Part 9 continued
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?
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.
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!).
/
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.
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.
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.
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.
Holy crap this was very long to make and i apologise for any grammar mistakes or repeat my points as this took weeks to make and my proofreading and autocorrect are crap. Note once again that some of these are my opinions and feel free to correct me on any misinformation and in sorry if any of these seem a little scatter brained as many new additions (pvz 3 being alive) were made while making this and new info came out. I may make more posts on some of these parts but in more detail.
Credit to all the YouTube channels and redditors and their videos/posts in this post.
I read through all of these while also getting stuff done here at work ( XD ) so it took me a bit, but I mostly concur with you here.
Copying OW made sense to a point as while GW2 did well and is my most played game ever, OW did blow up big for awhile, although it was falling apart even before we found out that Blizzard have a terrible culture. I've said for years that even before Activision got involved that Blizzard wasn't that good of a company and not to treat them like they can do no wrong, but I had no idea they were as bad as we now know. I uninstalled all their stuff back in '19 over the Blitzchung affair, and was barely playing any of their games even before that. OW's monetization with it's loot boxes is awful and GW and GW2 do MUCH better jobs at random packs that feel rewarding unlike OW's.
I always thought the Imp's selection animation in BfN was to mock D.Va, as Imp and mech came before D.Va did as GW2 launched in February of 2016 and OW was in May. D.Va was a personal favorite in my time in OW, but Imp is more fun.
There was a point in OW where there were no character limits in the main (non ranked) play modes. Fighting a team of multiple Torbjorn's with a Mercy (when she used to revive her whole team) was a nightmare, so was playing against multiple D.Va's taking turns to detonate their mechs.
For ratings, I'd give GW an 8, GW2 a 9 and BfN a 7. If GW2 fixed the remaining bugs and balance issues, got rid of hackers, and made a few other small changes (like bulk buying sticker packs), it could reach a 10.
People love PvZ and I wish they'd handle the games better. Heroes is actually really fun but it's mostly abandoned and I haven't played in quite a while. PvZ2 is good but the monetization has been awful for a long time and there are cheaters in arena so I stopped playing. The original is still wonderful and the shooters are all fun, although for different reasons. PvZ3 looks like they may well have fixed things and I'm looking forward to playing it. Now they need the same thing for GW3.
I've been more forgiving of BfN than a lot of our veterans as again, I remember how GW2 had many detractors and how it launched in a bad state, but quickly became a true gem and one of my favorite games of all time, if not my favorite. That being said, as others have pointed out, BfN feels like change for changes sake with more problems of its own than it resolves from the previous game and many changes that I don't like.
It's odd that EA changed what should have been GW3 so much, they tend to go the safer route and only make incremental changes, rather than trying to rewrite so much. I feel that a GW3 can and should make some changes that make the game better, but changing just to change gave us a game that feels more unfinished than GW does when compared to GW2.
In that YouTuber video you posted, which has been talked about and shared before, what pretty much all GW YouTubers wanted was GW3; more of a good thing with some needed changes like balancing. That's what pretty much all of us wanted from what I've seen.
There are some that prefer BfN, or like me, don't hate it, but the majority are obviously not happy with it and despite some cool ideas, it didn't work out that well; it has a lot of half-realized and implemented ideas that could have been great. I had thought at first that once things were ironed out that BfN could have replaced GW2 for me, but that didn't happen as I felt the tedious grind of getting max rank, no reason to go back to the free roam zones, still so many bugs that kick you from PvP matches at random, mess up your scoped in aim, the worst hit registration of all 3 games (it is an issue in GW2 for sure, and in GW, but BfN's is downright awful at times), and other huge issues, that even though GW2 could use a bug/balance patch, BfN is still worse in this regard.
I love BfN's upgrade system idea, but it lacks in practice. They needed to make more interesting upgrades, rein in the ones that are too powerful, buff or replace the weak ones, and as you point out, make them more obvious with visual and audio cues, as well as unique icons so they can be told apart. Too many share the same icon and aren't so obvious. For just one example; Dolphin Blasting doesn't give you any visual or audio change to your weapon at all, so it makes the upgrade less interesting.
