Issues with the Level Design, Barren Soil and more.

Wave System

Since the release of the seedling build 9 months ago, and the Welcome to Zomburbia buids, a lot of people have been complaining about how the "Wave System" should be reworked to match how it behave in the previous two games.

But what do we exactly mean with the "Wave System" you might ask?

PvZ1 for example utilizes a Wave point system

Every time the game tries to spawn a zombie it gets an X amount of points that it spends on the internal values of the zombies

Internally pvz1 and pvz2 give each zombie a "Weight" Value, which determines not only how expensive they are to spawn across the entire level but also how dangerous they are, as more dangerous zombies have more expensive values and so they spawn less often as the rest.

The game also resets and add even more points to use on zombie spawns every time all the spawned zombies from a single wave get defeated.

Lets say this level has 10 waves which means that the 10th wave would be the huge wave marked with a flag ingame on the tracker. the level should start with a small timer before start spawning zombies to give the player some time to prepare itself and plants some sunflowers. then the game spawns the first wave and when you defeat all the zombies spawned by the first wave the game gets back those spended points and multiplies them lets say for x1.25, and that immediately allows it to spawn one more zombie during the next wave, once all the zombies get defeated again the cycle repeats and near the end of the level the game would be able to spawn zombies in a escalating manner.

The reason im writing this in first place is because the current wave system based in a timer DOES NOT WORK

By checking internal scripts and level data we have pretty much confirmed that the levels in fact do use an internal timer to spawn waves during levels. like for example defeating zombies too quickly just leaves dead gameplay zones where nothing happens for a while and is just akward silence

There is also the opposite case where zombies either are really slow at spawning, walking or take so long to defeat and that makes the next wave get stacked with the current one making players lose control of the situation very quickly

All of this on top of other ingame mechanics that makes the game very afwul to enjoy sometimes.

Like: all levels in each biome are designed agains using an elemental plant to deal more damage AND ONLY deal more damage and the tool plant that if you dont use on that area thats just an instant Lose. the most extreme case of this are Volcano levels and specially the Current Nachonaut lawn patrol, where you are forced to use ice to deal enough damage on later levels to have a chance of winning but also you need umbrella leafs so your plants dont get instantly destroyed and the planting space doesnt get limited EVEN MORE than it already is, you also need cabbage pult because of course there is a flying zombie and you always need a sun producing plant, you are left with one seed slot to allow you to somewhat vary your strategy and not feel like you are just playing how the game wants to. 

Using the same plants over and over and over again is not fun and the levels are designed really heavily on "counter this gimmicks" on top of zombies with abilities that if are not taken in mind is just an instant lose.

Unsodded Tiles and Obstacles

Going back at the topic of level layouts, is genuinely INSANE how barren soil tiles have to be in every level, genuinely a BAFFLING decision, like the size of the lawn was always 9x5 or 9x6 on previous titles but here it got increased to 12x5 so to allow more plants to be in the board, is all fine there.

But then whats the point of this extra planting space if every level and i repeat myself EVERY LEVEL has these unsodded barren soil tiles.

This just causes a clash of ideas, like you want me to have the extra planting space or not?

And again this problem gets worse when we start adding obstacles like graves, blocks of cheese, water, dark tiles and who knows what else in the future.

Is also really strange why is this the case when the whole fusion idea is to power up your plants AND save on planting space but not even that is enough for some of these clustered with non planting space levels.

So there are power ups designed specifically to counter all of this? nobody really uses them, either because it feels really cheap and wrong or because you only have 5. and i imagine the team is aware of these issues, this is why i imagine these exist in the first place.

Issues Regarding Leveling and Wave System

As i previously mentioned the wave system both from previous games and current on pvz3 have a notorious issue when we include other ingame mechanics and one of those is the leveling system.

lets start with high level plants, they are able to clear out waves of zombies in seconds. So the current wave system of pvz3 will and indeed have just EVEN LONGER dead moments where nothing happens because of this, in PvZ2 the issue still persists but this just makes level end in seconds because a new zombie spawns and is dead, the new ones dead and like that you cleared the level in 1 minute or less making the whole point of building up a strategy pointless, this also raises another issue on why would i level up X plant or use this plant designed to counter a specific zombie when i can just brute force everything making just having options completely pointless and non meaningful.

all of these are issues that still persist even on the current build of the game, and the later point stands out even more when the game decided to nerf some plants just because, now everybody is forced to not use a lot if not all of the Potato mine, lime bomb, tangle kelp and spikeweed fusions just because there are better ones with actually impactful stats.

A lot of people with myself included have decided to just not level up our plants and the game has been feeling way better that way with the only exception being the zombie leveling, which is just making the difficulty a lot more artificial and not designed around zombie types in levels, this on top of Special zombies having an unbelivable amount of HP basically making damage sponges roles of the gargantuars and bucketheads completely pointless.

I hope i have been very clear with my points regarding the levels in this game, this is where the attention of the dev team should go, on improving the main aspect of PVZ the gameplay, and just to be clear im not here to rant in a bad way,  i care enough for this franchise and game to be here trying to make everybody´s word and myself included be noticed for this to be changed, i want the game to improve in the best way possible and these things need to be noticed and altered as a main priority.