How a lack of variety (and variants) killed ops.
Warning: long post ahead.
When it comes to bfn ops many players hold it as a downgrade in regards to previous entries in pvz shooters and heres why.
1. Lack of variants=lack of enemies: by removing variants I'd argue ops suffered an even bigger loss of gameplay variety than multiplayer by losing special waves and difficulties built around the sub classes, a few examples of these being gw1's flag march where only flag zombies and soldier variants appeared with only tank commanders appearing on easy difficulty, or sneak attack where browncoats and camo rangers would spawn past your defenses and closer to the gardens.
Having variants created more problems for defenders in terms of issues to deal with that are not available in bfn such as zombies never having to worry about the waves using ice enemies that could freeze them or their spawnables in place and make taking damage due to being swarmed a real issue ir plants never having to worry about fire and toxic damage chipping away at their health and being a real pain on CRRRAZY, instead your fighting the same handful of enemies with the same handful of abilities.
2. Lack of special waves: gw1 and 2 had a variety of special waves that could significantly hurt teams not prepared for them such as AMBUSH in gw2 where there would be no resting period for a team to heal and fortify their defenses or a wave to rescue a champion where a team could gain a fifth member who was a champion class that would fight for the rest of the game and could even revive downed teammates or win the wave for the group.
Gw1 had the most brutal special waves as they were quite hard and would punish the player for failing such as turning off zomboss satellites that if failed would call a air strike on the plants position forcing players to dodge and would damage the garden, no damage to players, or having to defend mini gardens depending on player count, or variant dependable ones such as only wrestling stars combined with exploding fan imps/ gw2's artic troopers combined with yeti imps.
Despite relying on variants there were a few spawnables only waves in both hames such as grumps where only newspaper/map zombies would attack you, huge waves where a wave is twice as long and numerous, or improvised armor where armored zombies would attack.
3. Ai are limited and bosses dont have unique minions: bfn sadly removed iconic zombies from the game such as newspaper zombies, flag zombies, blitzers, karate zombies despite appearing in pve do not help zen sensei, saucer imps, backup dancers, and vampires.
In gw1 and 2 when a elite boss wave happened bosses would attack with unique minions such as backup dancers assisting disco zombie in gw1 and party variants aiding the fight in gw2, baron von bats had his vampire zombies that if unattended could wipe out defenses with their healing, Gargauntaur lost blitzers with the unique factor of being the only ai with player abilities that could send defending plants flying, yeti imps stayed, big stump was assisted with armored variants and spanwables such as rock pea in his waves, torchwood got fire variants, royal sunflower got a mystic flower army.
4. Elite bosses aren't enough and less bosses overall: bfn blended bosses together such as giga gargs and big stump being blended into torchwood and regular Gargs and the only truly new boss in bfn is bitter dill as the new plant bosses are ripped from boss hunt and the elite mechanics are reused for multiple bosses just delete 1/3 of thier health then usually lead them to a area on the map or relieve boss hunt ptsd 3 times and you win.
5. Baby difficulty and wave advancement: gw1 and 2 are noticeably harder than bfn due to actually punishing reckless team members and punishes teams by keeping a downed player out for the rest of the wave rather than just respawning after a few seconds, chomper is now able to eat zombies regardless of armor, shoot them from range, and use a poisionos crowd control ability allowing him to dispatch waves much faster without having to rely on a team to balance out his weaknesses because he now no longer has any crippling flaws that could get him elimnated in the wave.
Players can easily sprint away from combat.
Gardenator is tankier than gw2 ops despite less waves to go through.
Sunflower queens crit zone is now in her face so there is no strategy in attacking her belly when she is vulnerable.
Lack of evacuations that require teams to fight through a boss that shows up to stop you alongside moving through the map.
Set difficulty online in bfn.
Being in the center of the map prevents most forms of environmental death like being knocked off the map by a all star.
Bfn special waves such as no damage now only require that certain amount of damage not be done.
Cooldowns on spawnables leave them unavailable for most of the game forcing players to spam rocket bots and pea cannons, not to mention the lack of spawnables overall.
Overheal is another safety net that makes players even harder to vanquish.
Waves spawn in classes much faster due to a 5 wave format so no real buildup is achieved when they do arrive.
Wave format adds 25 seconds by pacing out enemy groups.
Thank you for reading this long post.
