6. Gamemode downgrades, sprinting, and ttk.
I'll break these down one by one.
- Turf takeover: Turf had some very weird changes made. Instead of a small point they were now huge and had objects inside to hide behind.
A single defender could stall all progress despite the point being filled with attackers unlike the gw system of having more attackers start progressing the bar.
Now the bar is in three intervals and if you don't capture those intervals your teams progress will go back down.
I dont really like this as it makes defenders just stall the game beyond belief. Even an invisible nightcap on a fountain can stall all progress even if the entire zombie team is in the zone which is dumb.
In a 6v6 format it wouldn't be so bad but this is a 12v12 gamemode with attacking npc allies/enemies. The overtime system also shows this.
Pots are also too spread out to really support each other or the point in any meaningful way. In gw there were positions to support each other in times of crisis.
Some turf objectives are now payloads and while I get what they are trying to do it once again causes both teams to ignore flanks since the main objective is only on one path. This is why seeds of time tried to add secondary objectives with the drawbridge levers.
- Team vanquish: 8v8 just wasn't good for this mode imo. Since most are based off of pve maps sprinting across large gaps is required and yet that combined with the smaller team numbers I feel like it takes way too long to actually find other players to fight.
In gw even smaller team sizes had more fighting going on because the maps were better paced/sized.
It also drags out matches making them a slog to sit through at times.
- Vanquish confirmed: every problem with team vanquish but multiplied. It just drags way too much for my liking in bfn.
- Suburbination: The change to need two points to even start scoring is horrible as it eliminates the rather close games of gw that could flip to ones advantage if played well. In gw1 I was able to make a come back of a 60-29 deficit as plants and won a stacked odds game of 2v3 made 3v4. The final score was 100-94 I think. These unimaginably close games dont really exist in bfn and the game once again drags because of it.
- Gnome bomb: A good change made was needing to pick up the gnome by holding a button instead of just grabbing it instantly.
However sprinting is what destroyed this mode as carriers can't get away in time.
The class changes also made superbrainz the worst carrier in the whole game while funnily enough branium basher is the best thanks to mobility. He has no real options to defend himself from being run down and attacked from outside the range of his charged fists.
Camping the points was also far too reliable as engineers could just set up heavy helpers.
Also while all 3 of these modes were made into mixed modes they were still dead. They really need to push players to play these modes by some incentive.
-Ops: Ops was just butchered. What was once a test of your team and abilities became a snoozefest of boring and limited wave variety that was far too easy even on the highest difficulty.
Elite bosses were a neat idea but once again were too bland and far too easy.
Some bosses like giga garg being removed and gargantaur being reworked into that style also mean that original bruiser gargantaur that would run you down has essentially been deleted from the game.
Bitter dill is really the only truly new boss and since big stump was removed were still only at 4 truly unique plant bosses that aren't boss hunt characters.
Pots and bots cooldowns make strategy essentially worthless as you'll never be able to place interesting combos and if they fall your just out of luck until the cooldown finishes which is even more aggravating if your playing solo.
Getting downed is no longer a potential domino effect into a team wipe where your remaining team has to weigh the options of trying to bunker down with the pots to defend the base or saving you.
Also no solo ops with ai even after solo play was added why?
Remember how variants also helped wave difficulty/variety. On higher levels you could be attacked electricians, toxic brains, and iron citron. This shaked up the difficulties so much and made it to where you'd have to plan your defenses around what may show up.
Certain enemies also aided bosses like torchwood getting all the fire variants, big stump getting armored, disco got dancers, garg had blitzers, and so on. Sunflower queen summoned mystic flowers as her guards at low health where in bfn she can only summon stock.
You had special waves comprised of newspaper zombies or only goats. Camo ranger skipping wave timers and ambushing you.
All of this is gone in bfn.
I actually made a post a while back about how the ai is actually downgraded I legit studied this thing like an endangered species to know what it does and trust me when I say the gw ai is better in ops.
