New Avatar game is pushing Snowdrop engine 'to its limits'

Ubisoft Massive is going all out with its new Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora game and plans to flex its new next-gen Snowdrop engine to its limit.

Driven by new optimizations in its powerful Snowdrop engine, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be a spectacle for next-gen consoles. The team at Ubisoft has hyped up the new Avatar game, promising crazy next-gen graphics, lighting effects, and an immersive/reactive world. To make the Avatar game, Ubisoft Massive worked directly with Lightstorm Entertainment, the production company responsible for the high-end visuals of the first Avatar, gathering feedback directly from the creators of Pandora and using it to create an in-game world.

In a recent blog post, creative director Magnus Jansen talks about the amount of effort that's been put into the project.

In a word, the effort has been Massive.

"We've really been pushed to our limits, and we'll continue to push as well and continue to improve,"Jansen said.

The dev goes on to say Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will have dazzling draw distances when flying in the skies, delivering a kind of cinematic experience befit of the big screen.

"The games that have been released on Snowdrop are super-advanced and they can do spectacular things. But when you come to Pandora, where you have the immense scale of things - you can be up close, inches away, or centimeters away from an object in first-person. Then you jump on your ikran, take off, and you can see for so many miles and miles and miles, and you can go anywhere in the open world."

Like the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5, Ubisoft Massive has too been pushed to the max in order to get Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora to look and feel like a true next-generation experience.

"To be able to render all that in real-time, and to the fidelity that is expected to really take you there, yes, there's been a tremendous amount of work aided by the fact that we are only on the new generation of consoles.

"The modular nature of Snowdrop has allowed us to plug in new modules and new rendering technology and build upon the open-world tech we already had. Then we increased the size of the world, and the speed at which you could move through it, and the fidelity that we could bring to you by an order of magnitude."

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora releases sometime in 2022, exclusively for next-gen consoles and PC.