Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — Why You Should Try Exploration Mode
When you begin a playthrough of Ubisoft’s latest title, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, the game will ask you if you want to play in guided or exploration mode. It recommends players choose guided, but I think that’s actually the not the best way to experience Pandora.
This isn’t the first time this option has been given to players, it actually started with 2018’s Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, but I believe this is the best implementation of the feature so far.
Here are a few reasons why exploration mode is the way to go.
What does exploration mode do?
Essentially, it removes objective markers, and hides the location of any points of interest. Instead, it offers the player directions, such as “Across the river north of Hometree” or “in-between Lab A and B” etc…
That sounds like a pain, why would you choose to make the game more difficult?
Frontiers of Pandora’s systems are built around immersing the player in the Na’vi fantasy — exploring, hunting, cooking and fighting the RDA colonizers. The game’s greatest achievement is the world of Pandora — this is a dense, diverse and frequently stunning world.
Exploration mode tackles a common problem in modern open world design. Overreliance on map markers and symbols obscuring the player’s view can cause players to focus in on the objective and barely look at their surroundings.
Sure, it’s faster to use guided mode and head straight to your objective, but unless you’re attempting a speedrun, I don’t think speed of completion is the goal here. I’ve enjoyed getting literally lost in the game world, as it really adds to making it feel like a believable space and takes the game away from the repetitive checkbox ticking formula it could have fallen into.
Exploration mode adds to the gameplay and makes for a more unique experience.
Finding where to go in exploration mode can becoming something of a puzzle, and makes for some memorable moments. Particularly, in an early mission, when the player has to get to a burning resistance camp under a time limit. I remember having to run and scale trees to make sure I could still see the smoke billowing from the camp, using it to orient myself. It added so much tension to the scene.
Avatar’s world is more concise than recent Assassin’s Creed titles.
Recent Assassin’s Creed games have been gigantic affairs, with Odyssey and Valhalla reaching upwards of 100 hours to complete most of the side content. These games can risk getting repetitive with such a long run time, and you may not want to add to this time spending it searching for directions. Similarly, especially in Odyssey’s case, this is a massive world and getting around without any aid is very challenging.
Conversely, Frontiers of Pandora is around half the size, clocking in at an average 30–40 hours including decent amount of side content.
I really recommend you give it a go and of course if you don’t like it, you can easily change it back in the menu.
