Re: We need a new PvZ shooter

@Iron_Guard8A gw3 should simply build upon what 1&2 laid out before it seems to be the popular opinion and I agree how ever they definetly will need to improve after bfn and imo the community needs to ponder why bfn was made in the first place over a true gw3. Was it a smaller budget, overwatch, or something else?

Any way my wishlist for a gw3 would include:

1. New ai enemies that aren't reskins of browncoats for the 50th time. Send tv head and wildflower to the void or rework them but get them outta here!

2. Better ai all around as bfn's was definitely worse than 2's.

3. The animation and effect details have to improved as gw2's were way more detailed than bfn's. How the heck does a game with less effects to work with have them look worse than the ps3 port?

4. Don't completely shaft ops and the non turf maps in terms of design and layout.

5. Buff the pots, no exceptions.

6. New ops bosses that aren't reskinned boss hunts.

7. Bot support for all maps and modes.

8. Don't rush characters and maps or half bake them. Quality>quantity

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@stukapooka wrote:

@Iron_Guard8A gw3 should simply build upon what 1&2 laid out before it seems to be the popular opinion and I agree how ever they definetly will need to improve after bfn and imo the community needs to ponder why bfn was made in the first place over a true gw3. Was it a smaller budget, overwatch, or something else?

Any way my wishlist for a gw3 would include:

1. New ai enemies that aren't reskins of browncoats for the 50th time. Send tv head and wildflower to the void or rework them but get them outta here!

2. Better ai all around as bfn's was definitely worse than 2's.

3. The animation and effect details have to improved as gw2's were way more detailed than bfn's. How the heck does a game with less effects to work with have them look worse than the ps3 port?

4. Don't completely shaft ops and the non turf maps in terms of design and layout.

5. Buff the pots, no exceptions.

6. New ops bosses that aren't reskinned boss hunts.

7. Bot support for all maps and modes.

8. Don't rush characters and maps or half bake them. Quality>quantity

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I agree with this list (although if we get boss hunts back outside of Ops, they need to be shorter events, half an hour only to lose at times is too much time wasted) and am glad to see @PerniciousPea and @TheSprinter85 here as well! 

As far as BfN's budget, I don't know how it compares to GW2, although I have heard that GW did not have a huge budget and it's success was a surprise to EA, but I'm certain that the original success of OW (which is kind of ironic now), influenced what would have otherwise been GW3 rather than BfN. If they did make massive changes midstream that would explain why Founders was in such rocky shape.

As @PerniciousPea points out, a big part of the appeal of PvZ is it's silly atmosphere. I do like games like F.E.A.R. there are actually super gory but it's difficult to match the fun of PvZ, and I miss having stuff to unlock and an active shooter to play. All 3 games are still playable, but as they're in maintenance mode with no new content, we're in a kind of limbo. I'm wondering if they're eyeing PvZ3 to see how it does with all the changes (which are mostly good from what I saw), before they address the shooters again. 

There's a few YouTubers that built their entire career, or at least large chunks of it, on the shooters, so they could help build up interest for GW3, and they also show EA/PopCap that there are literally millions of people that would play/watch a new game, so it makes sense financially for them to pursue a new game, and sooner rather than later.

When I first heard of GW back in early '14, I was wondering how it would work with the plant players being unable to move! Then I saw a trailer and picked it up immediately as it was on PC by then and it became my favorite multiplayer shooter until GW2 came out in 2016. I have played others of course; Paladins, TF2, OW, Gigantic, and a couple others, but none have been as fun as the PvZ ones and I have more hours in GW2 alone than any MMO I've played and those things are designed to drain your time away! 

I never liked CoD and it's only gotten worse. I did play BF:1942 a lot but only with friends and bots, but generally, I don't enjoy real world style shooters at all as I find them boring and mundane, they have to have some kind of twist or be fantastical like Doom, Heretic, Dusk, or Hexen. This puts the PvZ shooters right up there and I while I used to play a lot of TF2 for similar reasons, I haven't played it all that much since GW2 launched. It's hard to enjoy other shooters after being a Sunflower with an ice cream sandwich on my head, shooting lightning at a zombie foot soldier with 3D glasses and a big foam finger hat while we battle over a taco place and Crazy Dave proclaims that he once lost a game of checkers to a sandwich. 

