A rough retrospective of the EA era of pvz
The ea era of pvz is a strange one since it produced a lot of the games we love but has also made mistakes and produced games that seem to have an put the franchise in a state of limbo till 3 comes out.
So since gw1's birthday is here i decided to look back on these games and give my opinion how I feel about them.
Pvz2: I like it and i think its fun to play but I also feel like the removed content drags the game down and too many of the newer plants overlap in function with the old ones.
The worlds are fun with their little gimmicks but I really wish they just added a new one especially after desiging romans in pennys pursuit.
Imo I think pvz2 shouldnt have been mobile only as pvz1 was on practically everything back in the day and is believe that led to its immense popularity.
The removed content:
Hot take but I really feel like pvz tower defense games have kinda peaked between the golden era of pvz2 and 1. Maybe 3 can prove me wrong but I just dont see how they can add to whats already been done and expand it in a meaningful way as 3 feels more like a spinoff than a sequel at the moment.
Garden Warfare: GW was a suprise hit for the franchise and honestly the pvz game i didnt know i wanted. New content creators sprang up for pvz and helped the game get popular on youtube.
Moving a 2d tower defense game to a 3d 3rd person shooter is such a ludicrous idea and yet they nailed it.
The art and characters radiate such charm while staying true to the series.
And this isnt just mentioning that the game manages to be a competent shooter and makes it feel satisfying to use the abilities.
Its bizarre to me how the gw games didnt get more popular than they were since they were the first ones to my knowledge to really capitalize doing the tf2 inspired cartoony shooters that overwatch would get instead.
GW wasnt without its flaws but I overlook a lot of them simply because the base gameloop is so enjoyable and its why the gameplay still pulls me back in every once in a while.
One thing a lot of prople agreed on was the games lack of single player which something we wanted in a sequel.
I know some want a remaster/remake of this one but i'm kinda against it. Let me explain.
GW is great but what could a remaster/remake add that wouldnt make it just gw 1.5. The artstyle and graphics hold up pretty well to this day and dont need a heavy tuning.
Ops in GW is lacking and if they add more content to the plants side the zombies will still be left with nothing and giving them graveyard ops would require a ton of gw2 assessts and it that point why not just port the maps to gw2?
I get why people want it because the improved qol and AI support would be amazing but I think a true sequel with gw1 stuff in it would just be better overall.
GW was a massive step forward for the franchise and the fans got a sequel that would quickly release an improve on the formula due to the games popularity.
Garden Warfare 2: What can be said about GW2. Its overwhelmingly viewed as the golden child of the shooters and arguably even the EA era overall for vary good reasons.
It greatly improved over 1 in many regards with added mode, AI support, general qol changes, new and inovative characters/variants, and a massively anticipated single player mode.
Gw2 starts as direct sequel to 1 with an interesting premise: The zombies have won. Zomboss contacted his future self and got the z mech to ensure victory in the events of GW1 as the new zombies overwhelmed and overpowered the GW1 plants.
However new plants showed up traveling through time to prevent a zom oss controlled future or being recently created brought the new zombie threat to a stalemate where both sides are looking for a way to gain an advantage.
I like this premise as it gives a good reason for why the new characters werent around in the first game and the zombies rapid technological advance in zombots.
We also finally got a hub area in the backyard battleground which is a really cool area. The divide of plants and zombies are really well designed and their bases are cool. One thing that really helps it is that the fight escalates on how long you fight or try and raid the enemy base which makes it feel more like a war than the street brawls of bfn.
The single player mode was finally here and-it was ok.
A lot of the missions take place in the hub and pvp maps and are usually reskins of ops. I dont hate it but I simply wanted more.
Dont get me wrong the single player does have some stand out missions like the Butterhawk, boss hunts, and the introduction of gnomes but I wanted it to do more with its premise, some of the almanac descriptions could be cool setpieces like the bandit cactus train robbery. More emphasize on the sides trying to gain a permanent advantage.
The early gw2 dlc also slapped with the addition of trials of gnomus, Zombopolis, front line flats, and the town hall with new gamemodes.
Early gw2 when heroes released could honestly be classified as the golden days of the shooters in terms of community imo. Constantly updated and full of hype.
However gw2 has its flaws especially later in life. We all know the tragic tale of project hot tub: a pvz game that would've brought the series to an action/adventure platformer like ratchet and clank. However it was struck down for a star wars game that was also cancelled. It was being developed in 2016/2017 and the death of the game hit popcap hard.
