Kind of annoying that this game will probably be marketed better and will probably also launch as a finished game, not like how BFN was in October. Sigh. Well, that's a wrap I guess. I can only hope that several years from now, these guys come back and we see a message like this one: "the studio has recently embarked on bringing a beloved and revered IP back to life." for PvZ shooters.
What really saddens me about this is that when they first went quiet, it was possible that they were going to try to do what's happening with Anthem; another EA title that released too early and performed badly in sales and player retention. That's what I was hoping for back then. I just saw a YouTube news briefing about that exact thing which is why I posted this now. While I have no data to compare how well the 2 games performed, neither appears to have been what one could call a runaway success.
@Shadowphinx101there have been a lot of leaks for BfN, going back a long ways. I remember some leaks on Reddit and some of the YouTube channels even before the Picnic alpha (which being a PC player I wasn't a part of). And then it just got to epidemic proportions after launch. I never actually thought about the leaks causing this much damage though. They did add some content to GW2 later on (the costumes for Torchwood and Hovergoat that also heralded the costume system of BfN, and Wall-Nut Hills), so I get the feeling that things were taking too long and they wanted to get it out in a sudden hurry. I was eager for a new PvZ shooter but I would've gladly waited for months or even longer if it meant we got a better end product with more content, better core functionality, and a better economy.
@Shadowphinx101 & @shurikeninja
Apparently, a community testing release was planned from the beginning. The leaks might have sped things up a bit, but they didn't create the situation. Included below is a screenshot from Shaun Laker's twitter page. This happened after the announcement of the surprise GW2 update in 2018. When asked he said it would only be tested internally, but he also said that they loved what EA was doing with CTE. I didn't know what that meant at first and from my research on the topic I learned that in the context of games, CTE means "Community Testing Environment". They were planning on using the community as testers to improve the game in "future releases" a.k.a BfN