7. Fall off and ttk, overheal disaster, baffling design choices, and animations.
One thing that annoyed every player was bfn's rocky ttk which was not great to say the least and that could be attributed to one thing: Fall off
Damage fall off is where a projectile you shoot deals less damage the further it travels.
This is a primary balancing tool in games because dying from a full damage shot from half the map away just feels cheap.
Bfn however never implemented it and it hindered the balance choices going forward.
Instead of fall off they increased spread and bloom which absolutely gutted characters like imp who yes does fall off at longer ranges thanks to spread is suppose to be rewarded with fast ttk in a close range fight but since he's still doing baby numbers for all ranges it doesnt matter if he attacks close or not because his damage will never reward him for close quarters combat ambushes.
Snipers also have a hard time because every character can just hit them for full damage across the map and vanquish them quickly.
It just sucks to think you'll escape a fight in bfn only to get vanquished anyway because they're still hitting you for full damage.
However I think this can be traced back to two design decisions: overheal and sprint.
Healing in bfn is far more powerful while being less useful in bfn.
Let me explain. In gw healing and regen was slower than bfn but it also had several uses in that it cured status effects.
Healing canceled afterburn, freezing slowdown, and being toxic.
In gw2 you can regen to full health but it's slow even with upgrades and healing is a far better option.
Zombies could heal multiple people with stations and heal zombies but it was slower than the heal beam and you had to stay with your healing source.
Heal beam and flower were better but were one target only or burst healing.
While your harder to vanquish you can still be put down easily even with being healed thanks to relatively quick ttk.
In bfn though regen is far faster except when sprinting. Healing also heals much faster and even provides overheal.
The only status effect to dispel in multiplayer is afterburn which no longer vanquished players and for plants its ice which rarely shows up and no longer freezes players. Why did they remove something that incentivised healing?
Overheal makes trying take down a healed target annoying as they have extra health and are being healed at a faster rate.
Scientists can heal multiple people at a faster rate but they can now also move with them and throw an instant activating sticky heal thing.
This means the weakness of waiting in one place to heal is gone as you can just stay on the move with multiple people and not have to weigh options or risks.
Upgrades in bfn also could grant overheal so you don't even need a healer to pull these off.
Since the heal rate is faster than some characters damage/fire rates it makes fighting healer duos in bfn a pain (in founders especially) and I imagine it's why they didn't add fall off in bfn because it would have made them too strong.
Sprinting also means players could easily escape at range thanks to weaker chip damage they can sacrifice the overheal to.
Now some more of the other balance choices in bfn were also weird.
Remember when imp was completetly invulnerable when calling his mech. How he doesn't get vanquished even when you've defeated him?
Why does imp just get a second life for literally no risk?
Chomper being able to two shot snipers from range.
Why did they think gravity grenade not shutting off mobility abilities was a good idea? Half the plant team can just escape now and invalidate the only hard counter imp has to some of the plants that will destroy him in seconds. Also why does citrons roll now do imp slaying damage?
Animations were overall downgraded in bfn as well.
There are some good taunts and the facial animations on zombies are pretty good but what are those reload animations?
Imp doesn't open his guns, a mech doesnt blow apart, and soldier reloads in a bland fashion.
My theory is that taunt/facial animations were made good because some costumes/taunts could be purchased by stars and thus microtransactions if impatient.
They dont even have idle animations in bfn like scientist tossing his warp remote, superbrainz fist clench, or Rose's side strut.
The visual effects for explosions and projectiles were downgraded pretty hard. Soldier doesnt even leave behind paintball splats anymore. Only generic bullet holes.
These videos show what I'm saying:
https://youtu.be/qUviVtTgU4s?si=LLVPgQV5KjOMhmHY
https://youtu.be/YgGigD0v8Lc?si=xByHOo3tC6G6GhWe
8. The battlepa- I mean prize map and a tedious grind.
So instead of adding more items to the reward o tron popcap instead chose monthly prize maps where the players would earn bulbs through normal gameplay until they could unlock items.
