How long was BfN in development for?
As the title reads, I'd like to know how much time team had to develop BfN, if there is any public info on that. I remember reading about people being excited for a Garden Warfare 3 in early to mid 2018. If I remember correctly, the devs were looking for some feedback from the community, which to me indicates the planning phase of BfN. If this is true, we can assume active development began around July 2018, which raises the following question:
- Why did they have so little time to make a 3rd PvZ shooter that had to live up to high expectations?
I'm asking this question because I would like to know if we are in a similar situation like gw2 was in after content updates slowed down. I guess BfN's current situation is much worse than what happened after gw2. Gw2 still saw some minor updates, but people were wondering if a gw3 would be made. If they supported gw2 with bigger updates for 1-2 years until the content updates slowed down and were reduced in size, this would also point the development of BfN starting in early/mid 2018. This would mean that there has never been a break in between the PvZ shooter's development phases, except for actively supporting the current one. Since the BfN team embarked on a journey to bring an old ip back to life, we can't be getting a new PvZ shooter from them after the same interval that was between gw2 and BfN. Does this mean that EA decided to 1) permanently cancel PvZ shooters 2) hand them to another team or 3) give the BfN team some variety until they start working on a new entry? These possibilities are ranked in order by what seems most likely to me.
I sincerely hope that another PvZ shooter will be made, either by the BfN team in a couple of years or by another team.
There was talk of the next game going as far back as 2016 when they were hiring AAA shooter designers for single and multiplayer aspects. Frontline Fighters was the last big update the game had for awhile and that was released in December 2016, so less than a year but we got a lot more new stuff for it than BfN got, and we knew by that time a new game was being worked on to some degree. It seems like it took longer than expected which is why we got Wall-Nut Hills for GW2, and then the outfits for Torchwood and Hovergoat later on as well.
Assuming they were working on the game in full after Frontline Fighters, that's just under 3 years till Founders. GW launched in 2014 ( February initially and June on PC) and GW2 launched and then in February 2016 GW2 launched for all platforms, with BfN hitting founders in September 2019. The shorter lead time between GW1 and 2 is likely due to less changes between them than BfN had, since BfN changed a lot of things while GW2 was more of an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary product.
This still looks to be not enough time as what we got has never felt finished. The team was smaller for BfN so that must have been a huge part of why, but it still seriously hurt the game as people at launch couldn't even play, and we still have serious issues with moving and shooting to this day.
As far as the future. It looks bad indeed after the sudden stop, especially after hearing they had something like 4 years of content being worked on. That being said, they may have just decided to take a break after being unhappy with how the game did for them, and will make another game once things have settled down and they will almost certainly try to recapture the magic that made GW and GW2 such hits. They know these games can make money, as they've seen that with GW and GW2. Had BfN been fully fleshed out and functioning, it would have fared better, but I'm thinking if they make a new game, I really want them to, it will be more akin to what succeeded; i.e GW and GW2, maybe taking some of the better aspects of BfN into account though as well.
