Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora delayed until 2023 or 2024 admits Ubisoft

Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora – no longer out this year (pic: Ubisoft)

Ubisoft’s open world Avatar video game won’t be out this year and maybe not even next, as it suffers a major new delay.

At this point it’s madness to bet against James Cameron. There seems very little popular interest in a sequel to Avatar but given how his last two films were both, at one point or another, the most successful movie of all-time it seems unwise to assume Avatar: The Way of Water will be anything other than a massive hit.

The new film is out this December and already there’s a mountain of toys and other merchandise being prepared, and that was to include a video game – but not any longer.

Although Ubisoft has not made any public announcement it states quite clearly, in its latest financial results, that Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora ‘will now release in 2023-24’ (likely a reference to the April 2023 to March 2024 financial year).

‘We are committed to delivering a cutting edge immersive experience that takes full advantage of next gen technology, as this amazing global entertainment brand represents a major multi-year opportunity for Ubisoft,’ said the company.

‘While this additional development time is a reflection of the current ongoing constraints on productions across the industry, we are hard at work to design the most efficient working conditions to ensure both flexibility for our teams as well as strong productivity while delivering the best experiences to players.’

The announcement also make a reference to ‘a smaller unannounced premium game, originally slated for 2022-23’. which has also been delayed till 2023-24.

There’s no clue as to what that is, as it’s never been mentioned before, but in publisher parlance ‘premium’ means ‘not free-to-play’, so it’s presumably a console and PC title of some kind.

It’s possible there might be more information in September, when Ubisoft is planning a quasi-E3 style event, which will see the reveal of the next Assassin’s Creed.

Frontiers Of Pandora is an open world game by The Division developer Massive Entertainment, with most of the early reveals focusing on how good the graphics will be.

Massive Entertainment is also meant to be working on an open world Star Wars game, which doesn’t have any kind of release date and for which there hasn’t been so much as a piece of concept art.

Since the two are likely to share a considerable amount of underlying technology, the delay of Frontiers Of Pandora does not bode well for the Star Wars game coming out any time soon.