This sounds fine as it's not a microtransaction system but then we saw that just ONE prize bulb would cost 10,000 XP!
This is on a board where the lowest item cost is 3 bulbs. That's 30,000XP!
The fastest way to get these was pvp but remember that bfn pvp was an absolute nightmare to play at the time that could randomly give out and boot you from the game at any moment so most went to the pve regions and even still it was a grind.
Exploits like deadbeards xp pellet per shot were found but it was just tedious to do and the devs quickly patched it out.
It was so bad they eventually lowered it to 7500 xp but that was still too much and it was lowered again to 5000 we have now and yet even when you play pve over pvp you can still feel that grind.
If anything this worked against the game as players got more and more fed up with how broken the online was while trying to get bulbs and may I remind you at the time we never knew if these prize map items would ever come back again at the time or be moved into the regular loot pool like how deep rock galactic (great game btw) handles its seasons.
They introduced daily quest bulbs but only 2 and they were very specific such as vanquishing 15 players as a class which before solo play could only be done by grinding the pve regions or battle chests for offline.
Compare this to gw2 for a moment where to get stars you had specific quests yes but a lot of them were pve accessible such as vanquishing 50 zombies as sunflower which all you had to do was just go into the backyard for not even 5 minutes on easy and boom your done. Very convenient and simple.
The gw2 system ontop of giving stars also gave an xp boost for completed quest.
If this xp boost was in bfn bulbs would've been much more bareable and it would feel like players are actually accomplishing something by completing quests while rewarding them for constantly playing the game.
Also if you don't care about cosmetics and such than half of the prize maps essentially offer you nothing.
Players also ranked up so fast they burned through unlocks and popcap tried adding the grandmaster ranks to have incentive to keep playing except you get nothing from getting them.
9. Rainbow stars. GW2 vs BFN. And the implosion of ranked battle arena
Rainbow stars were eventually introduced in bfn to add another currency to let players get special costumes, taunts, and etc.
In bfn however you can slowly unlock them by completing specific tasks in the weekly mode instead of just you know, completing the game? Even if you win if you didn't complete the specific tasks than no rainbow stars for you buddy!
The stars were also pretty limited only getting 10, 20, and then 30 for completing every task. That's 60 total stars for every weekly mode.
I believe this is most likely do to rainbow stars being more monetized in bfn as they can now be purchased and the costumes all cost well into the hundreds or even thousands range compared to their functionality of just opening a chest for key/character or classic gw1 items in gw2.
Given the math to earn one bfn 1000 star costume from nothing you would need to play 17 weekly modes and earn all the stars for them. That's just cruel. You would literally unlock Torchwood and hovergoat over the 4 months faster. And that's one costume!!!
In gw2 you could also exchange stars you got for quests for rainbow stars. Yes it could be tedious but it allowed those who could not play pvp to still unlock things at their own pace. This is what I did before xbox live.
However there was another opportunity made in bfn to get rainbow stars faster: Ranked battle arena.
So Popcap made the only new mode in the game ranked now. Oh well lets see how its goi- ah poop.
Battle arena was easily one of BFN's most loved modes when the game released and why not? It was a new gamemode that genuinely shakes things up.
Being a 4v4 elimination mode where you couldn't reuse characters is actually a cool idea.
Ranked than proceeded to utterly gut this mode.
When people are playing a mode for fun the flaws aren't as noticeable for the average person but when actual rewards are on the line it can just be frustrating.
Balancing problems became very apparent as zombies had two immense advantages with space cadet and imp who at this point were practically invincible do to a mech just being a guaranteed second life and given that one player on the team could just pick them every round the zombies never ran out of the annoying buggers.
Since characters are now specialist over gw's generalists certain characters now are just downright better than others for the mode. Why would you pick rose when Citron is far better at supporting the team in this mode by blocking zombie abilities, can escape gravity grenade counters, and can actually finish people off from all ranges.
