[Discussion] Looking back on a decade of garden warfare. Happy birthday gw1
Garden warfare was truly an amazing thing for pvz when you think about.
A tower defense turned into a 3rd person shooter.
This sounds like the premise of a failed edgy semi reboot of a series that fell into obscurity or was immediatly ditched in the next entry right? Heck the concept art almost was this.
Seriously wtf was that early peashooter design.
Well for pvz it worked and left players wanting more.
1. The unexpected entry.
So gw1 was revealed at e3 in 2013 to a rather mixed audience but overall the game's marketing being a blend different styles and focus drew attention to the game.
It was talked about that the games design was to make the characters still feel like they fit in the pvz universe.
s
The marketing appears to be a hit. I myself only found garden warfare through an old gameinformer magazine which had plenty of positive things to say about the game and as someone who had played pvz 1 I was interested in how the idea even worked as the only image I saw was the promotional ops image of sunflower on zomboss estate. I was skeptical but interested.
One thing I think helped gw1 (and gw2 ) was that it was fresh and new in gaming in a time before dozens of tf2 inspired games came rolling out in force afterwards with overwatch and co. We even had both gw's released before and outlived battleborn.
The devs released a log about how they transitioned the games designs form the 2d games. Really the 2d to 3d process that gw made doesnt get talked about enough. I mean these are all the same character in several different styles but you can still immediatly recognize that its pvz.
This are all the same series.
2. Gamemodes and cosmectic system.
So what did gw1 actually bring to the table.
* Gardens and graveyards- This is easily the most popular gamemode as it not only was a attack/defend mode spanning a large and expanind map but it also allowed you to summon AI npc's to either defend or attack bases which is not something many 3rd person shooters do online. Given the amount of variety you could formulate some fun strategies like all bamboo shoots fending off barrel pirates.
Engineer was special in this mode in that there's a teleporter on the map he can build to bring zombies out of the firing line and into a flanking position much further up to the point.
These are very useful as taking the direct main route to the point is long and zombies especially are highly exposed to sniper fire that can * their health and sniper sightlines are big in gw1.
The final points also made the map feature a unique minigame that must be completed for zombies to win. I wish more games ended matches with a unique point for attack/defend modes like gw does.
I feel this mode also showcases the design philosophy of gw1 the best as the zombies are designed with a mobile nomadic playstyle and plants are defensive and have turret modes and traps to delay the zombie advance. You especially see this in the healers.
* Team vanquish- a deathmatch gamemode to 50 points on non g&g maps. Unlike most deathmatch modes in other games the revive system allows you remove a point from the enemies score incentivizing you to save your team.
This mode is fine as players can experiment with the characters abilities and how they differ from g&gs attack/defend nature.
* Vanquish confirmed- Team vanquish but you must grab an orb from your fallen foe to actually score. You can also stop the enemy from scoring by picking up fallen teammates orbs.
Truth be told I have never really cared for this mode. It just feels like drawn out team vanquish and you only ever really get games in mixed modes.
* Gnome bomb- grab a gnome that spawns in and strap to a garden or tombstone and let it detonate after a few seconds before the enemy team disables it.
Introduced in the chomp town dlc update.
Its an alright mode. Really depends on team size as an imbalance can be frustrating to deal with.
Gw2 improved it by adding the bots and pots to defend each target.
* Suburbination- Hold and capture 3 point to start scoring points for your team. Only one is needed to start scoring however ill three give a Suburbination bonus.
Fun mode as it forces players to constantly be on the move and not stay in one spot to long and the matches can be really close.
* Taco bandits- A gw1 exclusive mode that was never brought back until reworked in gw2 as capture the taco.
It actively changes maps as it barricades off certain sections so the game flows better.
Both teams spawnables can be used here which the only time you'll see them outside of g&g funnily enough.
The zombies have to capture a taco from a grill with a cardboard cutout of dave and run back to a UFO to score. Sections of the map are blocked off or slightly altered much like the backyard battleground in gw2. I guess this is to prevent players from just getting distracted on the other end of the map.
Once again the defensive plants and offensive zombies philosophy butts here again as plants are often just set at defending the grill while zombies see more of the map.
This is the only pvp mode that didnt return in gw2 but I think thats just do to the different focus on the teams with plants having more offensive power and vice versa. Capture the taco also forces the players to move around more.
Taco ufo.
Garden ops- Plants must defend a garden from 10 waves of zombie attack and then escape.
A mode that mimics the classic tower defense style as you can plant smaller pots to defend the garden each with their own little attacks.
Every few waves you will have special objectives, enemy compositions, or a boss.
All four plants can be selected and all bring something to the table for the team
Survival mode- This was an exclusive to gw1 on xbox one and ps4 where instead of evacuating after wave 10 you just kept fighting wave after wave of zombies.
