A rough retrospective of the EA era of pvz

On a sidenote, the forums have again been collapsed, and not even BfN has a separate forum anymore! I won't hit them in chronological order like you did, I'll just list them off by types.

I have the PvZ Risk board game but haven't gotten it played, so no idea if it's any good or not. I got it since it's PvZ!

Great points @stukapooka . I got the original PvZ on Steam and loved it. I played it a ton, beat the adventure mode, got the tree to max size, unlocked all the minigames, it's just so good and enjoyable. I remember when they changed the Michael Jackson zombie to Disco zombie too, and although I did like the original's tribute to Thriller, the new one is good fun too. I can't think of anything negative to say about the original PvZ.

PvZ2 is fun and I like most of it but it's over-monetized and when I was playing the arenas, I ran into cheaters with weird planet levels and I was never a big fan of the idea anyway, just wanted to unlock the new plants. I haven't played in some time now, but at its peak, it was a favorite game for sure. Most of the game play changes are at least interesting, but I just do not like the  business model.

Heroes is very much like Magic: the Gathering, but has that PvZ world we love and is more fun in general. Like PvZ2 though, I stopped playing as I had some issues with certain items while playing on Android. The concept and execution are excellent though, and the PvZ world is pure win for me.

Garden Warfare caught me by surprise. I can't recall how I heard about it, but I grabbed Origin (now just the EA app), specifically to play GW when it came to PC, and I loved it. It has problems to be sure; spawn scumming is awful (for those unaware, in GW you can respawn while being attacked and avoid being vanquished), the maps tend to be a bit too sniper friendly, no ops for zombies, the leveling system was not great, upgrades were random in packs, too much rooftop camping, and certain characters are still too good (especially toxic pea and super commando).

But even with those serious problems, GW is an amazing game and when you have teams that are roughly balanced it's an amazing experience and nails the aesthetic, and gives some exciting, fun and silly matches. Ops are fun as plants too, although they don't scale to team size, so can be rough with less than 4. I remember when they started adding new modes like taco bandits, gnome bomb, and so on, and how much I really enjoyed almost everything about the game; from the hilarious engineer device sounds, to the variants, the maps and especially the night variants, the minigames at the end of the G&G maps, there is just so much to love.

Then GW2 came out and it's even better. Not perfect of course, some annoying bugs, lingering balance issues, and other problems remain, but the fact that it took the surprise (and well-deserved) success of GW, and mostly improved it is astounding. Yes, things like spikeweed being less well animated, lack of more themed music for super boss waves, and a few other GW things were lost, but now we have zombie ops, more characters and variants, quests, plants can attack in TT, the mystery portal, the gnomiverse, and especially-the backyard battleground, make GW2 one of my most all played games of all time, I'm right around 3100 hours as I type this, and I still play at least a little every day, because the game is so fun. When support was active, there was so much going on between playing the game, watching the dev streams, and looking forward to DLC, that it was my number one game for years. I used to check the progress-o-meter at work to see how we were doing on the challenges, I'd do all the quests all the time (we have a hacker on PC that has ruined the quest rankings, with an impossible number of quests done now unfortunately), and still do most of them. GW2 is quite simply one of my favorites and even though I feel that the business model went downhill over time with the paid packs for legendary characters and some other stuff, the game was brilliant and is still fun today. It needs an actual sequel instead of what we got next...

BfN isn't as bad as some claim but it's just not as good as it could or should be, and the fact that they took a canceled single player game and tried to turn the work done there into a multiplayer shooter has got to be a large part of why it never got the attention that the GW games did. The business model is not consumer friendly, the lack of variants was seriously felt despite the additional new characters, netcode may be the worst of all 3 games here, the zombie areas didn't feel very zombified, and so many other problems hurt what could have been a brilliant game. It has some fun parts, like the 1st time you finish each free roam region (and the I still love the Washy quest), but after GW2, all we really wanted was GW3, and BfN misfired badly.

I can't say much about PvZ3 as I may or may not try it if it comes to full release. I admit that while I started with the original tower defense game, the shooters became my favorite. I post it once in awhile, but if like you post about @stukapooka if we could take the best of both GW games, get some solid fixes to issues, migrate the best bits of BfN, and add some cool new stuff, I want a GW3 most of all.