When a teammate left you are now actively in a snowball decline to the point entire matches devolved into 4v1. I got stomped in matches because my whole team just leaves after one round.
The unstable servers and bad hit detection also screwed over players or outright booted them before they won and penalized them.
Remember how superbrainz hitreg is trash well now it's being screamed in your face.
Imagine losing not because your enemy outsmarted you, played better, or had an ace in the whole ability. No you lost because your powers straight up DON'T WORK!
Imagine playing elden ring or something and you hit a boss and it recoils from the hit and yet it takes no damage and one shots you. That's what ranked battle arena and a lot of bfn was at times.
The frustrations also mounted in that while being max rank will get you rainbow stars it wont even be enough for ONE 1,000 star costume. Someone called that you needed 75 wins for max rank. What is this bs.
Oh and since everything is so unfun about this mode nobody wanted to play it so shortly afterwards it could take up to 3 minutes to find a match and even longer waiting for a full team!
It ruined a good mode. In fact when battle arena came back as a team vanquish map players loved it! It being made a weekly mode sucks since it's not available normally as it preserved its fun status by not making it so frustrating.
Could you imagine if ranked was still around with branium basher in the meta?
10. Content drought.
So heres bfn's full update list
https://plantsvszombies.fandom.com/wiki/Plants_vs._Zombies:_Battle_for_Neighborville
November: Food fight event goes live.
December: Feastivus festival goes live.
A new Team Vanquish map, Z-Tech Oozevoir, goes live.
January: Snow day festival goes live.
Velocity and drag distance added
February: Valenbrainz festival goes live.
Turf back to 12v12.
New Turf Takeover map Preserve Pastures goes live.
Shogun-Guard Legendary Upgrade for Kernel Corn goes live and can be unlocked through the prize map.
March: Luck O' the Zombie festival goes live.
Ranked battle arena added.
New arena layout with hazards switching from water, ooze, and cheese. Why wasn't map two in private play?
The Wizard zombie class goes live but must be earned through the prize map.
Shogun-Guard Legendary Upgrade for Kernel Corn can now be purchased from Rux as the Valenbrainz prize map is over.
April: Springening festival goes live.
Thorn Apart Legendary Upgrade for Rose goes live and can be unlocked through the prize map.
Wizard can now be purchased from Rux as the Luck O' the Zombie prize map is over.
May: Birthdayz festival goes live.
Steam Blaster Legendary Upgrade for Scientist goes live and can be unlocked through the prize map.
Thorn Apart Legendary Upgrade for Rose can now be purchased from Rux as the Springening prize map is over.
May: Tourist trap island added.
Added ai backfill. A very controversial decision at first but lobbies were getting thin all around. I think the idea is nice as having a bot fill in a 11v12 game is a good idea. The problem at the time was that the bfn bots were straight up busted like healing while vanquished or laser beaming their opponents down halfway across the map.
June: Garden Party festival goes live.
Steam Blaster Legendary Upgrade for Scientist can now be purchased from Rux as the Birthdayz prize map is over
July: Summer Nights festival goes live.
Brainium Basher 9001 Legendary Upgrade for Super Brainz goes live and can be unlocked through the prize map.
August: Summer DayZ festival goes live.
Brainium Basher 9001 Legendary Upgrade for Super Brainz can now be purchased from Rux as the Summer Nights prize map is over.
September: Fall festival goes live
Swarm characters (Wildflower and TV Head) will become available for purchase from Rux and can now be used in all game modes.
Wildflower and TV Head have gained a melee attack.
(unlisted) Additionally, the upgrades for the melee attack, Petal Powered Punch and Big Bite, were added into the game and is unlocked after reaching the Elite rank.
Added a new icon for vanquish feeds.
Text to speech button changed to Hold instead of Press.
Battle Arena is now available as one of many weekly events, it is no longer a default option within the Multiplayer Terminal.