@stukapooka ref. the very last part of your message where you write the following. I quote,
..........It would make financial sense to do a gw3 but at the same moment they also probably lost a lot of money on bfn so they would be reluctant to put more money into a series they view as a failure despite the fact that bfn's failure was their own fault for messing with the formula in the first place.

Unquote.

 

I'm no marketeer, but considering how busy the two GW games are at the moment, and I suppose it's the same for BfN. (Still haven't got round to playing it yet. Am pretty busy at the moment) I was just wondering how many are currently playing the 2 x GW games and BfN. 

 

It's quite seldom that I don' get into a full board when playing on either the East Coast, West Coast or European servers. In fact, I get the impression that those servers are nearly just as active as when prior to them being abandoned; so there surely must be a case for introducing a GW3. It would be interesting to find out whether my impression is wrong. If I am, I'll have to abandon all hope that there will be a new game. 

 

@PerniciousPea even on PC (NA east for me), where the population is apparently not as good as it is on consoles, I have to focus on TT but GW sees matches that range from 6v6 to full, usually on the fuller side, GW2 may drop to 8v8 temporarily but it is often full (although hackers can be a pain, they aren't as rampant as some say), and BfN is harder to measure as people leave and bots pop in, but it was comparable to GW as far as population the last time I played.

So, if the least populated platform is still going well, and you can't get GW or GW2 on Steam which would likely make them perform even better where I play, then that means that XBox and Playstation are even more populated, plus the Switch for BfN only, a new game, if done well, would be at least as popular as the current stable of shooters as we're playing 3 games in maintenance mode, so people are slowly moving away as they feel 'done' with the games. If they can keep up a decent pace of new content on top of a great new game, something like the DLC we had for GW and GW2 early on, they could easily have another hit. We need new stuff to do in the established PvZ universe, as part of the fun is discovering stuff; this is why the backyard battleground from GW2 and the BfN free roam regions were so exciting. Stuff like finding the golden gnomes, solving puzzles, the snow globe hunt, and just finding new locations spark something within us.

This doesn't guarantee a new game, and many popular IPs have faded away (often from bad games or other issues), but it does indicate to EA/PopCap that there is a large audience for a new game. They just need to do it right. 

@Iron_Guard8 One can only hope that EA/PopCap see your message, or at the very least, that the Community Manager would consider conveying your observation further up the line.
As regards console vs. PC, I am on Xbox, so I seemingly meet far more populated games on GW and GW2 than you do. Which reminds me that I should actually have been more specific in my previous post, as when playing GW I'm only on the European server and don't have the possibility of playing globally, as I do when playing GW2. Be that as it may. The GW game is full up when I play the game.

 

A bit depressing when noting your comment towards the last part of yr message that the game, despite its popularity after no longer receiving support, could just be allowed to fade away. 

I wish that there was some way of convincing EA to introduce a GW3.

 

@PerniciousPea I love that we can get games on even the original GW which is now 7 years old, lacks bots, and has 2 sequels (or to get technical, a sequel and a spin-off). I don't play it as much as GW2 since I mostly get quests done there now and the GW meta is a bit too full of toxic peas and fully upgrades super commandos, but GW is still great and I do love getting matches in from time to time, just which on PC it would be mixed mode that's most populated instead of G&G only. I do get full lobbies there, but not guaranteed, whereas in GW2 they are almost always full or near full, and if I get a lobby with a hacker I can usually leave and join a different TT lobby and get a full or near full game without a hacker. BfN has bots so unless I stop to check how many bots we have, I can't say how full it is with actual players, but I've dropped my playing there down a lot since I have everything done.

It is a good sign too, that they haven't shut any of the servers down. I wish they'd also give us the more exciting town hall events and deal with hackers in GW2 at the very least, but a lot of games that have sequels or get put into maintenance mode aren't playable for much after and here we are in 2021 still able to jump into even the 2014 game! 

