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.
14. Studio shutdown, the nintendo switch, and gw2 steam.
So bfn was a failure and a few months later popcap vancouver officially became motive vancouver and a lot of the dev team left. Welp, this is the end.
But wait theres a new trailer for bfn. A port for the nintendo switch? Well that's sucky timing given that the game just stopped receiving content.
But wait the switch port is unironically the best version in some regards? Yep
While ops has only four pot placements, turf is the only permanent gamemode at 8v8 and pve regions are now only playable solo the switch overall brought in several qol fixes.
Players can now pick the prize maps they want to complete and cosmetics were cut in half price wise to 15,000.
You can truly play offline. This should be a base feature for all 3 games but I'll take a win where I can get it.
There are no rainbow stars. Everything in the game can now be bought with coins.
The switch version is also strange as bfn on switch was actually registered as top selling on Amazon. Although take that with a grain of salt since I dont remember much else being out at the time.
Sub reddit members of gw also have pictures of places like Walmart also bothering to put up advertisements for the game on switch. I get the feeling this somehow did more than most of the games advertising.
I wish we could see the sales records of these games.
Even though the switch port was apparently well received it wasn't going to bring back bfn and I simply wonder what could've been for this series.
Even worse is that bfn on switch was the first time the frostbite engine was able to be ported over so pvz paved the way for any other ports of that engine.
Gw2 also later came out on steam and it absolutely buried bfn's all time player count several times over. Gw2 on steam didn't get marketing either but it was clear what game was preferred.
15. My idea for garden warfare 3.
So what would I have done for a gw3?
I would have made gw3 the end of a trilogy but focused on a few things.
The main one is the overall plot: With the plants and zombies conflict spiraling out of control across time and space and stealing their treasure the gnomes step in to regain control and exact revenge. This will lead to all three factions fighting each other and tie into gameplay at times.
The new maps and aesthetics will also be mostly gnome based and do to time travel shenanigans old maps will be brought back but altered with rifts in the sky and some changes/gnomoverse patches of land. This will be my way of bringing old maps back but altering them just enough to fit all classes. If this wouldn't work then only period appropriate classes.
A skyboxes idea from a mod on reddit:
Two new maps I've thought up would be:
A gnomiverse team vanquish map. This map will take place in the gnomiverse and play like normal but their will be a twist. Some ideas:
* A singularity from Infinity time roams the map and will either instavanquish or drain health of anyone caught in it.
* Time is distorted at random with some effects such as traveling forward in time and instantly reloading main weapons and bypassing ability cooldowns, players will get affected by time speeding up or slowing down movement speed and so on.
* Gravity randomly goes wacky and allows for low gravity jumping for a time
* Gnomes roam the map and attack anyone they see. In vanquish confirmed they can take orbs to deny points, put suburbination points back to neutral, and force a gnome bomb reset or deliver it to the closest enemy base in gnome bomb.
A 3rd AI team may be weird to balance but I wanted the map to stand out this way.
A turf map that has plants try to stop a zombie expedition into the gnomie verse. Certain points will have hazards like singularities or gnomes attacking both groups.
The final point will have both teams fighting each other and gnomes to capture a king of the hill styled clock.
This is the hands of time and both sides want it to stop the other from perfected time travel unbound by any butterfly effects.
If plants win we cut to the pvz 1 lawn where a small flower panicks as a zombie approaches only for it to be comedically eaten by chomper and the pair to celebrate as the sun shines on this new bright day.
If zombies win than a zombie is seen trying to crack a wall nut on the lawn only to give up when z mech shows up tapping him on the shoulder. A loud crunch is heard as dark clouds gather as zomboss's laughter can be heard as more zombies approach the defenseless house.
The ending is essentially either team time travlling unabated to change history in a significant fashion.
We can change this if you guys think the idea stinks.
A new gamemode with a few ideas: Gnomeageddon.
Some ideas:
-plants and zombies work together to fight off gnomes as long as they can.
-the map is divided in two and the last team standing wins. Players get infinity shard points to buy things to mess over other teams like in pikmin multiplayer such as dropping airstrikes on the other side of the map.
-bo2 zombies grief styles match where the teams just can't hurt each other and who ever has the last man standing on the end of the round wins. If both go down then it's based on points.
A few other changes would be qol mainly.
* solo play now allows the player to choose team layouts by picking specific classes/variants for slots and allows them to choose what spawnables the AI can spawn. Want only flag and heal spawnables boom. Only newspaper vs doomshroom in turf? Boom there you go. Want only a team of tank commanders and cosmic brainz against fire peas and iron citron? Here you go.
* The gw2 upgrade system will now have the bfn point limit to avoid the meta builds being spammed.
* bfn qol such as peashooter and engineer continuing to fire as long as the button is held and not being able to see enemy markers unless marked by a variant like scuba soldier. However ally markers would remain but in the detailed gw icons. Also keep the cooldowns for gatling and such determined by ammo fired.
* Imp punt keeps the bfn attributes of only 100 damage unless on direct hit.
* spawnables prices/rarity changed and units like bonk choy are buffed.
*teleporters can be built on either position to give players freedom of choice to avoid mass tele camping.