The Time Warp crazy option was removed from Private Play. Why did they remove it? It was fun.
Modified bot AI field of vision and accuracy so that they behave more like an average player.
Numerous balance changes such as imp getting 15% mech armor and sprinting for mech.
March 2021: Nintendo switch version releases.
One problem you probably noticed is that major content really dried up. Wizard released but was it really unfair for plant players to expect at least one new character for them around the same time? A draw for the game is new characters but theres only one of them after a few months? I think even OW got new characters out faster.
A lot of these like tourist trap island also released clearly unfinished as some platforms had the ocean evaporate and had to have the map pulled and fixed.
Now lets address the elephant in the room: The covid pandemic.
Yes this did hurt the games update schedule but if anything with everyone in lockdown more people should've been playing but they weren't and even before Covid not a whole lot was being done for the game.
11. Tone, a sequel or not, and the comic problem.
So with all sequels you want one thing imo. To make the games feel like they take place in the same world.
Does gw2 feel like it's in the same world as gw1? Yeah we even see old locations come back in new ways.
In bfn they toned down a lot of gw2's more wacky environments and that's fine but it feels like they went overboard into just some being bland locationwise.
In gw when plants were shot they actually bleed an animated green blood and sound like they're in quite a bit of pain and gw1 has signs talking about how the end is near. It's a cartoonish apocalypse.
In BFN the plants don't have any animated blood and do almost childish acts like hitting the zombies factories with marshmallows and that's about all they really do defensively that isnt initiated by the zombies until preserve pastures which does follow a gw1 formula and give us super bitter dill which is actually a nice ending but its plot is just a redo of cactus canyon.
But how do the plants plan to deal with the zombies in gw1?
Oh yeah they planned to blow them up with the equivalent of a nuclear bomb. That seems a lot more surefire than a stationary mortar targeting one factory.
In gw2 the plants defending rose's castle and the frozen yeti king also seem like far more sensible options then trying to defend a giant marshmallow that has a port specifically for sucking up bombs might I add. Remember how the zombies specifically targeted the support structures of the tactical cuke with z4 and not just have a port built in for detonation they could just slide them into?
The plants also go on the offensive to destroy a zombot, zombie campus, and a giant magnet to create eclipses.
Someone on the subreddit said it best in that it feels like the gw teams are trying to win an actual war by defending important locations like Dave's mansion or attacking vital targets like the zombot mid construction.
Meanwhile in bfn some things just feel dumb. The zombies need a satellite launched into space to locate humans. Who they've already talked to... idk it's just hard to see how bfn citizens would've lasted five seconds against the gw zombies given how much more competent they were. Remember how theres a garg carrying the front of a house in gw2? Neither does bfn so the plot can happen.
There's also the drill that will alter a town's history by...deploying a comically large pole to display a tiny flag??? Why did the plants think this was a big deal again? Why does Dave mention aliens at the end?
There's also that weird censorship where they removed acidic from fume shrooms description.
I know pvz has always been family friendly but the newer entries like pvz 3 and bfn dont give anyone who dislikes it for being childish a worse leg to stand on and frankly I see why they think the way they do.
I've talked about it before but characters like zomboss went from a competent leader who treats his underlings decently to a * who berates them every five seconds for existing.
"Oh but it's more accurate to the comics"
Oh boy I need to talk about this.
Look just because something is in the comics does not mean it always fits the games and those that DONT READ THEM are just gonna be confused on why all these things are getting referenced.
"Whose mr Stubbins", "Whys zomboss a * suddenly", "Where did the variants go", "who's penny, and "what's neighborville, what happened to suburbia"?
"Oh well bfn isnt a gw game it's a spinoff".
Oh but it's ok for bfn to use gw2 models, assets, sound effects, alt ability names for upgrades, being internally called gw3, and flat out being referenced in the game by some outfits!
The citronaut skin mentions that he didnt her the memo that the battles not in space anymore and a town center medal mentions yeti king.
