I always told people to play GW1 prior to GW2 and GW2 up until BfN, and yes, I encourage people to play BfN now. Normally, I'm the first of my friend group bored with a game and looking to try something new but the GW games have held my attention for a long time, especially GW2 thanks to the private matches and quests. There's just so much to love! Where else can I plant Z4 to stop a tactical cuke, or fight against a zombie with a silly hat over a pirate ship, or claim a taco stand for Doctor Zomboss? For me, BfN has replaced GW2 even with the issues it has as I feel 'done' with GW2. Getting the final community stickers and the fact that the team has largely moved over to BfN has meant that while I still login to GW2, it's mostly just to remind myself of the 2k+ hours I put into that game and why I loved it so much.
I do love BfN too, but I worry about it with the issues we are dealing with. Both GW games had their own issues and still do (I logged into GW2 last night and again was a Sunflower in the zombie base), and GW2 had serious problems at launch, so I'm sure we can get past the problems, but the sooner we can move forward the better. The idea of getting brand new characters is far more exciting to me than trying to balance another toxic/electric/frost/etc. variant for the basic characters and the free roam areas are fantastic, so the potential for this game is massive. I haven't seen a single player playing as a boss which is great news. The lack of detonation characters and being frozen all the time by arctic troopers and frozen citrons is certainly a nice change as well.
I would love to see a design philosophy document for BfN and the reasons for the many changes they made. At least some of them appear to make the game more team focused, but I 'm very curious about the process and the rationale behind them. I am not attacking these changes, whether I 100% agree with them or not, but am very interested in the how, the why, and the plans for the future.
There's many ways they could fix the prize bulbs but one thing I do like about them is that getting XP once maxed level actually doing something is great. Barring when they added the Twilight Chomper, I hadn't had my XP in GW2 do anything for a very long time. The prize bulbs must be easier to get than they are now, but there are steps in the right direction in BfN, even with how great GW1 and 2 are. I stand by my earlier comments that the game should have been delayed a few more months and with much more open testing before being released to founders, much less the full release, but I'm going to break with my normal pessimism (not only is that glass half empty, whatever is in there is probably toxic), and keep playing BfN and encouraging others to do so, as I'm really having fun in spite of the problems, once the problems have been fixed and we get other improvements, it's going to be amazing.
