How Massive created the world of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora | interview

Ubisoft published Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora as an original extension of James Cameron’s Avatar films on December 7.

The average review score on Metacritic for the first-person action-adventure game is 72 out of 100, which isn’t spectacular. The game reminded people, including our own Mike Minotti, a bit too much of Ubisoft’s Far Cry games. But the title from Massive Entertainment is pretty universally applauded for its amazing visuals.

I spoke with Cedric Decelle, vice president of technology and Snowdrop Director at Ubisoft; and Nikolay Stefanov, technical director at Ubisoft’s Massive Entertainment about the graphics for the game.

Decelle spent most of his career on the Far Cry franchise and he became vice president of tech for Ubisoft Motreal in 2021, and he took over Snowdrop technology in 2022. Stefanov is a career graphics expert who also worked on Far Cry 3 and Tom Clancy’s The Division.

Here’s an edited transcript of our interview.

GamesBeat: When it comes to how this game got made, what’s the interesting technology story here for you?

Nikolay Stefanov: We wanted to transport players to the world of Avatar. Immersion was one of the highest priorities. We wanted to make sure that the level of fidelity, the level of detail was there, so that you can sometimes forget that you’re playing a game. You can feel like you’re in that world. Pandora is the star of the show.

In terms of tech, we had to move from the urban environments that were the focus of The Division to something that’s much more organic. Much more foliage. We also had to fulfill the fantasy of flying on a Banshee. We had to build a lot more systems for vistas, for quick streaming. Of course in the end you’re three meters tall. The amount of detail that’s there in the world also needs to be raised. We had to do a lot of work on micro-detail systems in order to raise that visual quality.

GamesBeat: Was there pressure in that people could see what the film looked like, and say, “I want the game to look like this”?

Stefanov: I wouldn’t necessarily say there’s pressure to match the movies. There’s certainly a desire to be as immersive as possible. One of the key things that you have in a game versus a movie is that you’re not just looking at an image on screen. You can move around. You see the environments reacting to you. The plants move around. There are different things happening when you go near them. You might get hurt by certain things. You might get a little buff from others. You can jump over them. You can destroy them if you’re inclined.

When it comes to visuals, yes, there’s definitely that aspect. The Snowdrop team made it possible for us to switch entirely to raytraced lighting. That let us make a very big jump in quality compared to what we had on the previous generation of consoles. But it’s not only about visuals. It’s also about interactivity. It’s about how you can traverse the world and how the world reacts to you.

GamesBeat: It seems like there are some competing challenges to deal with. You have very fast motion with the ability to fly, but you also have to have a high level of detail in the world going by.

Stefanov: Flying is something we didn’t do in our previous games that ran on Snowdrop, like The Division. That was a very big challenge. There are two aspects to this. One is to make sure that when you move fast enough, we’re able to stream in all of the objects that pass by as you’re flying. The other aspect is that the flying has to feel good. We have a system that runs at 120Hz to figure out if there are any obstacles, to make sure that you can avoid all the obstacles. It’s a living creature. It’s not a car. It’s not supposed to crash into walls if it can help it.

The Snowdrop team did a very good job with all the improvements in rendering, especially the micro-detail rendering up close, but also all the different systems around streaming, how things are loaded and so on. One of the key things when we’re talking about how we achieved this–we worked in very close cooperation with the Snowdrop team. We knew that this was going to be the game that showcased Snowdrop on the current generation of console, and we wanted to make sure that it was a good showcase when it came to image quality, flying, and everything else.

GamesBeat: Do you have any favorite parts of the game? Anywhere that it shows off what you’re capable of especially well?

Stefanov: The first moment, when you exit the facility and see Pandora for the time, that’s absolutely one of the defining moments in the game. You can see the amount of detail and the attention to quality that the team has put into this game, from the amount of foliage you see to the raytracing quality. The other big moment for us is a little bit before the middle of the game. You get to have your own ikran, your own banshee. There’s a big sequence where you climb up to the ikran rookery and take flight. Suddenly you have this completely new way to explore the world.

Cedric Decelle: I have two wow moments. The first one was the first time I went out into the nighttime, with everything glowing. You can see the raytracing in action everywhere. I was really amazed by the work the team has done. We talked about density and detail. You can feel the care that the team put into crafting the world. The other thing for me, I really enjoy just traversing in the game. I don’t ever use the fast travel. I want to discover things. I want to move through a space and find out what’s going on. It was very impressive to see what the team has crafted. It showcases the teach very well.