I've watched a lot of videos and read comments on variants and while I love them, I thought that BfN could have done better with more characters instead as they could all have unique abilities, looks, sounds, and so on, but we didn't get enough new ones. I really didn't get how much a large chunk of our community absolutely loves variants to the point that that alone made them leave. I feel that variants need to return for GW3 now, but they could still use the upgrade system from BfN on top of that as well. The upgrades in GW were just random and some (looking at you Super Commando) are just too good. GW2's is better but they shouldn't all have the same value, so BfN could have really made this so good had they developed it further.
The Gnome Bomb change is great; no more picking up the bomb accidentally.
The Suburbination change is very bad as the behind team gets nothing. I've come back and won after being behind in these matches before, but as you point out, I couldn't have done that in the same situation in BfN. This change is very bad and needs to be reverted.
TT maps are too narrow, too reliant on Sprinting (which shouldn't exist), and lack teleporters which I miss. Tourist Trap Island is my least favorite TT map as its too simple and not a fan of pushing the carts as they get very campy in any TT map where they exist, and the final minigame is boring. I like Preserve Pastures and Peachy District the most in BfN.
I like GW maps the most overall, but GW2 has some great ones too. GW maps would work better now as it wouldn't just be soldiers and peashooters on the roofs anymore (a serious issue in GW), but they need to tweak Wall-nut Hills final point to avoid cheesing it as zombies.
The art style in BfN doesn't bother me much, barring exceptions like Rose, but it's an odd mix of the characters being more cartoony than ever, but the world looks more real (just look at the vehicles and buildings in the 3 games to see what I mean). I'd rather return to GW2 or GW1 style with some quality improvements.
Ops are not that good in BfN. Phase 3 could have really helped, but what we have is messy, too easy, and unsatisfying.
The economy in BfN is its greatest failing. I have like 9 million coins right now and since I'm at max rank and have everything, they are worthless and that's a bad feeling. Throw on the rainbow star situation as well and that Feastivus Pack (which I did buy), and you have an awful system that feels bad and unrewarding.
I have suggested a system of having us pay different amounts to get the consumables we want, so that their power is reflected in their cost and some have to be unlocked from free roam regions. The timer system in BfN would have worked had we had more options. GW2 lacked enough consumables even if added a couple new ones that weren't in GW but lost others, BFN's choice for these was woefully inadequate. I really don't mind not being spammed with Outhouse Zombies like you get in GW and GW2, but I also hate having no choices left at all. GW3 could address both of these by using my idea of directly buying/earning them with cost based on power, or other systems that improve upon the current games, but they need to address this.
I prefer GW2's HUD the most, but none are bad, and BfN has nice QoL improvements like the overheat indicators.
GW3 needs to return to a more GW2 formula but not throwing BfN away completely.
Overhealing needs to go along with sprinting. We also need damage drop off back, pretty much every hero shooter besides BfN has it, saving no drop off as a special sniper or power ability. Characters need to have different movement speeds.
Things like the TAG system for 80s and the boss hunts in GW2 need to be explained better.
I actually prefer the half health revives and self regen in GW over what we have in GW2 or BfN. Full reviving chains of Scientists and Sunflowers is a pain. I also like how BfN made it so you could help revive and get bonus XP. The reduced health on revive or self regen is also a way to attract healers to play.
GW3 can and should be a thing, but they have got to handle it better than BfN. With PvZ3 looking so much better, my hope for a new shooter has increased, but until I see actual news on it, I can't my hopes up. It could be a glorious thing if done well though.
@Iron_Guard81. That's just the problem. Overwatch was a trend that quickly faded just like battle royal and fall guys did and tbh it was never that great from the start but blizzard back in 2016 was riding a massive "can do no wrong wave" before they quickly came crashing down due to horrible gameplay decisions and politics.
2. Is it really mocking if the entire game is designed to play like Overwatch? Of course I should've known popcap was so big brained that in copying Overwatch as a mockery they made the game trash truly "brilliant". Its weird imp even references her since he was around before she was and imo handled better.
3. Fighting multiple of the same characters was nightmare but now being forced into 2 dps, 2 tanks, and 2 supports isn't fun.
