@Iron_Guard8 One thing the upgrade system lacked that I brought up in the retrospective: visibility. All the variants and their projectiles were visually unique and were easily recognizable compared to upgrades. They also had specific weaknesses that bfn doesn't bother to have.
Balancing over 100 characters will be hard but even when they had a fraction of the characters they couldnt get it right in bfn.
Legendaries should stay imo they just need a few balance changes for toxic and disco and they'll be fine.
Not all of them are that interesting but the same could be said about new characters as overwatch and bfn had characters that were definetly more appealing to play than others. And while some peiple only play the meta the same is true with bfn in that the game is dominated by Superbrainz and citron shines above most of the plant roster.
Snipers definetly suffered without variants as they've been changed into a ********** system of widowmakers mechanics and can only play the game one way, **** that.
The lack of variants did turn people away from the game but it was also popcap forcing players to a class only one way which leads to really boring gameplay like overwatch after a few matches. Tf2 and gw avoided this by having characters in very loose roles like demoman being in defense but also being reslly good on the offensive or scientist being agrresive or sitting back and healing.
The variants also allowed the map design to stay relatively intact as bfn imo has the worst map design of the three and its far easier to design a map when you dont have to think of new character additions in the future years later. Bfn has less non turf maps than gw1 lmao.
I think the devs answered the whole upgrades vs variants with addition of legendary upgrades that functioned like variants because the upgrade system had quickly grown stale before the game was even out for half a year. I described it in the retrospective as a futile attempt to spike a flatlining combat system which people lost interest in.
They need to come back or else the game will die quickly just like bfn did because combat will become repetitive.