From a player/consumer perspective this feels abrupt. I obviously have no idea how far ahead DLC was planned for or when they wanted to make a new GW game but it still feels like we had a lot more room for growth in GW2. With their seeking a scripter for a single player and multi-player shooter, even if the new PvZ game planned for next year isn’t GW3, it sounds like it may as well be (my money is certainly on GW3 being a thing).
As someone who loves and plays both, I feel there were some missed opportunities in GW2 despite liking the game more than GW1 overall. Since I’m posting this under the assumption we will be getting a GW3 next year (or perhaps 2019 if it proves to be more difficult to finish it in a timely fashion), I’m posting a list of personal ideas and issues for the next PvZ shooter, note this is going to be quite lengthy:
- Maps: A large chunk of the population misses the old maps, myself included. The fact that we will never see them (barring the rework of garden center into aqua center) in GW2 is disappointing to be sure. GW2 has some excellent maps, although Time Park is a mess in multi-layer despite being great in ops, but we just don’t have enough maps for turf takeover. GW3 needs to give us more of these maps; and it would be less work to tweak existent maps than to design all new ones; perhaps release with a mix of old and new would be best but we need a larger selection of maps. Obviously turf takeover maps take more work than the smaller maps for the other modes but they are also the most popular; more maps for the most popular mode means more variety and generally ore player interest and retention.
- Bugs: This was a major issue at launch of GW2. No modern game I’ve played is bug free but GW2 had serious issues early on which hurt it significantly and there are still some that plague us to this day (such as the stuck reloading on an All-Star which is just weird since you don’t reload in the first place!). GW3 will have to do a better job on this from day one.
- Classes and variants: While personally a fan of ‘more is better’, there has to be a balance and that is harder to achieve with so many characters and variants. It has improved overall but it has had some bad patches in GW2’s balance cycle. I fully expect to see more variants for the 6 new classes, and we certainly need a frozen corn since you can buy that in the store now and an Ice Pirate as an homage to the movie, but GW3 must again avoid the serious GW2 issues such as the plague of roses near launch. On a personal note I really want to see a bowling star!
- Backyard battleground: This is perhaps my favorite feature of GW2. I’ve mentioned it before and I do wish other games would adopt this, especially MMOs since they tend to have a much less dynamic spawn cycle than our backyard does. I feel that despite my own love of this feature it didn’t fully take advantage of this opportunity. We needed a larger backyard, more places to decorate (we have so many unused decorations, especially epic ones), more backyard quests and activities, and more variety but this core idea is amazing. I love being able to login and just play right in my own backyard.
- Solo and Multiplayer content: This one seems to divide the community but as someone who enjoys both aspects I hope to see GW3 take full advantage of this, and based on the Popcap help wanted ad it should. Being able to play solo ops and matches, jump in the backyard, solo storyline quests, and a mix of other quests gave the game both extra variety and kept me interested and playing often. Seeing more depth to both would be an added plus. The trials of gnomus I like overall and some of the events are great (I especially enjoy Rando’s revenge), but some like Cats and Dinos gets tedious and the trial keys set some people back as they took a while to acquire. I got my keys on weeks 2-5 so only one behind which wasn’t a big deal for me but others had a much rougher time. Some kind of mystery portal as well as the community challenges are most welcome if handled well.
- Quality of Life (Qol) features: One of the biggest complaints I have with both GW games is the customization selection. Having to laboriously scroll through all the options in a single column is slow and honestly a bit of a mess. Giving us ways to search by keywords and seeing a large number of options at once would go a long way to making the customization process faster and smoother. Also the selection of your character in the booth is still a bit off, even to this day I accidently leave the booth when I was trying to select a character. The menu to select decorations is actually easier to use than the one to customize our characters in GW2. GW2 fixed the obnoxious open issue of GW1 that had to be patched in; when I first played GW1 I muted my own mic since it was stuck on. I always use push to talk when I use voice chat at all and having mics stuck open was ridiculous.
- Communication: My biggest gripe here is I have not seen an official word on the Engineer’s Epic Dillo Derby legendary hat. If something has been removed for a reason, please communicate openly about it. It’s a great hat and being unable to use it is very frustrating. It would still rankle with official word but at least we’d have an explanation about why.
- More taunts and boss variety: I’ve hardly ever used the ability to switch characters in solo ops, and then only when an AI got stuck or I had to wipe the team from a bugged wave to reset it! Going back to 4 gestures is widely desired from what I’ve seen. We need more bosses to fight too, especially plants in the backyard. I’d love to see squashes, zen masters, baron von bats, zombombs, and new bosses in our backyard and more in ops too (such as a giant tomato for the plants as an example).
- Keep the old more new: It makes a bigger game so more room on your hard drive but one of the biggest complaints I’ve seen from the community is a lot of good missing customizations from GW1 in GW2. We have gotten a lot back thanks to the mystery portals for sure but let’s start with these already available and build on them! This goes for maps and character variants too as mentioned previously.
- Other: I’ve heard that Justin Wiebe tweeted that taco bandits wasn’t popular enough to migrate forward and that may be true but some kind of capture the flag mode would be great, even a revamped version of taco bandits, perhaps with both sides fighting each other like 2 fort in team fortress 2. Turf takeover is certainly the most popular mode but having more modes that people enjoy playing wouldn’t hurt; king of the hill is one such mode that comes to mind.
I’m sure others can add to this, assuming many read my wall of text that is, and I want to stress that I greatly enjoy both games and want to see more of what we have but also better!
Edit: And even with all that I forgot a couple of things! Consumables: The lack of some of the consumables from GW1, even with a few new ones in GW2 was a let down. New ones are great but we need more of the classics like the barrel pirate and fire pea back!