4. Heroes suffered the main problem bfn did: ZERO marketing and its a shame as I really like heroes. I hope they actually advertise pvz 3 or else it will go unnoticed especially after its poor first reception.
5. Yep, it was nice hearing the youtubers speak their mind from both a fan and youtuber view where either way they looked at it they just enjoyed gw more and it was much better for views.
6. I said in my posts that they need to show the upgrade icons clearly like gw2's but appear on the vanquish screen like in bfn. They should take 2's upgrades but add the point limit so players cant just spam health, damage, and ammo but at the same moment not be given variants but worse.
7. I did say i liked the gnome bomb spawn indicator but my god does sprinting just DESTROY the bomb carrier and camping your positions due to 8v8 is far too effective. Loggy acres also shares this problem.
8. They ruined suburbination and they need to do a full step back. It was a system that didn't even need to be changed and they still found a way to **** it up.
9. Bfn maps are just poorly designed in being too narrow and lacking proper pacing. going back to gw and the maps are just so open and big but combat still flows really well. Gw1 did have the best maps but gw2 had some great ones and it tried to experiment with new factors like low gravity and weather. Gw2 walnut hills having a ring that disables abilities around the door and the gw2 cast would've have relieved the many problems the map has as it devolved into soldier vs peashooter again.
10. I get what you mean about the buildings and the character's cartoonyness has been greatly increased (look at imp and z mech) in bfn (I also mentioned how they completely removed the animated blood in bfn). The main thing I miss were the plants and zombies own aesthetics in the games like massive bright gardens for plants and the gothic and corrupted zombie areas with all the architecture having statues or symbols of the 2 sides with zombie gadgets strewn about (gw1 had the plants worshipped as heroes like in chomp town).
11. I've already explained why bfn ops is a disaster multiple times.
12. I like your economy idea as it keeps the no cooldown consumables but avoids coffin spam by making them expensive.
13. Gw2 Hud with bfn overheat indicator and other qol changes would be the best system.
14. Agreed on sprinting and overheal its only made combat sluggish and frustrating and characters need differing speeds in a multi class shooter.
15. A lot of mechanics from bfn and boss hunt are just straight up not explained and need to be (i mentioned the animated ability shows that did a good job of showing the player what happens, they need to return).
16. Compromise? Half revive health with full regen like gw2's as bfn's is too fast. Im neutral on multiple people reviving faster as it encourages doing it together but also kimda takes away healers being special in reviving faster.
17. You truly did underestimate variants. Gw1 would've quickly gotten stale and boring if we were only playing the same versions of the eight characters.
They made players experiment but also didn't force them out of their comfort zone with a characters ability set like mechanic forcing engineers to be accurate in exchange for fast automatic damage while allowing them to still build teleporters that helped their team or bandit cactus players wanting to jump into the fray but also liking the cactus' defensive ability set.
They spiced up the game while also keeping it familiar much like tf2 alt weapons in that they could introduce into new playstyles with a familiar character with respective checks and balances against their stock counterpart like agent pea or the crusaders while allowing the map design to not have to altered severely due to new characters (Overwatch map updates were painfully slow to accomodate for all the characters).
The upgrade system was never going to come close to the combat depth variants provided as half of the upgrade system was just diet variants with none of the depth that made the system so engaging in the first place.
Ive also mentioned in earlier posts about how they added variety to ops enemy/ally roster and its difficulty.
Even reviews of the game noticed their dissapearance and the lackluster combat depth. Imo this one does a good job at explaining it. I even remember one titled: Should you play bfn? Not if you've played garden warfare.
https://www.glitched.online/plants-vs-zombies-battle-for-neighborville-variations/
18. I want a gw3 but at the same moment I'm genuinely concerned about WHAT they will do to it.
EA really should've played it safe with a gw3 as now it seems they lost everything: the fans, the money, and the studio.
@stukapooka We agree on most things, even if not always to the same degree!
On the variants. I love them, especially for how they make changes in costumes, weapons, and such. GW would indeed have gotten boring with just 8 base characters. But, having 69 completely unique characters instead of 8 base with 61 variants of those base characters (if I recall GW's numbers properly, GW2 has over 100 total) could even be better, although harder to do as you need to make 207 abilities instead of only 24 (with some alternate abilities). Paladins adds new characters with great regularity but they have balance issues and bugs to a large degree.
