Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is one of the few upcoming third-party games that will only be coming to PS5 and Xbox Series X/S, and there’s a good reason for that, as Ubisoft has explained during an interview with IGN.
Magnus Jansén and Nikolay Stefanov, who serve as creative director and technical director of programming, respectively, explained that the added horsepower of Sony and Microsoft’s new consoles simply allows them to do so much more than PS4 and Xbox One in terms of map design, AI and visual effects like ray-tracing.
Stefanov commented:
[New consoles allowed] us to have much better object detail up close to you, but also when you’re flying high up in the air – to have a lovely vista and far-distance rendering, where we can even use the ray tracing to do shadows super far away, you know, three or four kilometres away from you.
In terms of a new generation of consoles, the improved [hardware] just gives us so much opportunity to make sure that the game’s as immersive as possible.
Meanwhile, Jansen touched on the subject of hard drives, something which the PS5 SSD offers a massive advantage in terms of loading times and capacity in comparison to previous hardware.
If you look at, with the old hard drives, they had to be spaced out very far [apart], because you had to stream out the old and stream in the new, so it just created a formulaic world. So, there’s a ton of stuff like that.
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is scheduled for release on PS5, PC and Xbox Series X/S in 2022, and was announced earlier this month at Ubisoft’s Forward event.
[Source – IGN]