, "Oh my God, I have never seen this." It's an act of pure creation. And so we needed to do new animals, and to do that, we needed new environments that they could live in. So it all ended up with a bunch of new, and that I think is what makes it so g

Set shortly before Avatar: The Way of Water , Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora takes players to the never-before-explored Western Frontier of Pandora. They take on the role of a Na'vi who was taken as a child by the RDA and trained as a soldier before they are put into suspended animation. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora sees players wake up fifteen years later and embark on a standalone story uniting the Frontier clans against the

The big distinction from most Ubisoft open-world games is how that map is filled in. While the map showed RDA base areas, they were worked in the background of the map instead of an icon marking their location; in other words, they seemed like a natural part of the map and not something interactive like a radio tower in Far Cry . We also didn't see anything resembling collectibles like relics, lost letters, or anything of the sort during our time with the game. There were fast travel points like Na'vi camps for us to use, but while the map has the size and girth of any typical Ubisoft game, it didn't seem to have the bloat of icons that sometimes overwhelm players. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora also gives players the option of playing in a standard guided mode, where players can use waypoints to mark where they need to travel for some quests, or in a mode where players can only rely on context clues for travel. Either way, players are given context clues like "a giant stone monolith covered in purple flowers" to help narrow down where they are supposed to