Watch James Cameron use a virtual camera to direct Avatar: The Way of Water

Welcome to Polygon’s first weekend special of the new year. The pickings are a bit slim as we kick off 2024, but we’ve still managed to scrounge up a couple of deals you should check out. For the uninitiated, every weekend at Polygon we present to you a roundup of our favorite deals from the past week in gaming and entertainment, along with some of the best-selling products that have recently graced our site.

UK fans of James Cameron’swill have to import a copy of the film in 4K if they want it, as a battle over the censoring of a scene has seen its release there canceled.

As we race to the end of the year, it’s time once again to kick off our Game of the Year awards, diving once more into over a dozen different categories and celebrating the best video games of 2023.

We've reached the last month of an incredible year in gaming, closing the season with a final rush of exciting titles as the Christmas holiday period fast approaches. Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora — out now on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series S/X — is easily the biggest launch in December, transporting players to the never-seen-before Western Frontier of Pandora, teeming with awe-inspiring creatures and luminescent vegetation. It's a bit reminiscent of the James Cameron movies, in the sense that you awaken as a Na'vi orphan and are thrust into battle against the Resources Development Administration (RDA), the corporation looking to harvest natural resources from the beautiful alien moon planet.

Humans are horrible. You don’t need an allegory about the environment filled with blue aliens to tell you that. However, the joy of James Cameron’s Avatar isn’t in its humans, or the azure Na’vi, it’s in the vibrant, living world of Pandora. From the instant you start Frontiers of Pandora, it’s clear that Ubisoft has done an incredible job bringing this world to life, and while you bathe in the neon glow of its incredible wildlife, you’ll discover a people whose lives and culture you’ll want to protect.

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It may have been distressing news to Avatar fans to find out the franchise’s next three movies have been delayed. On the bright side, Avatar 3 will be ready for its 2025 release date. Not to mention, production has completed segments of the fourth film. So, why get the ball rolling on a fourth film when we have yet to see a third? According to James Cameron, Avatar 4 will feature a time jump.

Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is a game this writer has been waiting a long time for. In many ways, it is the Hogwarts Legacy for fans of big blue folk and vibrant alien worlds. But with that apt comparison and Ubisoft Massive at the helm, does it do enough to stand on its own two feet? Or is it nothing more than a pretty tour through Avatar’s greatest hits? While it certainly is pretty and it does its best to hit those Avatar beats, Frontiers of Pandora actually won us over with one of the most enchanting open-worlds available on PS5.

Regardless of the jokes about Smurfs in space, there’s no disputing James Cameron’s Avatar is a mega-franchise that has made over $5 billion off two – yes, two! – films. Now, with even more movies on the way, the Na’vi and Pandora return to the world of video games in Massive Entertainment and Ubisoft’s Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora. The first-person action-adventure game seems like a natural extension that’s rife with endless potential, but it ends up being a mixed bag of brilliance and blunder.

Behind-the-scenes stories from the set of James Cameron’s The Abyss are nearly as coveted by longtime fans of the aquatic odyssey as the movie itself. A majority of the 1989 film was shot in enormous water tanks, and the labor of both performing and diving each day led the cast to experience multiple emotional breakdowns. Much of the endurance test is well-documented, but Cameron clearly has a few things left to say.

The Na’vi resistance fighter simulator is here, and like many other big-budget games, it has a big price tag to go along with it — so it’s only natural to see if Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is on Xbox Game Pass or PS Plus to save a few pennies.

Fans of James Cameron's sci-fi epics will be delighted that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora releases today on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S and PC.