GamesBeat: A lot of interesting light and shadow moments there.

Decelle: Yeah, yeah. Even just the sunlight–it’s not usually something I notice in games. But it struck me while I was playing, when you see the light interacting with everything that’s happening. It’s very well-crafted. It’s a big step forward.

GamesBeat: What is the most challenging kind of scene to handle? I assume it might be when you have combat and there are lots of things happening on the screen at once, everything moving around.

Stefanov: That’s right. In this game we have different systems that are tailored toward processing different kinds of entities. We have separate systems for all the foliage and the micro-details there, and many other things as well. It’s important to have an approach that’s more than one size fits all. You can do specific optimizations for different use cases.

We started with performance in mind, from very early on. It was important to have the scale to build these types of systems. We can, for example, skip processing specific entities that are far away, that you don’t see. We can selectively turn off certain parts of the world, like the physics simulation for certain objects. That can turn off at a distance. When you start with performance in mind from the get-go, it’s easier to optimize when you come upon these difficult scenes.

GamesBeat: Some people might refer to some of this as foveated rendering. When you have a central part of the screen that you’re going to notice, that your eyes are drawn to, you can render that in higher quality, while things on the edge might be blurry because you’re not looking there. Is that another way to keep the performance under control?

Stefanov: We don’t use foveated rendering in that specific way. What we do is, we have a dynamic scaling solution in place. Snowdrop provides that, even in some of our previous games. We constantly monitor the framerate that the game is rendering at, and then we gradually drop the internal resolution until we can hit the target frames per second. The way we still keep the rendering quality is that we have an upscaling solution on both PC and consoles, in order to upscale this smaller internal buffer to a higher output resolution.

GamesBeat: Were there any particular things about the tools that made you more productive, that might have saved work and time?

Decelle: Cutting down iteration time is one of the major points of Snowdrop. It’s a unique strength we have. Loading in the engine is super fast, so people can work where they need to work. Everything you do is very quick. It requires quite a bit of work to keep it that way. Over time engines get slower. They get fatter and so on. We put in a lot of effort into making sure everything stays lean and fast, so our content creators can focus on their craft, on taking the right ideas and putting them into the game. You don’t want to have to wait for the machine to process stuff. You want to work on your ideas. That’s what matters to us.

The other thing that comes to mind for me, the team developed a great system to deal with all the vegetation, the micro-detail that was added into the world. We call it the scatter system. It allows the content creators to work on the vegetation and all the biomes in the game, scattering features around the world in way that feels crafted.

Stefanov: The scatter system was a big time saver. What we do is, we create these procedural worlds by defining what we want the specific environment to be. That can be things like, we’ll have this tree, so that means we’ll have this type of other vegetation around it. You also get these particular rocks, these particular plants you can harvest. Tweaking those rules and seeing the results is nearly instantaneous. Our designers can go in and rebalance the entire game. “I want more of this type of harvesting materials in these areas.” They don’t need to wait for hours of processing to see that in effect.

The other thing that is really cool in Snowdrop is it allows us to work with something we call level templates. If I can describe it a very high-level way, it’s a sort of sub-level. You have the big map of Pandora, and then you can place individual locations inside of it and move them around in near-real time. They automatically blend with the terrain. That allows you to very quickly change the entire layout of the map. We used to have these weekly or bi-weekly playtests. Then we would get feedback from the developers. Maybe this particular quest, you have to walk a little bit too far for it. For the next playtest, it was easy to adjust those locations and their landmarks. Iteration could go a lot faster, which is something that I think is unique to Snowdrop, the way we can modularize level design.

GamesBeat: Was there anything in particular that fans have noticed or mentioned about the visuals that’s stood out?

Stefanov: The reaction from the fanbase has been pretty positive so far. It’s been good to see people appreciate the amount of attention to detail that went into the game. One thing that’s a particular highlight to me is that people are enjoying the in-game journal, with all the information about the flora and the fauna. We spent quite a lot of time on that. It’s canon, actually part of the Avatar universe. It’s very satisfying to see the positive reception to that.

GamesBeat: Do you think there’s any way to outdo the films with the kind of technology and hardware platforms that you have?

Stefanov: Competing with the movie isn’t something we want to do. It’s a different kind of medium, completely. For us it’s more important to make sure that this is a game you can immerse yourself in, where you can become part of the world and see all of the details and so on. Trying to compete on rendering power is something for the future.