At Ubisoft, one development gap follows the next. In a report to investors, the publisher has now indicated that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora will be delayed by up to a year and a half, while development of four other games will have to be stopped altogether. Two of them were already announced.
Moved, discontinued, only with NFTs, discontinued
Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora was announced at E3 2021. The open-world action-adventure is being developed by Massive Entertainment using the Snowdrop engine. Ubisoft is already showing the latter in an opulent tech showcase on YouTube, but there will be nothing new to see from the game as such: the title was originally supposed to be released at the end of 2022 together with the Avatar sequel Way of Water, but it has now been released Ubisoft's 2023-2024 fiscal year postponed. A release is therefore conceivable in April 2023 at the earliest, and in March 2024 at the latest. This does not come as a surprise, however – recently it has been very quiet about the game.
It was just as quiet about Ghost Recon Frontline and Splinter Cell VR; However, the two games will not only be postponed, but their development will be terminated entirely. Ghost Recon Frontline was announced in October 2021 as a free-to-play spin-off of the shooter series. However, the Battle Royale game concept did not meet with much approval from fans of the series from the start – in this respect, the end that has now been announced is not necessarily surprising either. A successor to Ghost Recon Breakpoint (test), on the other hand, is still in the works, including in-game items based on NFTs and despite criticism of a corresponding monetization concept via the NFT marketplace Quartz. A release is expected next year.
Splinter Cell VR was again presented exclusively for Ocolus headsets in September 2020; the development was carried out by the Red Storm studio in cooperation with Ubisoft Düsseldorf and Ubisoft Mumbai. Here, too, there have been hardly any new details since the announcement, so the ending is not surprising again. Ubisoft does not provide any information about two other games whose development has also been discontinued. Both titles have not yet been publicly announced. 15 older Ubisoft games have already been released but will be discontinued in the fall.
Thinned release roadmap shows mishaps
It was only in the spring that the pseudo-RTS was converted The settlers postponed indefinitely. Ubisoft received devastating criticism for the changes communicated as “streamlining” of the former development strategy game as part of an open beta test, which forced the developer back to the drawing board. The remake version of Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time also has no release date after being postponed.
After several lengthy postponements, the pirate game Skull and Bones is due to be released on November 8th. However, first impressions of the corresponding announcement, including several trailers, were not necessarily cheerful two weeks ago. The only other new Ubisoft game for the rest of 2022, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, co-produced with Nintendo, is coming exclusively to the Switch on October 20th.