If it walks, quacks, and acts like a duck.....
Okay so gw2 is clearly canon so once again what happened to the variants. Did they all take each other out mortal kombat armageddon style? Did they just leave? Did all the zombies just crack and give up on brains for good?
There's also the lack of almanac so we have no little tidbits about the new characters. Remember how a few plainly stated why gw2 classes weren't in 1 like corn being overseas. It was a nice and simple explanation. In bfn I guess acorn and nightcap just wanted to watch all their plant friends fight for their lives before yeti king one shot the team while snapdragon finally decided he was done being an f tier pot, hit the gym, and got jacked.
Wizard got a backstory in a tweet but it's lame. He was apparently in another room and nobody bothered getting him. So they forgot about him and not the goat/party characters sealed away in another dimension in gw2? Ok.
You could have had a tongue in cheek description about how he finally got done raking in the cash from seeds of time since it was built by wizards.
I guess zomboss really is just dumber now. Its canon. It's in the lore guys.
So how did bfn even happen? Well most of this was in a comic included in an edition of bfn but what about the actual game?
In an update to the intro we got a newspaper about how zombies were trapped in a giant glass bell and then glass shatters onto it and another newspaper flops down and says they escape. Maybe this is what happens when you attempt to stop lasers and missiles with glass.
12. Map design, flanks, and verticality.
The maps in bfn just arent that good let's be honest.
A problem with a lot of bfn maps is that most are reused from pve and it shows blatantly.
I've said it before but change the artstyle and they become call of duty maps with how they're designed. Not much verticality, decentish cover in open areas, and designed to be ran through to find an opponent where close to mid ranged combat is incentivised.
In turf not many flank routes are good they don't diverge from the main path enough to be worth the effort for attackers and defenders can't really hold the line. The ai itself prioritizes rushing the front instead of bothering to flank and there is only one pot on these flank routes to defend them.
In a map like seeds of time the first point has two pots on both sides of the point to defend the flanks while protecting from direct assault to an extent. Gw1 on several points bothered hiding pots around corners for bonk choy/doom shroom setups. Bfn however leaves alot of them alone in a random spot on a flank. The preserve pastures finale has pots that wont even see action if nobody stops following the gargs.
In bfn there's no real reason to take a flank as there's very little tactical value outside of potentially catching someone off guard.
In gw teleporters incentivised flanking as they allowed your team to cut travel time to the point in half.
The flanks also allowed gw players to gain the high ground to attack enemies or flat out get all the way behind them such as Zygpt in seeds of time or driftwood shores buildings.
While gw2 maps weren't the best they also were more varied in locations as we had space, modern, and ancient times. The maps also had features to impact gameplay and shake them up much more than gw1.
The space maps have low gravity in outside areas, sandy sands has a sandstorm blow through the map obscuring vision, great white north has a snowstorm on one point, frontline flats has cannons, z tech factory has portals and the zombot roaming around, and more.
Bfn has minecarts, ooze, and cheese but nothing else and they're mostly ideas that have been done before better.
Also why does a nighttime pressure pier exist in pve but wasn't just copy and paste as a nighttime map in multiplayer? You're already reusing pve so just go all the way.
The sprint sections in turf are also mainly filler from what I've seen. Rarely any fighting happens in them and the game eventually spawns you far closer to the point. The 3rd capture point on peachy district's museum is a perfect example of this.
Why do cactus and deadbeard finally get verticality options in a game with nowhere for them to go!?
13. Behind the scenes disasters, the YouTube effect, and hero shooter burnout
So bfn is a mess but why they had three years since gw2 and it's the same team?
Well in the time between of three years another game was being made at popcap vancouver codenamed project hot tub.
This was an ambitious singleplayer title that I've already covered in a post below.
It was canned and a lot of money flushed down the drain so put on your tinfoil hats here.
