Hi, PlayStation Blog readers. The Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora team has been working hard to leverage the PlayStation 5’s unique features to make playing the game as immersive an experience as possible. Read on to discover how Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora takes advantage of the PS5’s adaptive triggers, haptic feedback, and much more.Play Video
Raytracing
In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the world of Pandora is enhanced by hardware-accelerated raytracing on PS5 with both raytraced dynamic global illumination and raytraced reflections. These systems fully integrate with Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora’s rendering systems like terrain, water, fog, and cloud systems. All these rendering systems adapt dynamically to the game’s changing weather patterns and the changes to the time of day.
Also, Ray Marched Volumetric clouds coupled with improved atmospherics and sky rendering allow for dramatic weather effects like thunderstorms.
Dynamic environments & stunning visuals
Pandora’s environments can change dynamically, where in-game events create large-scale world changes. This includes installations from the human militaristic corporation, the RDA, clear-cutting Pandora’s forests and creating extensive pollution, which dynamically impacts Pandora’s vegetation.
The beauty of Pandora also lies in its micro-detail rendering system, so expect a great level of detail in small leaves, moss, branches, or even tiny ambient critters.
Adaptive triggers and haptic feedback
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora combines the DualSense Wireless Controller’s adaptive triggers with haptic feedback to create a rich, tactile experience. Feel the tension of your Na’vi bow string when aiming or the recoil of your human weapon when firing, and carefully adjust the tension of the triggers while harvesting resources to optimize their quality.
There are well over 400 unique haptic effects throughout the game. Experience the joyful surprises of Pandora by touching the reactive flora around you and feel how they react through the haptic feedback in your hands. In Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, you can feel the Helicoradian plants folding in around you as you pass close to them, the footsteps of heavy animals like Sturmbeest and Soundblast Colossus as they get closer to the player, the roar of a Thanathor as it stalks you when you enter its territory, and of course, environmental effects, like waterfalls, lightning strikes, heavy wind, rain hitting your weapons, and the thrum of focusing with your Na’vi senses.
For animal lovers, you’ll feel the feedback from wildlife as you pet and soothe it, including the breath and purr of your very own Ikran.
While traversing Pandora’s Western Frontier, you’ll feel the rush of adrenaline while soaring the skies on your Ikran, and the subtle shift in feedback while sprinting, sliding, jumping, swimming, climbing, traversing up or down a Lift Vine, or riding on a Direhorse.
3D audio
A key goal for the audio team working on Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was to make Pandora come to life from every angle. Almost every sound in the environment is 3D-positioned, so when players move around, the sounds maintain their relative positions, like they would in the real world.
Pandora constantly reacts to the player and to itself. Wildlife panics or quietens after hearing unfamiliar sounds like gunshots, or heavy RDA machinery. Plants rustle as the player brushes past them, raindrops drizzle onto plant leaves, and wind gusts can be heard in sync with swaying tree branches.
All this truly comes to life with the PS5’s 3D Audio, providing a new sensory feeling of immersion, and a sense of space and connection to the world that wasn’t possible before.
