Insane update for Avatar movie fans as brand-new game launches

The largest ever single expansion of the Avatar universe is coming to Australia – and it’s something else.

Update for Avatar movie fans as game Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is released.

In one week, we will see the largest ever single expansion to the Avatar universe. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a brand-new game which will introduce Avatar fans to new clans, new humans, and new, never seen before biomes.

Usually, movie-tie-in video games are just cheap and badly made, designed to make a quick buck before fans realise what they’ve bought. But Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora has been an eight-year labour of love between game studio Massive and filmmaker James Cameron’s Lightstorm Entertainment. It will introduce biomes, clans and costumes that will feature in upcoming Avatar movies. That means that while the game is a stand-alone story, it will be something fans of Avatar can’t miss.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is out on December 7. Picture: Supplied

A major theme of all the Avatar films has been Indigenous connection to land, the cruelty of colonisation, and the need to protect the environment, and Frontiers of Pandora will be no different, this time pulling on the thread of Residential Schools. The game follows an unnamed player character, a Na’vi who was kidnapped when she was young and raised to be a soldier as part of The Ambassador Program (TAP) by humans from the Resources Development Agency (RDA) in the year 2138.

The first Avatar movie was set in 2154, and when the RDA left Pandora, your character was put into cryo sleep. In 2169, when the second movie and the game is set, the protagonist wakes up and starts working with several members of the human resistance. You play as her as she discovers her Na’vi culture, finds her name and tries to find connection to a world that was taken from her.

In the process of finding this connection, you learn to fly on Banshees and organise other clans against the RDA as they try to pillage the resources from the Western Frontier.

Avatar: Frontiers of Panda is set in 2069 when the protagonist wakes up. Picture: Supplied

I recently had the privilege of visiting Lightstorm Entertainment in Los Angeles to learn about the game directly from the developers of the game itself, and the costume designers, production designers and producers of the Avatar movies. What really struck me during the panels and interviews was how involved the team from the movies was in the game. I’ve been covering games and entertainment for well over a decade, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a movie franchise tie-in game with this level of collaboration.

Dylan Cole, production designer, on Avatar said that sometimes this depth of collaboration meant reigning in some of Massive’s ideas. “Sometimes we had to play fun police. Sometimes they would have these amazing ideas and we’d be like ‘that’s so cool, but it doesn’t really work.’ Our job was to take their amazing gameplay ideas and make sure they were authentic to the world of Pandora.”

In an exclusive interview with news.com.au Cole said that there will be a lot of pay-offs from eagle-eyed fans who know the characters from both movies.

“We’ve put a lot of effort into this collaboration, because it really is a canonical expansion of the world of Pandora. So, there are a lot of details and Easter eggs that might be relevant to stories, or that you might have missed from the movie have been injected into the game at very intentional places.

“We’re really excited to see fans notice the crossover as they move throughout the world of Pandora.”

The look of the Avatar game will influence upcoming movies. Picture: Supplied

However, Cole also says that while the movie team has been quite prescriptive towards the game team, the collaboration hasn’t just been one way. He said that the game has inspired him to see what else can be done in the environment in the movies.

“We’ve been working with the amazing team at Massive, and they have such cool ideas and we want to try and put some stuff into the films, but in a sprinkle way,” said Cole.

“It looks so damn good, I’ve been starting to get inspired for designing, because the execution was so good.

“Even though it’s stuff I helped art direct, just seeing it holistically and experiencing it was instantly just like ‘ cool – I’m excited to go and design stuff for the film’.”

Ben Proctor, who is in charge production design in the films agreed.

“I’ve taken screen grabs from earlier builds of the game and shown them to the visual effects team from the upcoming movies. It’s like, ‘hey guys – look at that!’ – so it is literally influencing the finished look of Avatar for all time now,” he said.

Ronal, Tonowari, and the Metkayina clan in Avatar: The Way of Water. Picture: 20th Century Studios

Working on costume design for a video game was a challenge for the costume design team, because Lightstorm Entertainment works slightly differently to other studios. Hana Scott-Suhrstedt told news.com.au that to get the right look for the costumes in the film that the team came up with entirely new weaving techniques and fibre arts.

Whole costumes would be inspired by a single feather, or a shell from a beach in New Zealand. They talked about a cloak that took more than a full year to make.

Because, although all the Na’vi in the Avatar films are CGI, all the costumes are made by hand so Wētā FX, the CGI studio in New Zealand, can test the costumes in wind machines and under water. Everything has to physically work and move the way it does before it’s allowed to be included in the films.

“Any piece that is worn by a character, especially in an action situation involving water or flight, Jim [James Cameron] is very insistent upon having a proof of concept that it would work. So in addition to the finished piece, there’s also a stage piece that is made for a performance capture artist to wear and simulate the action,” Scott-Suhrstedt said.

Costumes in the game Avatar: Frontiers of Panda. Picture: Supplied

But they weren’t able to follow the same process for Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, so they had to come up with new ways of making these costumes work, including coming up with all-new visual languages for the three featured clans. This includes building on a concept that was introduced in the second movie, but isn’t fully expanded on until the game: Songcords.

“Jim Cameron as a director – there is a vast atmosphere of meaning around the world he creates, he’s got it all in his head, as if it’s entirely real to him. Even all the things that you don’t ever see or know necessarily in the final product of the movie that exists. It is all real in the world of Pandora for him,” Scott-Suhrstedt said.

“You don’t necessarily see each Songcord up close and personal in the movies. We’ve made each character have their own individual Songcord, where each element of that Songcord is entirely handmade, with a story behind very bead, every knot.”

In the game, the Songcord is an essential part of tracking your character’s journey, just as it is for the Na’vi in the movies. Up close, the Songcords look beautiful, and It’ll be interesting to see how they’re explored and expanded upon in the games.

Players can jump into Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora to explore the world for themselves on December 7.

Alice Clarke is a tech writer and travelled to LA as a guest of Ubisoft.