Variant Talk

Time to address that elephant in the backyard (Why an elephant, Dave?); variants.

When I first grabbed GW back in ’14, I had been playing shooters for years, back to at least getting Wolfenstein 3D on 3.5 disks all the time, but PvP ones less so, TF2 and some WoT, with BF:1942 in the past as well. I was and still am, a huge PvZ fan but the idea of a shooter based on a tower defense game seemed weird and I was wondering how we’d play as plants that were going to be basically turrets (ha!), but the game looked great and wasn’t expensive so I picked it up shortly after launch on PC and never regretted it. Having 8 classes isn’t terrible for a game of this type, but then I started buying packs and unlocking the variants and that made the game all the sweeter. GW2 added more classes and variants on top of that, which only made me love the game more, and despite some of the issues with balancing them both in their own class and against others, they’re a fun idea that works more often than it doesn’t. I still would argue that BfN’s idea of no variants while adding more diverse upgrades and with many new characters could have worked had we enough new ones to play, but variants have a lot to love, and it’s become quite obvious that people love them to the point that their absence alone drove them from BfN. I knew it was a thing before, going back to Founders, but no idea it was THIS critical for so many.

One of the things I love about GW and GW2 are the variants; take the Engineer’s concrete launcher, replace it with a rapid-fire weapon, and bam! You have the Mechanic, a kind of Engineer/Foot Soldier hybrid, or take the Sunflower, give her an electrical attack, and the power flower is born, who is handy for Ops as you tend to have lots of AI zombies in close proximity. Some of the variants are problematic for balance; often too strong or too weak, but the idea still works.

Some variants are a bit simple, like many fire, toxic, frost, and electric variants end up just being ‘slap elemental effects on them and adjust their damage a bit’, but they do add some nice effects and skins for those characters. GW2 kept these up but also tried to mix things up a bit with such variants as the Zen Cactus, S.H.R.Imp, and the meter characters, with mixed success. I was hoping we’d see an Ice Pirate (for that movie, which was a good time), Frozen Corn (it’s in the store!), and other such variants for the new characters, but we never got as many as I’d have hoped for after launch. I like what we got for sure, but once you have variants, you want more and more!

I’ve seen some on Reddit point out that variants aren’t as exciting as brand-new characters since they don’t change things up as much as an entirely new character. I can’t say they’re wrong since while variants may change things significantly, they still have the base character’s basic appearance and kit, but I also feel that even minor changes give me reason to try out the different variants, but your mileage may vary.

The biggest issue with variants is balancing them against not only other variants and the base character they are a variation of, but also against characters on their own side and of course the opposing team. This is why in GW the zombie teams are flooded with Super Commandos while the plants are dominated by Toxic Peas. I see more variety in GW2, largely because there is more variety in the first place, but Astronauts (which I don’t see as often in GW as in GW2), Toxic Brainz, the detonation characters, and a few others are very common. This is why I wish we had another balance patch or 2 for GW2 before they put that game in maintenance mode. It’s still my favorite of the 3 we currently have, but anything that helps keep people from focusing on the most powerful variants so often would have been nice. A lot of max ranks only play a couple particular characters and that’s it, which doesn’t really help keeping new players interested and engaged. I’ve been max rank for a long time, but unless I need one of those ’10 vanquish streak’ epic quests, I like playing a wide variety of characters and leave certain variants like Toxic Brainz, for PvE only (he’s great at getting boss quests done or that 500 vanquishes with a toxic variant’s main weapon), to avoid being one of ‘those’ max rankers.

In any game, some people will always migrate towards powerful or obnoxious characters. And this can backfire as they drive new folks away who have really bad experiences, and games like this need people to stay to play with. I play a lot more PvE than PvP, but I’m not the norm for these games where PvP is the main focus so am fully behind getting things balanced and fair for all players. The meta changes over time as things are adjusted but as GW2 hasn’t had any work done since 2019 (and limited even then), the meta is well and truly known by us old hands but the many new players I see when I jump into the portal lack this knowledge so perform even worse than one would normally expect as most active games like this have a more fluid and changing meta as things are added, removed, or changed.

Also, should the meter characters go for the next game? I’m talking about party characters and the other legendary ones that have these meters. They’re difficult to balance as they have the 2 modes and the base mode has to be viable without the improved mode being too powerful and it’s still an issue now with such underpowered variants like Disco Chomper and overpowered ones like Toxic Brainz. I hate to see any variant removed, but we lost the trademarked characters in GW2 that were in GW (The Aquafina and Chee-Toes characters), so maybe it would be better to remove them, although I’d hate to lose Party Imp’s music! They’ve tweaked these a couple times and barring a few exceptions aren’t too onerous to deal with, but it would be one less balancing headache if they were gone.

I also would like to see variants of the new characters brought into a new game, and although some would be less easy than others, like Snapdragon, it could work and have 7 more characters (Snapdragon, Nightcap, Acorn/Oak, Wizard, Space Cadet, Electric Slide, and 80s Action Hero), with at least 4 variants each plus a new plant to balance the wizard out, would be 30 characters to play (8 basic plus the 32 variants), in addition to the variants and characters of GW2 and then any new variants they add while hopefully not losing any barring the legendary characters.

Speaking of variants for a new game, I think we need more diverse and unusual variants instead of just fire, ice, toxic, and electric. We do have others of course, some of which I quite like (like Jade Cactus and Alien Flower). Not that the elemental variants are bad in general, but that the more unusual ones are more exciting and interesting. Some could be passives too, like a Chomper that continuously spawns smaller chompers that run around and chase zombies to bite them (NOT to swallow them), but don’t do a lot of damage and aren’t difficult to vanquish, or a Nightcap that releases a cloud of spores when vanquished that causes damage to the zombies near it for a few seconds.

The only issue I really think we have with variants, BfN’s upgrade system, and alternate is abilities is that they can ‘step on each other’s toes’ at times making it difficult to determine where some of these ideas belong. This heavily depends on what the next game turns out to be of course, but part of why I gave up on OW and focused on games like all 3 PvZ shooters, TF2, and Paladins is that they let us tweak things  up to the point that they drastically alter the way we play the games, and I love that concept, and want to see it propagated to the next PvZ shooter.