Next Game Idea: Personal Neighborhood
As the second part of the 2 hubs, I’ll be covering the one more closely linked to GW2’s amazing Backyard Battleground; the Personal Neighborhood. Like that feature, you can leave it wide open for any...
Forum Discussion
This idea sounds really cool! 😇
This idea seems to combine the Backyard Battleground in GW2 and Giddy Park in BfN, but it builds more upon the idea of the Backyard Battleground. Being able to personalise your neighborhood would sound quite exciting, and would be something that I would like to see in a potential future shooter. Having a tutorial seems like a new way to benefit new players if they had not played a PvZ Shooter before or are new to PvZ. However, it should either be skippable for more experienced players or the tutorial should mainly cover content that would be new to this shooter (less content that has been in previous shooters). Bringing back a lot of the content from the previous shooters, such as character booths, Rux and the Stickerbook, as well as the other more essential content, and being able to access them from this personal neighborhood seems really useful. This personal neighborhood could be the area that you always spawn in whenever you first boot up the game. If we ever got a new shooter, since many players would prefer a GW3 type game instead of a BfN 2, it would more likely be more beneficial to build upon the idea of an expanded Backyard Battleground, rather than building on Giddy Park.
Having your entire Personal Neighborhood be really large and customisable means that players would be able to put their creative skills to the test, and you can show what customisations you have done to other players, whether it is just friends or other players in general, or you could keep it to yourself. It would be really interesting to see what some more creative players come up with as well. I would really like the idea of being able to expand the size of your neighborhood, perhaps you would be able to expand your personal neighborhood in any direction by paying Coins or something similar for a designated amount of land. It could start with pretty much only the Plant and Zombie base, the necessities and the war zone in the middle, but after you reach a certain rank or if you pay a certain amount of Coins, you can expand on it in certain directions (I am sure there would be a limit though). Having lots of choices is what would could each player's own neighborhood very unique. Perhaps certain customisations are only available from Rux for a limited time, and rarer customisations would be available much less often, meaning if you really want a specific rare customisation that Rux sells, you may have to wait really long periods of time, but you would look forward to getting it.
This idea of the Personal Neighborhood also reminds me of some of those sandbox games out there (such as Minecraft), where the aim of those games are to build, mine and basically do whatever you would want. The personal neighborhood would allow you to build as you like, similar to the sandbox games, while also allowing you to get other players to join and visit your neighborhood. This is something you would be able to work on freely, at your own pace, and you could do this if you do not want to play in Multiplayer. This idea also reminds me of those building kind of games, where you try to expand your empire or something (I do not generally play those sorts of games though), because of the abilities to build on your land, customise it and expand it. Some items could possibly be unlocked automatically as your overall rank in the game goes up, for instance, for every 100 ranks you gain on your characters, you unlock a new and exclusive sort of customisation, meaning that you and your neighborhood would benefit by playing the game for long amounts of time and it might encourage players to level up most or all of their characters. I do notice that, in the current shooters, that some to most players never reach a particularly high rank, as they are not interested in using certain characters or maxing out their characters. However, who knows, these exclusive customisations could provide incentive? To randomise this, there could be a specific set of exclusive customisations only obtained by ranking up this way, and the game would give one to you randomly whenever you level up 100 ranks or something, and this will continue until you hit max rank, meaning that if you are after a specific customisation, you may have to nearly hit max rank to get. There could also be a specific customisation, and a really rare one, that you get if you hit max rank?
In these neighborhoods, perhaps seasonal or limited-time events can happen at specific points of the year, where certain items can be bought, which can customise your personal neighborhood even further. If some of these items would change throughout the years, it would open up even more ways of exclusively customising your neighborhood (like a Battle Pass that changes over time).
To keep this neighborhood idea interesting, hopefully it would be supported for a long time, such as adding new customisations and updates over time, adding new features, adding new lands possibly or something that will greatly improve the replayability of the neighborhood (so it will never truly be boring, even after a long time). Being rewarded while doing certain actions or activities in the neighborhood sounds like an awesome idea as well, which means that you can simply play around in your neighborhood to earn rewards, you are not required to play in Multiplayer. Perhaps if they made it so you could play around in your Personal Neighborhood while offline as well even?
In Conclusion
I would really like to see a Personal Neighborhood or a similar feature added to a new shooter. It would be an expanded variant of the Backyard Battleground (which is already really cool, and fairly expansive already). It seems like a really awesome way to show off your creative passion, as well as having a way to switch up the look of your hub if you so desired. There would also be really good replayability as you would be able to change the look of your neighborhood when you wanted, and not only that, but you can also unlock more items to customise it as you progress through. You can show it off to your friends, have hours of entertainment perfecting and working on the look of your personal neighborhood and more.