Shame that this was exclusive to splitscreen on newer consoles at the time and never made a comeback for ops in gw2 as i feel the idea could've been expanded with the champion enemies and such.
Cosmetics are handled differently in gw to most games.
A player can purchase packs with coins in game that give several cosmetics with a chance of spawnables and a character piece of a variant.
This is actually a good system as it ensures you'll always have something you can spend those spare coins on (stares at my bfn coins).
The gw1 cosmetics are also really good as they fit the world really well with things like crazy dave masks, fume shroom caps, and so on.
3. Update history
Major dlc updates mainly
2014
The Garden Variety Pack: added new abilities for each class, 100 new customizations, chomp town map added, gnome bomb added alongside the map, pirate zombies, and astronauts glasses behind his helmet removed. Clearly the most neccesary change.
Zomboss down: Released Cactus Canyon g&g maps, more customization, and 8 new character variants.
Pc release brings the non g&g map jewel junction.
Tactical taco party: Brought Vanquished Confirmed and 2 new characters.
Suburbination pack: Brings plasma pea, Suburbination, and the new map crash course.
Numerous holiday customization packs.
2015
In march of 2015 popcap announced the game would get no more dlc however shortly afterwards a hint of a new game was coming was teased.
In may popcap celebrated the birthday of pvz by giving players a hundred skip challenge stars.
In novemeber to celebrate 8 million players worldwide popcap gave players 80,000 coins and released stats for the games player tally.
So gw1 really just had 1 year of content however the game was absolutelty stuffed with content during this time frame.
https://plantsvszombies.fandom.com/wiki/Plants_vs._Zombies:_Garden_Warfare/Update_history
4. Design and maps.
So how does garden warfare even work?
Well unlike most shooters you have assigned classes with their own roles and powers.
Each character has 3 abilities and a set limit of health.
When a character is defeated there is a small window where any member of your team can revive you but healers will revive the fastest. However no matter what your character will only revive at half health.
Your character can regenrate health after a period of inactivity but only up to half of your characters health. This incentivizes healers to step up to keep the team running at full capacity.
Characters are leveled up by completing challenges such as vanquish 3 chompers a match. Skip stars can be used to bypass a challenge.
To provide gameplay variety the classes are given variants which can change the weapons and effects of the characters such as a foot soldier who shoots fire rounds but off a semi automatic weapon or an engineer who changes his mid range semi auto splash weapon for a fully automatic longer range rifle fulfilling a blend of soldier and engineers styles for players.
This was good as all the variants provided a new but familiar way to play the classes and do to the care put into them you can always tell them apart despite cosmetics and can always recognize whose projectile effects are theirs. You'll never mistake super commando and camo ranger for example.
On the ps4 and xb1 you got one player playing boss mode which was a 2000 health airship circling the map that collected resources to eventually drop revives, bombs, heals, and spotters for their team.
-The maps in gw1 are probably the best and most well laid out in the series imo.
They have a great variety of flank routes and vertical freedom that is unmatched even in most shooters now.
In ops the pot positions can even be ontop of some rooftops that granted are still ontop of areas accesible by stairs but we never see that again in the series
The game has very few areas that are off limits to players to try and get to. You wil constantly be engaging on multiple planes of combat and it feels like enemy fire could come from almost anywhere thanks to the games rather large sightlines almost every class can utilize.
The maps are also multi terrained in that on a map like sharkbite shores you can have players figgting ontlp and under the dock or in driftwold where you have players inside on top or on the masts of pirate ships to attack the point. You're gonna be looking up often in gw1.
Now i do have one critique of gw1 maps and thats that foot soldier and peashooter take the maps best heights and shoot beyond and soldier especially can turn the game into a living nightmare with his long range advantage on these high up long spanning sightlines. I'll just go ahead and say soldier in gw1 was too good at things like this, sure other classes could get there by abusing the engine techs but soldier just presses a button and climbs three stories in a second.
On the soldier pic I can shoot the next point from here with soldier.
How is sunflower, chomper, or scientist suppose to compete with this?
Chomper is also just left behind by the fact that every other class in the game can rake advantage of these factors but him. Even just something like unicorn warp in gw2 wouldve boosted his vaibility.
Playing soldier and peashooter compared to chomper or all star completetly changes how you look at the game and they're the most picked classes because of this.
5. Aesthetic and tone
All gw1 maps follow a general suburban small town environment with a few desert and beachfront maps. They all feel like they would greatly fit in and expand on the world of pvz 1 while also just being places that people would want to live in and i think thats why people love their general vibe so much.
I love hlw every zbie soawnpoint usually involved a graveyard. If only bfn bothered to actually have graves in the game.