With hot tub down and money gone the studio panicked and hastily threw together bfn to try and make money. We even see several things from this project make there way into bfn such as 80s outfit and plant/environment designs.
So bfn had poor marketing but why didn't youtube atleast help it somewhat? The zackscott gw videos had millions of views yet his bfn series petered out quickly.
Well I think this was do to the audience. The new game and character videos did well but afterwards just sputtered out. Sure they came back up in views when actual content came out for the game but overall youtubers said the game was not as good as gw1/2 for views.
There were sponsored videos from youtubers like glitch productions and h20delirious but the game still didnt skyrocket from sponsorship players.
I think most effective advertising is on TV anyway as not everyone watches youtube or specific YouTubers.
For the average viewer bfn doesnt really do anything new and outside of arena and pve thus offering no new gameplay experiences to rope them in. The artstyle and effects for explosions are less visually interesting to watch from a spectator's perspective.
Upgrades don't do enough to be interesting to a viewer and a new viewer who doesn't understand the system might think its just base kit.
Wolfy was probably the most well known example of this as he has stated multiple times he didnt think bfn was as fun as gw2 and even stopped playing it during its updates and while some gave him flack for this I think deep down a lot of players agreed with the mentality. He still plays gw2 every once in a while by comparison.
Krook also made a video interviewing multiple community youtubers and the mentality with all of them was the same: Bfn just wasn't as good or profitable for views as gw.
https://youtu.be/S2JDeQVCLm0?si=ymsQA28-T1Ycz0SP
Another thing I think hurt bfn was that we've seen it before a dozen times.
If I wanted to play a half baked overwatch with forced teamplay mechanics why would i not just play modern overwatch at this point?
The hero shooter genre has mostly run itself into the ground. People are tired of it being put in games where it didn't even really need to be, remember black ops 3/4 or battlefield 2042 with their unique specialists over a random soldier?
Adding new characters can seem cool but overtime roles start to overlap and muddy the waters of what characters are actually viable. Why pick just a healer when I can choose a far better healer who can actually damage people? That's what happened to Mercy in overwatch.
Why pick a hard sniper when sniper hybrids who are far better in 1v1s and group fights exist. Look at 80s vs deadbeard in bfn.
A lot of hero shooters try and have unique characters to stand out but a lot of them are frankly underdeveloped or bland especially since some corporations like blizzard have actively removed things from their games in order to avoid offending anyone. This leads to a lot of characters feeling a bit milquetoast.
Tf2 got it right but its characters aren't a really family friendly bunch and a lot time and effort went into the character design to make it distinct. This was 2000s valve after all.
Bfn came out at the time the genre had already ran itself into the ground and people were getting tired of it. Bfn also didnt really do anything unique or interesting enough that it wouldnt just blend into half a dozen other hero shooters. Pvz in 3d also isn't some new exciting idea anymore.
Payload and attack and defend maps? Ha, never seen that in a shooter before.
Even now we're seeing the collective groan with games like Concord. I remember a reddit comment saying "Looks like every other live service game we’ve gotten the past 5 or so years, but with mid-2010’s MCU dialogue".
The games steam and twitch numbers are not good with some even calling it doa.
The character designs are also getting blasted as just being unappealing.
Update: the game is below 60 players at times and its revealed this game was in development for 8 years aka back in 2016 when OW stormed the market. They struck with an iron that isn't even cold its frozen over at this point!
Also a 40$ live service in a genre where the most popular ones are free was doomed from the start.
Another update as of september 3rd: Concord is going offline. It died not even two weeks from launch.
After how badly blizzard fumbled overwatch 2's pve promises there could be a place for someone to take the crown but given how incompetent and malicious the modern gaming industry we will probably not see it, atleast not from a modern triple A developer.
The modern game market is also insaney competitive, and adding demanded fixes even a month or two after launch is long enough to have a lot of people walk away from the game before updates come. Halo infinite died on the spot when a ton of features fans requested were added in SEVERAL MONTHS after launch or not at all.