When I look at the other multiplayer shooters out there; I just don't enjoy them as much as the PvZ games; TF2 is great but it's just as enjoyable for me as these, the news about Actiblizz would keep me away from CoD and OW, even if I already didn't dislike them, Paladins is good but they made some annoying changes to their challenge system that drove me away (I can't stand being told to play characters I don't enjoy to get stuff done), Gigantic is shut down, and so on. I still love all 3 of our current games, but we really need something new in the PvZ shooter category, so I keep posting here about it and I keep playing the current ones.

@Iron_Guard8 you mention that GW is already 7 years old, and of course GW2 is 5, but what does worry me is that GW2 is already showing its age and more so than GW; probably because GW2 has always been plagued with bugs of one sort or an other even while it was being supported, and not so GW.

 

When playing GW2 I experience problems such as:

 

1) Stock Pea disappears from my character list when playing the Town Hall quests

2) The game freezes, particularly when I use the Engineer's Jackhammer

3) The Kill Counter does not register kills properly (that is the most debilitating error of all. I have let off a Shuck Shot right in the face of a Toxic Brainz in Legendary mode. Knocked him out, but no kill is registered! And knocking out a Tox B in legendary mode is undoubtedly the most satifying of kills.)

4) I get thrown off the server in mid-game (Can't quite remember if this happened while the game was being supported)

5) When entering a game I have found myself placed underneath the road surface and can follow players walking above me.

 

Bit of a pain, as I really like GW2 and prefer it to all other games in the Garden Warfare franchise, and would hate to see it become unplayable for the reason that  @stukapooka puts perfectly, namely overall polish.

 

@PerniciousPeaI don't experience 1, 2, 4, or 5 on PC, but 3-where the game states I caused damage but the target didn't take it is something I encounter in all 3 games unfortunately. It's a netcode issue that I wish they'd have fixed by the time BfN came around.The only shooter where I get booted from multiplayer matches is BfN. I do lose connection to Ops in GW, as the lag can be terrible if I join someone where my ping must be bad to their location as they host the Ops.

I do have other bugs in GW2 though:

1. Turret mode bugging out-where it fires your normal weapon while in turret mode instead of the turret mode weapon.
2. All-stars stuck reloading when they aren't supposed to reload at all.
3. Logging in as a plant in the zombie base.
4. Imp-Kata not causing any damage to anyone at certain spots in the backyard.
5. Hackers-not a bug per se, but if they used an anti-cheat like BfN does, it would be at least better than it can be.

Despite these issues, GW2 is still a massive success and even today the Reddit links are mostly GW2, although GW and BfN are still posted about, and I'm closing in on 3k hours in it even as I type this, working on quests.Part of why I was more forgiving of BfN's awful launch was how bad GW2 was at its launch, which it mostly recovered from, as we can see today. The gaming industry as a whole really need to stop launching games with so many issues, and I'd like GW3 to learn from the good and bad of all 3 current games and give it time to be solid before its released.

@PerniciousPea I've had the game freeze more lately also. I've also been getting kicked from the server more these days, sometimes with just a few seconds left in the game. 

The hacking, with players playing as bosses or spawning endless AIs is also still a problem. Yesterday  there were four Iron Citrons playing as Zombies. I was a zombie but they seemed to be invincible. Just weird and to me pointless.  Sometimes the hacking is harmless; sometimes it makes the games unplayable.  I've been seeing a lot more cheating the last few weeks. Recently a player had 119 vanquishes - I've never seen that before even with players who cheat. Yesterday a player had 45 vanquishes at the end of the first objective. At that rate he would have had  over 200 vanquishes for the game if it continued. It's always a Super Brainz but not necessarily the same player. That said (and said over and over and over to deaf ears at EA) , I've also had some of the best games I've played in a long time - evenly balanced chaotic nail biters that went the distance. Too bad those are the exception. 

@lookinin @PerniciousPea well I just got booted from a private match while working on quests! In fact it just booted me off Origin for no readily apparent reason, so that alters my previous post a bit!

GW2 isn't perfect, no game is, but even with it's issues, I still have almost 3k hours in it. I'd love a GW3 that can beat that record some day.

I still get kicked from matches quite often, whether there is no reason, the host ended the game session apparently, or if the game fully freezes and I have to fully restart the game. This is still really frustrating to this day, and while I am basically used to it happening on nearly a daily basis whenever I play a PvZ game, this issue is still really annoying to deal with. Hopefully in the future this can be fixed in some way.