"Visually Garden Warfare is amazing. Using the Frostbite engine it’s meticulously detailed and gorgeous. Lighting effects are used to great effect but the style and essence of Plants vs. Zombies is maintained. It never feels like it’s trying to look like a real life version of the cartooney original. This style permeates the entire game. Menus, notification screens, characters… everything looks like a beautifully detailed version of its predecessor". -stevivor
Another thing I think helps them is the underlying apocalypse that's been brought about that you can pick up in the map like the "end is near" signs or that the zombies have graffiti of cactus calling dumb camping meanie or the newspapers talking about zombie invasion and the missing posters with stickfigure face drawings on them. "We ate the peeple" is a good one.
You can also find makeshift catwalks, destoryed chunks of walls, roofs, and sandbags out of fertilizer. The world is slowly becoming a battleground.
Gw1 as somebody on reddit put is also played pretty straight. It's a goofy nonsensical game but it keeps a plain face on throughout. Yes that foot soldier utterly annihilated a cactus with a rocket launcher now keep moving soldier or else we won't be able to plant the z4 and stop the tactical cuke! Theirs no real jokes or sillyness made out of this situation like in the other entries much like pvz 1 once again where its played pretty straightforward.
Plants let out cries of pain when shot and even release a bit of animated greenish yellow blood alongside leaves and small bits of vines. They are also very bright looking with visible veins and root in their
The zombies themselves also have a bit of a green tint to them and their eyes are bloodshot. Frankly i wish they kept this in gw2.
In gw2 zombies were the star of the game but gw1 loves the plants as you can spawn in flowerbeds, see signs saying plant eat free, and even statues of them acting like local heroes in chomp town alone.
Theirs also stuff like the zombot minecarts on jewel junction and the chomposaurus skeleton that add to the maps.
Even the characters have some cool details like sky troopers zpg missile visibly being on his back when ready to fire or plasma peas stars on his body (gw1 plasma pea design supremacy).
Even the stickerbook and upgrade descriptions are pretty fun to read such as sky troopers ammo breaking the sound barrier, baseball stars baseballs being filled with lead to do more damage, or plasma pea shooting entire universes.
6. The aftermath of gw1.
Gw1 is a highly rated games by its players scoring a over 4 stars out of 5.
Looks familiar doesnt it.
Critical reception was however a bit less favorable ranging from 6-8 from critics the main complaint being that while the game was good. It was just lacking content overall and the required online connection could be a pain (seriously popcap i just want to play ops by myself by more than 5 minutes). Shortly after the success of gw1 a sequel was announced that would anwser a lot of these problems.
Gw1 is now a decade old and i gotta say its still fun to just jump into and play a match every once in a while even today with a health playerbase on ps3 from my experience however it can be rough going back to after the improvements of gw2. Especially how much people abuse the respawn to avoid an honest end. Agreggiosuly against chompers that genuinely get them. Not that this makes gw1 bad but just shows how gw2 was able to build upon a great system that needed tuning.
I've seen some saying to remaster/remake the game do to its age and I don't really agree for a few reasons.
· The game still has a somewhat healthy playerbase (at least on ps3 as i can see) and the true next gen console scene really hasnt arrived yet as the ps5 and xbsx havent really skyrocketed past expectations as of late.
· The game could still just be ported to platforms like steam or switch with enough tampering, maybe just using the last gen versions of the game since they seem less requiring. A steam port was apparently an idea but it seems dead at the moment sadly.
· What could it really add to the game? It still visually holds up really well and gw1 while enjoyable can't really have much new content without just being something for a gw2 sequel.
Maybe they could just make the game playable for ops solo offline or add AI matches/solo garden ops with AI (ngl this would be a tempting buy for me then if it was added to a switch port or something), some balance changes maybe? I just don't see anything new gamemode wise capable of being added with gw1 outside of that scrapped chomper infection mode.
· Gw1 was a game that released at the right time and I don't think it would necessarily be as succesful as some think alongside the "where gw3" comments it would bring about from some as we now have a lot more tf2 inspired class based shooters to play from these days.
· Studio and shooter franchise dead. Thats a bit of an issue if i must say.
I'm gonna try and end this on a positive note though. How did you guys get into garden warfare 1 and what was favorite time in it? Mine was when i first started playing online and ten chomper players coordinated a burrow on our team at once by staying perfectly still on suburban flats main road. Only me as a engineer on a jackhammer and an all star tackling like mad got out of there.
Main street is my favorite map as overrunning a city as zombies just feels so right. Also cob cannon returns in this finale.
Edit: It's now the actual day and its fun to see how much the community cares with gems like this being released and the older youtubers playing the game one more time.
Maybe with how much fans have put passion into the td fangames (how are we getting ones that now look more interesting than pvz3) we can one day get someone to make a shooter fangame or get to the point in a few years where someone makes a new ip with similarities to scratch that gw itch. Especially since it seems we will likely never get another true follow up to gw from popcap/EA