That is it from me! 🙂
@TheSprinter85 You hit on a lot of the ideas and goals I have for this idea! The Backyard Battleground is to this day, one of the best things I've ever seen in any game and it boggles my mind that we don't see things like it more often. It didn't have as much customization as I wanted, and the idea of expanding that, allowing players to personalize it as much as they can, and a good place to spend time and coins as well as being your home base and where you log into when you play.
For the area more like Giddy Park so you can have free form open battles, I also have: https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Next-Game-Idea-The-Public-Battlefield/m-p/10514009#M31095 . I also like Giddy Park as an idea, I just feel that like many ideas in BfN, it was never fully realized.
The only part I really disagree with you on is the limited time Rux items, barring seasonal items like feastivus decorations. I really want the next shooter to avoid FOMO so while the game would likely have a battle pass system, my idea is that once the battle pass is over, all those items are permanently available in the Rux store. I posted about my ideas for the economy awhile back, I may repost it after going over the Word document first to refresh it though.
But yes, the goal here is to give us reasons to login and play a lot, visit those free roam zones to unlock special buildings, paint schemes and decorations, to play PvP games, and to spend those coins to avoid the coin issue in BfN.
Extra Idea: Decorations: In addition to buildings, I was thinking about all those banners, postings, and the like we see all over the place in the current 3 games. Perhaps these could be placed on buildings as well and would be unlocked via playing various game modes, via Rux, and the battle passes as well.
I have the 'Art of Plants vs. Zombies' book (no shocker I'm sure), and beyond that, seeing some of the ideas around the net that show off ideas for the games shows just how much variety we could have for not just maps and objectives for all modes, but also for customizing our neighborhoods.
And of course these, that have been linked before: https://www.hazetoonz.ca/gardenwarfare
There are so many ideas that we've seen and maybe be stored unseen in the PopCap team's storage that could be used for the next games, especially a new shooter! Thanks to PvZ2 and GW2 we have time travel, the moon, and beyond! GW1 focused on Suburbia, BfN of course focused on Neighborville, neither of which are bad, but the sky isn't the limit in PvZ, we can go so much further beyond, but even if we focus on Suburbia again, the variety of what PopCap has done and can do with even mundane buildings and locations, is simply amazing, and one reason why I love PvZ so much.
Edit: a lot of these have of course been used, but not all of it, and there are others I haven't linked as well.
@Iron_Guard8I really wonder what early gw1 would look like with those concepts still as cactus canyon looks like a spoof of area 51 or some sort of listening post.
Driftwood shores artwork showed a swat soldier manning a mounted machine gun ontop of a stranded submarine firing blue lasers at a retaliating mega flower.
Moon base z was gonna focus on stinky cheese ray (I'm glad they chose an eclipse with the crystal mining instead personally) and the pieces were gonna be mined by enslaved gnomes which is pretty dark in context.And while they are in frontline flats background it shows the machines zombies used to repurpose houses to their liking.
The bfn concept art that's barely in there kinda makes me sad as its just further proof that they probably rushed the game and what we do see is imo more interesting than what we got in game as it seems to have more graveyards and such.
And of course there was the infamous gravedigger class and edgelord soldier who to be fair, I think he could make a great variant skin.
@Iron_Guard8Agreed, the Backyard Battleground is one of the coolest features that I have seen in the GW series. There were some customisations you could unlock by opening the Chests around the place or completing specific activities in the game, but that was really the only customisations that could be placed, and there would only be limited places where they could be placed. I will check out the Public Battlefield idea and post my thoughts on that as well.
Good point with the limited time items actually - if there was those players who could not play often and they were unable to get their hands on some really cool limited items, it would be unfair to those players. Perhaps instead those items would be quite rare to come by, but they would be sold from time to time so if players missed out the first time, they could save up and wait for it to appear again, then buy it, so they do not suffer from FOMO? The seasonal items could simply appear a solid once a year, on the other hand, for a decent amount of time, but only during a specific time of the year.
I've had a lot of fun reading through your new game ideas and they are extremely cool ideas! 😃
- @TheSprinter85 I'm glad about the removal of limited time items as it created the painful fomo system that plagued the prize maps in bfn.
The system you present sounds like rux in gw2 with his items coming back every once in a while.
Seasonal stuff should stay seasonal but last a fair amount of time.
The chests were cool in BB but once they ran out the map became emptier but you still had the neat little side quests like snowglobes and dead fish.