I had that poll on Reddit last year or much earlier this year, asking which folks prefer and variants did win out. Part of BfN's failure to do well is obviously the lack of variants and only having 20, then 21, then 23 characters, as opposed to 69 and then I think it's 119 in GW2. I still say that if we had a decent number of unique characters that could be better than variants, but if I had to choose between 20 different characters or 119 variants, I'd go with the variants as obviously most of the veterans agree on. Had they been able to give us new characters more often, I think more people could have been won over, but variants are easier and faster to create and barring some balance issues, I do love the concept.
Two of my least favorite changes in BfN are the capture points in TT and the Suburbination change. Of course, TT was far worse in Founders when overtime would go on forever, but I hate that the attacker can lose progress if you don't get to one of the stop points and that a single defender can stop an entire team of attackers from advancing the capture point. It was far better in GW and GW2 when you only had to have more attackers than defenders to advance it. Attackers are already at a nominal disadvantage as you have to win every single point to win, whereas the defenders only need to win once. BfN changes that up a bit but not in a good way. No more teleporter fights, no flanking battles, and so on; we only have fights right on the points, on the carts, or as the defenders fight on the way back to the next point after losing the current one. It's not as interesting, tends to play out the same every time, and the cart mechanic makes the game even campier than it can be in GW and GW2. The Suburbination change is awful and makes no sense. Why make the losing team lose more? The best games are the closest games and if one team holds 2 most/all the match you're going to see too many scores of 100-0, 100-10 and so on, as opposed to 100-70, 100-90, and so on.
BfN does feel like they tried too hard to make it more of a 'mainstream' shooter instead of what it was and why we love GW and GW2; they have similarities to TF2 and other hero shooters, but have their own niche, and a big one at that. 10 million players is nothing to sneeze at! No idea how many are playing them now but the fact that I can get full or mostly full games of GW and GW2 on PC which is the least played platform speaks volumes. We need a GW3, but it has to be handled properly, not just to do well, but to try to get the many veterans that left to at least give it a look. The Reddit has people posting about all 3 games every day, and people are these days anyway, largely positive about all 3 (with some obvious exceptions), but GW and GW2 get the most love and there's a lot of people practically begging for a new game. They can't delay too long on the new game as people are drifting away, but they have got to get it right.
@stukapooka No doubt at all that GW2 is the most popular and for good reasons!
GW is great but as many have said, it feels like an incomplete game and it was a budget title. An excellent game and still fun to jump into, but when you get bad match runs you can't just leave the MP portal and chill in the backyard or play private matches. You can play Ops, but it doesn't adjust for solo and I often join hosts with really bad connections or something with serious lag and get booted. This is the main reason I have over 300 hours but nowhere near as much time as GW2 or BfN.
I've not quit BfN, but I don't play it much after finally grinding to that level cap. GW's cap was a bit of a rush to get the Unicorn Chomper in GW2 as I wasn't that far off, but burned through a lot of challenge stars to get it in time. GW2's cap never felt bad to get to for me, I know some felt it was a grind but my MMO background made it a fun time, I barely used that fish! I ended up using the XP machine in BfN more than I expected, but that was largely from the sudden shut down of new stuff and my dislike of those swarm characters. Still have millions of coins to spend on nothing. I have 900ish hours in BfN, but I spent a lot of time in the free roam regions.
GW2, where I have 2800+ hours in, is still fun. I don't play it as much as my heyday when everything was shiny and new, and mostly focus on getting my quests done every 2 days, but I also make sure to check in every day and mess about a bit. While it's not perfect and I still often login as a plant in the zombie base, it's a rare game that can my attention this long and that speaks volumes. I'm usually the first person in my group to get bored and move on from a game, but I'm the only one left playing GW2 and no plans of stopping.
I'm not surprised that most posts on Reddit and most new videos are focused on GW2. There's just so much to do and even with hackers in PC PvP lobbies, it's the most fun, and the ability to just jump across my backyard and make the other side spawn bosses, heroes, and champions and have some great fights in my own little world is a great thing and we need that GW2 feeling of 'home' back.
