The bfn retrospective: how not to evolve a franchise

Part 3. A very short and troubled development.

This is probably the most confusing part of bfn to find out: exactly just how long was the game in development?

Rumors of a gw3 popped up all the way back in mid 2018 with an Amazon comic book with very flimsy evidence but it still got attention.

https://www.newsweek.com/plants-vs-zombies-garden-warfare-3-leak-82837

After the walnut hills release in gw2 in mid 2019 a alpha for a new pvz game called picnic had surfaced but EA/popcap kept the game locked and quiet but leaks did squeeze out and well early reactions were very mixed. An alpha that started in early august released on September 4th with no real official beta? Not much time to improve is there?

Before bfn released it was revealed that their was a scrapped pve game and that the dev team than merged with the bfn dev team. Maybe this is why the pve feels like the most complete part of the game?

https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Screenshots-of-Popcap-Vancouver-s-canceled-action-adventure-PvZ/td-p/1020798

A fair amount of bfn's PvP maps are also taken from these pve areas so we're left with a feeling of copy pasted resources.

The concept art of bfn is also much smaller than either garden warfares and they seem mostly the same with the finished version.

I even did a post on this on these forums.

https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Early-bfn-concept-art/td-p/1004623

https://www.hazetoonz.ca/gardenwarfar

All of this leads to many believing that this game was rushed and developded in a small amount of time, most likely only 1 year.

Part 4. Founders and marketing: A broken start and a view of whats to come

So on september 4th bfn was revealed and this is where the problems start.

The game was available to play on the same day it was ANNOUNCED. There's no time for significant changes or improvements and there is no time for the new artstyle and gameplay systems to set in with fans.

Gw1 and gw2 had multiple trailers and dev commentary before and after launch while bfn only had its launch trailer than a handful of festive trailers on their youtube than nothing!

I myself only found out about the game because I looked it up and than got ONE 5 sec ad on youtube a few days later. If I wasn't such a Garden Warfare fan to begin with I would've never found or given this game a chance. In fact this genuinely isn't an opinion I share alone.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PvZGardenWarfare/comments/gx8kj4/steam_reviews_are_not_killing_bfn

The early feedback was rather poor with many noticing flaws in balance, especially with nightcap, oak, superbrainz, and station. Bug reports also flowed in from many players and the massive change in gameplay formula was being noticed especially the upgrade system and sprinting. Snapdragon healed enemies lol.

Optimization was so terrible in founders to the point they had to reduce 12v12 turf to a 8v8 for a time and many reported issues.

The game quickly dropped in price and went on sale which is not a good sign for a game that costed less than gw2 did at launch.

Content slowly rolled out week by week but popcap failed to account for the fact that gamers would chew through the only available content open leading to many players already getting bored and burning out. This brings us to the next point.

Part 5: A shattered economy, painful grind, and the mad grab for rainbow stars.

Oh boy bfn's economy! Where to start on this absolute mess.

Look I don't want gw2's trillion reskins (ngl though some looked better than the og cosmetic) but bfn's economy crashed and burned within founders.

1. The removal of spawnables into cooldown resources has taken away the need to buy them to use in gameplay.

I understand some don't like the randomness of the sticker packs but we still could've reached a compromise of browncoats and pea cannons costing less than outhouse zombies and doom shrooms in guaranteed amounts by coins.

2. The reward o tron is a terrible system.

The new additions of emotes and text bubbles feel like they're in the reward o tron to make up for the lackluster amount of cosmetics.

Just 1 cosmetic or speech/text bubble costs 30,000 which will require the player to play about 2 games of turf or even more games of ops and team vanquish.

You dont even get to choose what you get so if you want a nice costume, TOO BAD here's a emote you'll never use!

Solo play has to be played on crazy in bfn to even earn the normal amount of coins and xp, why? Gw2 gave double on crazy so why change it for the worse? It just feels like you're punishing solo players.

3. Prize maps, bulbs, an annoying grind, and players already max leveling.

So to combat this lack of cosmetic content popcap introduced the prizemap a system that would give bulbs to buy items based on xp and this is all downhill from here.

15k xp for a single bulb, really? Players quickly burned through the ranking system and earned all the upgrades for there characters, even be able to buy more xp through coins allowing them to beat back the mass number they had accumulated.

However pocap than released the grandmaster rank to try and increase player numbers by getting max ranks to come back but what do you get for reaching max rank you ask?

"You get Nothing! You lose! Good day sir!"-willy wonka.

Thats right these new ranks were absolutely pointless and now without the variants you have only the same handful of characters to play (I'll get back to this later).

Now xp is only good for prize bulbs coming at an excruciatingly slow pace and since it's designed to give content over a month you're meant to be playing a few hours every day. Lets not forget that any exploits to speed up this process were hunted down by popcap and eliminated. The xp changes in bfn also don't favor healers so you're far better off earning xp through kills and the objective.

Now when new content came out like wizard prize bulbs were at their highest limit and if you missed him you would have to buy him for 500,000 now lets say your new to the game, ok? You know have to painfully slave away in multiplayer to finally unlock a new character. Same with wildflower and tv head.

They even had to lower the xp required for prize bulbs multiple times!

The switch allows players to work at their own pace on prize maps while any suckers stuck with console or pc will just have to WAIT an entire year before that specific map shows up again.

It was horrible when the game was still active because we never got confirmation that these would return creating a fomo system that preyed on your time!

At least challenges in GW2 give an XP Multiplier and it's a subtle lure into making you play along with multiplayer quests to earn coins faster while encouraging you to play more modes than just turf takeover.

4. Rainbow stars, oh boy.

New content is released but it's now in rux's store. Oh well you'll be able to earn rainbow stars freely through weekly modes which only reward so much per week that you'll have to play for months before you unlock one of these sparkly costumes.

Don't worry you can still BUY it with money if your worried you'll miss that outfit you like of course!

Oh but don't worry there's ranked battle arena which will give you 250 rainbow stars at the end of every season. That is of course if you win 75 matches in a row with no game disconnects, terrible teammates, your team leaving you, tryhard metalords that make the local gw1 super commando main look pathetic, afks, being stuck on plants, and lagging.

Not too mention that the gamemode was deader than a doornail during ranked so its no wonder the mode was pulled just like mixed modes.

https://answers.ea.com/t5/General-Discussion/Battle-Arena/m-p/9451229/highlight/true#M2621

They did give free rainbow stars out to players that played every few days but it WAS RANDOMIZED. Thats right if you wanted enough rainbow stars by playing the game well screw you heres only 25 while other people get 1000!

https://www.reddit.com/r/PvZGardenWarfare/comments/hi8zxq/we_need_to_talk_rux/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=comments_view_al

5. Nothing returns.

Gw1 and 2 had many cosmetics and taunts a gw3 could pull from but due to the shift to bfn with a artstyle change the cosmetics are all just thrown into the dumpster despite having the potential to stave off content cravings for a short time. Bummer.

No solo ops, really! Let's just talk about ops in general.

This game mode was absolutely OBLITERATED in bfn! We have less maps than gw1 to play it on, less positions to put the base, less pots, weaker pots, enemy variety is worse than gw1, boss variety has been cut down and there are few new ones that aren't from boss hunt, elite bosses are weak, death is meaningless since you just revive so your team feels no pressure in trying to revive you in time as you slowly go down one by one, the lack of elements like ice or toxic and the addition of upgrades means that healers are even more irrelevant as they dont have to act fast to save their team from being frozen or poisoned, its pathetically easy, ai seems worse, tv heads/wildflowers exist, no sense of emergency from the lack of an evacuation phase, and the pacing of the waves has been ruined.

The map design has also gotten much worse in bfn and there is no high ground verticality for the player or enemy classes like foot soldier to take advantage of in ops like crash course, sharkbite shores, or lunar landing. Invisble walls ewwww.

In short they simplified it, made it easy. So easy that nobody finds it fun anymore. People are just gonna play the older ops. Not only because they remember them, but because they're worth remembering in the first place.

Turf takeover. Only 4 points per map which is the lowest we have ever seen and the map design is rather poor with little vertical positions to use and a low amount of flank routes to take.

On consoles and pc it is the only mode on 12v12 in game therefore awarding the most xp so players will play them over ops or mixed modes.

A lot of the maps reuse concepts from gw1 such as preserve pastures being cactus canyon all over again or peachy district being walnut hills.

Defending/attacking is a nightmare due to the cramped nature of the points which require just 1 defender to completely stall the enemy team which is a step back from the gw system of needing more attackers than defenders on a smaller area.

Overtime doesn't end immediately after attackers are off the point which allows attackers to keep stalling by throwing bodies into the point to stall the game.

The progress bar is now decided by 1/3 intervals that go down if not completely captured.

Payload sections have the same problems cactus canyon and seeds of time had in spades with bombing the payload with everything a team has.

Bot ai gives up at the final objective so good luck solo players!

Defenders can almost never retake a point once forced out due to the narrow entryways back to the point.

The lack of teleporters has all but killed map pacing and flow as the sprint sections will be skipped if you die and walking to the next point from the last usually only takes 15 seconds after the first point and defenders are hardly ever given a good position to defend the base farther up the map like in gw1 and 2.

Depriving zombies of teles in gw1&2 left them at a major disadvantage as they now had to cross open terrain to the objective losing valuable time and being picked off by snipers. It was also a constant struggle to keep the teleporters up as they could be destroyed by defenders. This extra layer of combat strategy has been removed.

Spawn camping has now become an entirely new problem do to the awful overwatch style spawns that can be shot in and out of. Turning point is the worst culprit.

Furthermore, the sprint sections are nothing more than glorified set pieces as no combat happens in them and a defender staying back is guaranteed to get steamrolled in a heartbeat. They serve no purpose to the map. Sprinting feels like a feature that is only in the game due to pve having a large travel distance, not because the ttk and map flow is appropriately adjusted to it.

The finales are also horribly unbalanced like loggy acres or boring like tourist trap island.

The switch version reduced the mode down to 8v8 from being the only mode in bfn with 12v12 still.

Gnome bomb. Being able to see where the gnome will spawn is a good change but lets go over the negatives.

Sprinting absolutely DESTROYS the bomb carrier as he is unable to use abilities or sprint while having an icon that reveals his position to the entire enemy team. Loggy acres finale shares the same problem.

Stock super brainz is the worst carrier as he loses his shield and has no long ranged defensive options.

Camping your points has become far too effective and leads to no one attacking resulting in drawn out stalemates.

Suburbination. Look how they massacred my boy.

To start scoring a team now needs two points. This has destroyed suburbination.

I played a gw1 match recently where it was 2v3 at 63 points zombies to 21 plants. I was on plants with an agent pea as fire chomper. Despite this massive gap in both players and points the agent pea with my help was able to go from a zombie suburbination hold to plants going to suburbination at 83 zombies to 66 plants points on a 3v4 now. We were able to hold and flip the game and narrowly win at 100 to 96 when the zombies flipped back 2 points from us. It was unbelievably close and intense.

This is impossible in bfn. Due to the score now needing 2 points a winning team is just going to keep winning and the losing team can do NOTHING to turn the tide even with holding 1 point.

Vanquish confirmed. Its team vanquish but drawn out longer.

All of these also suffer the terrible spawns on bfn maps and the slower pace of 8v8 even despite sprint.

No wonder these modes had no players and were pulled. THEY WERE POORLY DESIGNED. I find more suburbination players in ps3 gw1 in 2021 than I did in bfn during its early months.

Before these maps were pulled popcap flooded lobbies with bots to combat the dying player base but even this was not enough to save mixed modes and battle arena and both were pulled due to lack of players.

The bots were also criticised for cheating at the game with their abilities and having ungodly aimbot in a game with no fall off.

Even if you like bfn you have to realize that gw1 and 2 were never at a low enough player count that they needed bots to keep the game limping on IN THEIR FIRST YEAR! This was the confirmation of the bleeding playercount in bfn as before many, especially pc players, were complaining about the lack of players.

Now I'm not against bots filling in player spots until they're taken as it allows a game to march at full speed but bfn introduced them to hide dead lobbies and with how bad yet op the bots in bfn are just leads to a bad experience.

Giddy park is not a good alternative from backyard battleground, especially for solo players. It lacks depth in its combat system against the ai and the spawns are horrendous being easy to camp. I spent most of my early gw2 time fighting the ai in the backyard or in solo play due to a lack of Xbox live and I still enjoyed it. Until solo play came to bfn this was impossible.

Part 6: The official release of bfn, several steps taken back from both garden warfares, dying game modes filled with bots and the slow death of a player base.

Why did we have no private play until near the end of the game? Gw2 had this at launch! The marketing even hyped up this feature in gw2!

We have less non turf maps than gw1!

No night maps!

Part 7: Terrible balance and terrible animations/texture effects.

Despite having only a fraction of the characters 1&2 had bfn's balance saw little to no improvements.

We ping ponged from overpowered and buggy characters month by month starting with nightcap than after awhile we moved to all star and then superbrainz in a rough summary.

We never got fall off implemented so many characters spread was amped up and made some of them useless at longer range while others became way to effective at countersniping because they couldn't balance without fall off. Imp was destroyed by this and chomper flourishes despite being a "melee character".

All the characters moved at the same speed while sprinting so a sunflower will arrive at the objective at the same time as a citron and imp and all star are the same.

1v1s now revolved around which character you were now playing rather than the players skills factoring in as a citron in bfn will always destroy an imp with his stun roll combo and branium basher is straight up uncounterable at times if you're a 125 health plant.

The game now is dominated by station and branium basher while classes like imp and corn are pathetic.

Sunflowers damage was absolutely gutted making her combat effectiveness terrible.

The animations are also terrible in bfn.

All the returning characters abilities visual effects are much less vibrant and detailed than their gw counterpart.

Imps lights dont blink and his reload is pathetic.

Soldier doesn't bonk his head.

All stars rotors don't spin. Ps3 all stars rotors spun, wth popcap?

Soldiers shots look awful and dont even leave a paint splat. Ps3 gw1 has superior soldier effects wth.

The character models from gw are all severly less detailed besides superbrainz.

Z mech doesn't even explode. It just has a explosion filter with some screws over it.

3fps payload moving speed. The golf bomb and bootering ram didn't look this choppy.

Scientist has no visual windup for his warps and now travels instantly making his survival guaranteed with the instant heal bomb.

Superbrainz cape flows less when not moving. Hair is better though.

No idle animations for characters.

https://youtu.be/mPWvMFtqtu

Crazy dave and Dr. Zomboss aren't even animated anymore.

Despite popular belief players do notice these details in games!

For reference:

https://youtu.be/qUviVtTgU4

https://youtu.be/6NXaVJqbda

I could sit here explaining the problems the balance had when the game was supported in greater depth but this post is long enough and I don't feel like writing a novel.

Part 8: Variants and alt abilities vs upgrades/new characters and the death of players creative strategy.

I get the upgrade system has it fans but it was never going to give former fans the diverse strategies and playstyles they once had in gw.

Lets go over the main thing upgrades lack: visible threat recognition.

When fighting say fire or ice variants in gw their bodies or weapons were on fire or encased in ice and their particle effects, sound effects, and damage/ammo count were changed.

Other variants like commando pea/mechanic allowed you to play a different style of a character while still having their ability set to use in gameplay. They once again had unique projectiles and looks to seperate them from the base characters look.

In BFN however, upgrades aren't visible at all, heck you don't even get a good description of what the player is using. Instead you have to go and memorize every single upgrade name, what they do, how much they cost, even their icon, and then you can finally try and guess which upgrades you have to contest against, and then maybe you can figure out how to counter them.

Lets look at vampiric for chomper it allows him to regain health after vanquishing a zombie but its hard to realize that a chomper is using it at first unless you recognized the upgrade symbol (which it may share with other upgrades) and see the chomper regain health which is unlikely in a firefight.

Compare this to count chompula who was bright red and visibly glowed after a swallow showing he was currently regaining health. He also had the down side of losing 25 health making him easier to kill in direct combat to make up for this new power.

Vampiric spikeweed is another one in bfn as it stays the exact same look as the regular spikeweed so its impossible to tell when a chomper is using it. Gw2 vampweed was red and dealt no damage for its healing nature so chompers had to prepare for zombies who walked into it to still be at full health and zombies now realized a healthy chomper is on the move.

The Hot rod and chomp thing upgrade have the exact same problem vampiric has in comparison to their respective variants weakness/looks

Defibrilated is another one. You dont even know a electric slide has it until they USE OUTTA FIGHT. You can be winning the fight than they bail, heal than finish you. This is bs. Compare this to fighting a charged variant. You can visually see the charge build up over time and know that a large amount of damage is soon to come your way in a firefight.

Long bomb in bfn just makes regular imp punt go slightly farther (good luck remembering the difference to know an all star has this upgrade). Compare this to gw long bomb where an all star would have to compensate for the lack of close range they traded for long range.

For reference I was playing jewel junction in gw1 and came across a particular situation: the mine building had an open window and three plants inside. I was standing on a rock outside and saw this opportunity and I was carrying long bomb and launched it in vanquishing 2 of them and allowing the 3rd to be picked off by a soldier.

Now here's a question for you all, could you even do anything relatively like that in bfn?

Now that all stars dummy shield can be walked through he loses creative placement to jump on and gain a strategic advantage.

Using upgrades to create your own variants is also a flawed argument.

Most of them are very situational and/or don't do enough. And the ones that are "game changing" force you to only use them because they take up too many slots.

A good example of this is sunflower. If you wanted to make a unique sunflower with say: Blossom, Sunslinger and something else to help out. Well too bad because you're stuck with either blossom or sunslinger with a mediocre combo. There's your "variant". Credit to reddit.

https://www.reddit.com/r/PvZGardenWarfare/comments/hd6tbu/bfn_lacks_a_natural_sense_of_progression/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_bod

You are always going to take the best upgrades over faster regen or speed. Gw2 upgrades also share this problem. A point system to prevent players from having health, damage, and faster reload all at the same time and having the icons show up when vanquished with unique symbols like gw2's would be the best system imo.

Lets take cactus as another character who lacks variety without upgrades. In gw cactus could swap between moderate sniper (default), a heavy sniper (camo), or a non sniper close combatant (bandit cactus). This allowed you to play how you wanted while still utilizing the abilitiy kit of a character you liked. Tf2 sniper has a similar system with the machinia increasing his pure sniping ability but lacking close range capabilities while the huntsman allowed him to partcipate father up the line with his team but decreased his range and damage immensely making him less effective against overhealed heavies. Now cactus is forced to sit in the back of the map and play one way and one way only, lame.

Techniques that aided players in gw were removed in bfn: drone flying is gone, bean surfing, kick surfing, bean jumping, heal station being used as a footstool to gain a height advantage, shields and barriers used to gain a height advantage, warp distance being able to be determined by jumping, and chomper being completely hidden when not moving underground.

Why does chomper need an upgrade to not waste more power when not moving? This was a basic thing in both gws and he constantly kicks up dirt in burrow while still so an ambush is all but impossible in bfn.

I was able to save myself and a supremo in a crash course gnome bomb match by having both of us jumping on my armored heal station before a fire chomper burrowed us in open terrain. This strategy of self preservation is gone now.

A 10 chomper ambush in gw1 on suburban flat due to all of them being hidden underground waiting in ambush. This type of creative/strategic thinking is DEAD in bfn.

Scientist himself lost the dilemma of choosing between offensive capabilities and healing effectiveness. The deadlier he was the less he could help his team. His heal bomb wasn't instantaneously activated so plants had a chance to finish him off. This is non existent in bfn.

With the lack of status affects like toxic, freezing ice, and nonlethal fire; healers are made even more redundant as now they aren't needed to combat these affects since healing got rid of them in gw but since they dont exist in bfn, especially ops and with faster regeneration in bfn healers are now made irrelevant as there is no need for quick healing as you're in no danger as snapdragons afterburn can't kill you and toxic doesn't exist and ice is irrelevant. Sunflower just can't stop taking L's in bfn as scientist at least has his survivability.

Time snare is no longer a visual effect and now you just start slowing down when a rose shoots you from some corner of the map with no repercussions.

Lets not even bring variants into it for a comparison but to tf2's differing weapons instead. A spy with a kunai has only 70 health compared to the stock 125 but he gains the the health of whoever he stabbed for a total of 185. This allows the kunai to potentially be deadlier than the stock spy with Overheal but lose easily to the stock spy as even 40 damage knife hits are going to HURT when you are on 70 health allowing the stock spy to usually win. 

Lets move away from the ripped gw2 varinats butchered for upgrades and look at a few others shall we? Some are class specific but you'll get the idea.

Fearless, bottomless, low life, combo, adrenaline rush, and many more. These upgrades reward players for playing aggresive and even reward them with health for jumping into conflict making healers less of a necessity as you can just bash your way to better health, ability cooldowns, and speed. You are rewarded for pushing forward when you would otherwise be punished and need a healer.

Even popcap reeled back on their decision to remove variants with the legendary upgrades which were a desperate attempt to inject life into a flat lining combat system which had gone stale quickly (there's a reason classic g&g and classic team vanquish gets boring after a few matches on gw1). This was basically an admission that the new system had failed imo. It also gave us one of the most broken characters in pvz shooters.

I could go farther for why these upgrades don't work in place of variants but I don't want to be here forever.

SOME PEOPLE THINK THIS IS AN IMPROVEMENT?!?

Part 9: Why wasn't it garden warfare 3 to begin with?

Gw1 and 2 were succesful and had a dedicated fanbase so why change the formula so drastically rather than improving on what already works?  Why not use the features and maps you already have as a solid guideline for the future balancing much like how the gw1 variants were fairly balanced out in gw2 as you can only improve, why try to create a new system from scratch?

The game was even made by a majority of the same people as 1&2.

Even internally the game is called gw3. The modes besides battle arena are all garden warfares.

Shortly after gw2 released in early 2016 another hero based shooter came to shake up the genre later that year: Overwatch.

Blizzard revealed their shiny new game modeled after the grandfather of modern class/hero based shooters: team fortress classic.

Overwatch was a massive succes overnight. It was made by blizzard the company that in 2016 could do no wrong and had a long successful track record.

It launched with 21 heroes each with their own unique moveset and personalities. It was such a massive hit that many declared that it would be the next team fortress two.

Overwatch was so successful many other hero based shooters also tried to pop up and the genre became more crowded with battleborn and paladins.

However many problems quickly came: the balancing and meta was awful the characters despite their differences had a small skill ceiling and content was slow. Blizzard themselves also revealed their awful nature getting involved in multiple controveries concerning banning players over hong Kong and political pandering.

The game while not dead quickly fell of due to this and the rise of battle royale.

EA saw how much money the battle royale genre was bringing in and wanted their own slice of that pie and created apex legends which was a success.

I have no reason to believe otherwise that EA didn't want their own personal overwatch given that it made so much money.

They already had a class based shooter based on tf2 in their hands in garden warfare but a massive change towards overwatch style mechanics still called gw3 would be jarring and most likely be repulsed by the fandom. So they changed it to bfn.

Ea is a company willing to jump on the money train at all cost and even side swipe established formulas for new copycat ones after a fad.

This destroyed the gameplay as now the focus was more on a overwatch attack/defense/support roles with shields, stuns, and powerful abilities. This is a bad idea.

Overwatch was balanced with 6v6 where only 1 of each character can be chosen and only 2 from each group total. A Reinhardt style character with a shield designed to soak up damage doesnt work when there are 5 of them in a 12v12 match and he can't be focused fired by the enemy team in a tight space.

Overwatch did have Overheal and these other mechanics but it also had team wiping ultimates to break stalemates with some requiring strategic thinking unlike bfn where this power to wipe the other team resulting in painful and hard to break stalemates in bfn.

Bfn's Overheal is a pain to fight. The ttk in founders was a nightmare and Overheal lasted forever. Now it drains after a certain amount of time has passed. The modern ttk makes it a pain to fight overhealed opponents but buffing it would make playing as a non overhealed character a pain. Compare this to tf2's system where Overheal fades the moment a medic stops healing and even a 450 health heavy can easily be killed by surprise as all the weapons deal heavy close range damage, ubercharge (also counterable but more risky to attempt), and sentries exist. Bfn neither has ultimates or sentries and uber, this just makes stalemates go on longer if both teams have healers yet neither have a way to break through especially eith no fall off.

Bfn also tried to introduce team play characters but this fell apart in encouraging players to stack classes that easily obliterate any player who is trying to lone wolf an idea that both gw and tf2 try not to support but don't punish either.

For example a spy/imp are at a disadvantage figthing a heavy/citron alone but its not an impossible fight and player skill factors greatly especially with the differing weapons/variants. A plant/mercenary alone can destroy a level 3 sentry/z mech but it's easier with a team. Bfn/overwatch want the team to stick together throughout the entire match.

Bfn also makes it impossible for an imp to fight a citron/chomper 1v1 as both posses abilities and weapons that butcher the poor guy so you cannot win against certain classes when playing a class that is beneath them much like overwatch.

Another poor aspect of team play were the swarm characters that reward stacking a team full of the same character for effectiveness as the spawnables are only really usable for this buff in turf (conviently the most played game mode).

Double time is meant to help engineers team reach the frontline faster but it's abused as a quick getaway for engineer to seflishly use. Lets compare this to hovergoats speed boost in gw2, it boosted all allies around the goat allowing it to affect his allies around him EVEN IF HE USED IT SELFISHLY TO ESCAPE IT HELPED HIS TEAM AND COULDN'T BE STACKED WITH SPRINTING!

Take casting shadows as another example, it's supposed to help hide allies but it: slows enemies, sucks them in, makes them extremely vulnerable to attack. This is a better gravity grenade for nightcap than team support ability. It also doesn't blend with nightcaps other abilities which are meant to get her around the enemy lines than deal massive damage, how does a giant noticeable dome help one mushroom?

Butter beacon also only helps corn in dealing more damage while butter barrage could help his whole team by forcing enemies off an objective. Look at wizards co star it also reveals enemies but also provides armor and extra firepower while increasing the hitbox making it a better team play ability.

The aesthetic and tone of garden warfare also completely changed as now all the zombie/plant grafitti (we ate the peeple), propaganda, apocalypse signs, and statues of them in maps are now all gone and we are stuck with maps that honestly feel like they could be in splatoon and you wouldn't even notice.

The garndenator isn't really even a garden, it's mainly a machine. Turf and suburbination maps no longer have gardens and tombstones that would slowly rise out of the ground than create a stormcloud/rainbow cloud above them?

Well now they don't exist or they're an unanimated machine that changes lights with no real personality.

No almanac to tell you fun information about the characters. Even the ability descriptions were cut down!

Information on mechanics is also presented terribly to the player as the tag system is horribly explained and the animated segments demonstrating how abilities worked form gw1 and 2 are gone.

The tone also shifted from the zombies attacking the equivalent of superweapons defened by anti aircraft guns and defending invincible robots to put a small flag into space that hurts the plants how exactly? And being threatened by marshmallows from a machine that can't move.

We also lost the animated blood entirely.

Remember how I said earlier that gw walked the fine line of a cartoonish setting that was still enjoyable for everyone?

I think it also did a great job of them fighting in the remains of a human civilization that honored these plants as local heroes (the plants eat free on restaurants and the statues like in chomp town). Well throw that out because we have hot cheese and over exaggerated designs! Just play gw1 and bfn back to back and you'll see what im talking about here.

Zombie territory lacks the dead and corrupted aesthetic set up ever since zomboss estate and expanded on in gw2.

There's nothing pvz about bfn in this game besides the characters and you could make it an entirely new ip but than nobody would care about it due to the garbage marketing and development choices making it an utterably forgettable overwatch clone (gw without pvz is still a solid shooter).

The overall amount of characters is the reason I believe the map design has only gotten worse since gw1 (2 has some real bangers though). Overwatch's map design is anything but stellar due to having to be designed for so many charcters and I believe bfn suffers the same problem. Just compare driftwood shores to tourist trap island and tell me how high you get before invisble walls start interfering with you.

Once again just like animations: fans notice these things, especially returning fans.

This was a deliberate choice by EA, popcap, or who ever was in charge to try and grab new fans and keep the garden warfare fans and it failed miserably and the old fans left.

I'll let doug walker aka the nostalgia critic speak for my opinion on this one.

"Fad" is just one letter away from "fade". And that's exactly what they do. They fade away. That's why it's better to focus on being good, rather than being popular. If you can be both, great. But if you had to choose one over the other, always pick good over popular, because once the people grow out of it and move on to the next popular thing, there's nothing of substance to bring it back. And the timeless message you claim to fight so hard for becomes just another passing trend to forget about."

If it ain't broke don't fix it.

Remember this is my opinion. Not all of this may be factual but rather speculation. I have no reason not to believe otherwise as alot of the evidence points to it. They even made imp's intro screen animation a reference to dva.

Part 10: The uneasy and uncertain future of plants vs zombies and popcap.

So here we are in this depressing reality.

Bfn was a total failure. Popcap vancouver died overnight and most of the dev team is gone.

The steam port couldn't even muster 1,000 all time players when the game was active and it sits at mixed reviews overall (it can't even muster a 250 player 24 hour peak). On consoles this is the lowest rated pvz game barely scrapping by at around 3 stars with a fraction of the reviews gw1 and 2 had.

The switch port however good it may be is clearly not going to revive the game at this point.

For those of us on these forums who were here from the beginning, how many people did we lose over the course of bfn?

https://youtu.be/3WM1XNdJuf

How many fans left the series entirely due to bfn?

How many pvz youtubers actually stuck around and didn't move on to new games as its clear through krook's video that they didn't enjoy bfn compared to the gw games and that it was much worse for content and views.

https://youtu.be/S2JDeQVCLm

For whatever flaws they may have had gw1 and 2 didn't die in less than a year with abysmal player numbers and whatever bugs they did have nothing like rapid fire for chomper existed in them to begin with!

Public opinion on popcap being a EA subsidiary for over a decade is not positive and many want popcap to also foxus on their other ips for a while. Many did not even know bfn and pvz3 existed at all!

The general opinion seems to be that they must be a pvz factory as it's their most popular franchise by far or else they will slip into irrelevancy.

Many do also not seem to enjoy the new artstyle direction of 3 and bfn (I'm one of them!).

https://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/mexau2/popcap_has_been_a_subsidiary_for_ea_for_10_years

Even the games cancellation was a silent leaf in the wind for those outside the fandom and most didn't enjoy it anyway.

I agree somewhat with many people who view a gw1 with 2's features being the best potential gw game.

https://www.reddit.com/r/xboxone/comments/ira112/for_anyone_unaware_plants_vs_zombies_battle_for/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=comments_view_al

Edit: Pvz 3 has returned in an early access beta! Now will it actually be good and ADVERTISED!!! Sunflower is alive. They even brought back the old title coloring HALLELUJAH! Liking the new artstyle.

The official twitter doesn't awnser fan questions and has left pvz 2 in a wierd state with the store in chaos while continuing to push forward with small non substantial updates.

My final thoughts as a whole on bfn?

They made a game with terrible balancing despite having a much smaller roster than even the first game, worse ai, poorly designed maps with numerous choke points and little variation, no drop off, AWFUL hit detection, copy-pasted assets (over half of the PvP is from the PVE!), poorly thought and executed features (elite bosses imo), a horrible testing team, a horrible coding team, lack of new content outside of free roam areas, little verticality in map design, removal of variants for an upgrade system which is unnoticeable most of the time, worse versions of variants, constant bugs and poorly maintained servers, a terribly implemented ranked mode that was eventually scrapped, a terrible launch state (gw2 stumbled at first but bfn fell onto a landmine face first), failure to recognize and fix pre-existing issues despite numerous mentions by the community(remember repaireville?), making things worse in general like the suburbination changes, less non turf maps than gw1(night maps tilt it even further in gw1s favor), an inability to reach out to the community, and six new classes that offer nothing new other than teamplay which was also poorly executed.

Looking back it didn’t stand a chance from the start. The devs did not have the necessary skill to pull it off. It’s some of the worst handling I’ve ever seen.

They were understaffed with most likely only 1 year at max to work on this game and then their main leads left halfway through after release.

I understand that they probably couldn’t do much if they tried, especially later due to the pandemic but it doesn’t excuse the fact that they screwed up to the point where it’s outstanding. We went from gw2 to this. I also understand that they had good content planned but having some of that o so glorious potential people kept talking about would've actually been great to see at launch where it mattered most!

Even Peter McConnell’s soundtrack in bfn is less interesting and notable than GW1 and even GW2.

Offline only on the switch is great though.

The game fell very short of what both gw games had before it.

https://i.redd.it/l1l43ia7xdx51.pn

There's probably an alternate universe out there where a gw3 that's everything we wanted exists and I want to be in it.

However since the game was most likely a financial failure EA will probably go "huh well I guess nobody likes pvz shooters anymore" and pull the plug altogether rather than admit it was simply terrible decision after terrible decision to switch from the gw format to overwatch with poor handling.

https://youtu.be/sxEle_lPWg

According to red head gaming popcap has released a statement that the franchise is not dead and will continue but they have not stated explicitly what this means. Will the shooters march on or is it only the tower defense portion still alive? Do they have any plans at the moment? Will development be given to a new studio/team? Even if the franchise survives I assume it will be a while before they return to triple a games as this is the first absolute failure pvz has had on consoles as a triple a game.

Bfn had a great and unique framework set out before it to build off of and it completely ditched it to become an overwatch clone in a market that became quickly oversaturated since mid 2016 with no marketing. It only had as many players at founders that it did due to many former garden warfare players being interested. Remove pvz and you have an entirely forgettable overwatch clone.

They had the pieces to make a great garden warfare 3 but holy *=&£ did they blow it. The fans are gone and the garden warfare series is most likely dead. This should've just been a full on pve spinoff like it most likely was meant to be from the beginning.

The chemist zombie's pvz bfn is dead: How and why it failed. It goes into great detail of behind the scenes information of the game (budget failing around April and much content being marked in a way to indicate that they were unsure it would ever be included) and studios slow demise.

https://youtu.be/vSaWJB9Rq3