The Nintendo Switch 2 is a powerful machine with some fantastic looking games, the star of the show being Ubisoft’s Star Wars Outlaws. Powered by the studio’s in-house Snowdrop Engine, the release of the Star Wars game has seen some fans wonder if Ubisoft’s other Snowdrop release, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora, would also be possible on the handheld.
Just like Star Wars Outlaws, Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a game designed around ray-tracing which made the game a real hassle to run on other handhelds like Valve’s Steam Deck. However, the Avatar game is also massively intensive in its rasterised graphics with dense, thick foliage which hammers even beefy GPUs.
Speaking to FRVR ahead of the launch of the game’s new From the Ashes expansion, which adds a brand-new story set after Avatar: Fire and Ash as well as third-person gameplay, narrative director Aoife O’Friel and game design lead Amandine Lauer revealed that they don’t know if a Nintendo Switch 2 version of the game is possible.
“Honestly, I don’t really want to wonder there, because I don’t know,” Lauer said. “That’s something we don’t know about,” O’Friel added when asked if the game would even be possible on Nintendo’s latest handheld.
“We are so focused on getting it shipped for the platforms that we targeted, and we’re also really happy that that allows us to do a lot of things, and to put a lot of quality into the graphics and all of this,” Lauer added.
Lauer explained that, at least with the target platforms the game has shipped on already, the team has the opportunity to really drive home the “quality and fidelity” that Avatar “deserves”. With the team not looking at a Nintendo Switch 2 port at the moment, the talented artists working on the game’s latest expansion are focused on maintaining the same level of quality seen in the base game.
While the developers didn’t touch on what cuts would need to be made for the game to run on Nintendo’s system, it is likely that Frontiers of Pandora would need to see more cuts than Star Wars Outlaws. With the world of Avatar so intrinsically tied to graphical fidelity, would these assumed cuts be worth the trade off?
Nevertheless, there is still hope with fans that a Nintendo Switch 2 version of Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora can release at some point in the future. While that port won’t be released in time to tie-in with the upcoming movie release, it would be fantastic to see the world of Avatar come to life on a portable screen.
For more Nintendo Switch 2 news, read about why Switch 2 devs “can’t avoid” the use of Game Key Cards. Additionally, check a look at the latest footage of Elden Ring: Tarnished Edition which appears to be massively improved over earlier builds.