GW2 content slowed to a crawl in terms of major updates but than a ray of hype came in 2018 with tale of the taco bringing us the capture the taco mode which is fun and the only unique mode to survive the purge later on.
We got variations of modes and than news of Wallnut hills coming to gw2. Its was ecstatic! A gw1 map in gw2!
And than the ball was dropped hard. First was the news that we wouldnt be able to have bot support on the map and we wouldn't be able to play the new classes.
If that wasnt bad enough, the map itself is just unbalanced due to the massive power vacuum and not attempts were made to fix the finales exploits with energy warp.
Gw2 is great but it has been left in shambles at the end of its life and somehow still has issues even with no constant changes (seriously how does a game with no updates brick itself). Leaving the mystery portal on a set rotation isnt a bad idea but why, just did they leave us without actually interesting modes like cvd, boss hunt, or soil survivors? I can understand support for gw2 ending so they could focus on bfn but just why did they make the dumbest decisions at the VERY END!
News of a new pvz shooter had come out on 2019. Maybe this would be a chance to improve gw2's flaws, r-right?
Pvz Heroes: Heroes was released after gw2 and even had cosmetics in the game.
It was a 2d card game spinoff.
I like it and it honestly has my favorite 2d artstyle for the series and the character designs are really well translated from the other games.
However after 2 new characters released support for the game dried up for some reason. The games download player count was good and even know i dont have issue finding games.
Maybe it was the same thing of project hot tub beiing a blow across the board and hurt both gw2 and heroes.
What can be said other than heroes is good but it was dealt a really bad hand too early.
One thing I despise is how everyone writes off these games just because EA without actually judging the quality.
Battle for Neighborville: What can I day about BFN that I havent already said. It fails as soft reboot, it fails as a sequel, and over all just didnt keep players invested.
It had its defenders when it came out but now the game has kinda evaporated in the fandom as I even get ps3 gw1 games with way better numbers having 10v10 matches in TV compared to only 2v3's in BFN.
Before the news of project hot tub and its vastly superior versions of the same models in just didnt really understand this game as gw2 was obviously succesful so how could they create a pseudo sequel that has less multiplayer content than GW1.
This may be unpopular but im also not a fan of the half baked attempt to shove in the comics with the games lately. I once again prefer the root it looked like hot tub was taking with some original additions.
One thing that bfn did well was have expanded pve which is nice as it now has dedicated areas and true bossfights thats great but theres still the problems of repetition in the format and the stories are eh. Once again I believe pvz has potential for a great single player mode and while bfn does takes steps forward it still lacks and even goes back a bit in other areas.
The main pve area that siffered was the hub as giddy park offline is boring compared to the backyard and is just so empty.
They removed variants and tried to go an overwatch direction of introducing new characters and maps instead but both of those fell flat with a too little too late scenario with just bad decisions in between, kinda like overwatch itself.
Im just not a fan of the artstyle and aesthetic change. Once again pvz was always cartoony, i mean I wanna slap anyone who unironically says GW1 looks too much call of duty because shooters obviously didnt exist before cod, but with pre bfn pvz games still had a touch of little darker humor/sub text like apocalyptic signs in gw1 or the almanac entries for winter melon or doomshroom.
I still dont understand the removal of the word acidic in fume shrooms description or why they made doomshroom purple?
I think best description GW's aesthetic comes from the JTMusic videos they made the gw games.
From their gw2 rap: "Garden warfare. It might sound quite absurd, The plants and zombies. Are rising from the Earth. They all look goofy. If that's what you prefer, But don't forget that it's the end of the world".
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This is a decent description of Garden Warfare's aesthetic that i feel bfn went too kid friendly on.
The game was just a flop and popcap vancouver was disbanded into motive vancouver and since they've been silent since christmas on their twitter we probably shouldnt expect any future news for the shooters. Even if the series does recover who knows how long that could be as we could be stuck with bfn either way being sonic 06 and just move on with another game but with a different focus or a metroid other m with the franchise on hold for years in mainline entry purgatory. Only time will tell.
Early pvz3: 3 hasnt come out yet but i've yet to meet another being who thinks it will knock it out of the park.
They say the opposite of love isnt hatred but apathy/indifference and i think thats the state most fans are at right now with the series as they feel burnt out by misstep after misstep and feel like the franchise suffering an identity crisis.
Since the lastest playtests didnt change much of anything and news is nonexistent that i wont be suprised if it just comes out and nobody hears about it and it crashes and burns.
Happy Birthday Garden Warfare may you look forward to many more and may your series rise to greatness once more.
Gw2 servers right now:
