I thought that the 2009 film Avatar, of big blue cat people fame, was a bit underwhelming. Speaking as a massive speculative exobiology nerd (which is to say I think theoretical aliens are well cool), I found it baffling that with a budget of 237 million big ones and a brief of "create a convincing alien planet", they couldn't have let their brains rip just a little bit harder. The beasts were all very spectacular and that, but every design basically boiled down to "a normal animal, but it's bigger and more brightly coloured, plus we've stuck a bit from another animal on it". Same goes for the floating mountains and, if we're honest, the entire story.
Unsurprisingly, then, when Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora was announced at Ubisoft Forward last night, I shrugged. Weird flex, etc. But in the course of watching the trailer, I changed my mind. It told us nothing about what the actual game will be like, but it made me realise there's at least a lot more potential here than I might have thought. Here's why.