Yep, it's that time again!
While I no longer play BfN, and not a lot of the original GW these days, and focus my PvZ shooter time on GW2, I do watch the Reddit and YouTube for the general community feelings and people are still playing all 3 games to this day. Yes, they are mostly focused on GW2, which is no surprise, but seeing people jump into GW, and on PC no less, which has the lowest population of the platforms the games are available on, and get full or near full games more often than not should really say something about these games' fanbase and we're hungry for more!
A new game would have to win back some of those that left over the years; we lost some when GW2 changed some stuff from GW, but the lion's share of those that drifted away did so over BfN, and that being the last shooter released means there's work to do, but there's no doubt that if handled well a new shooter would easily be a hit. Of course the pitfalls that drove so many away need to be addressed, but seeing the Dead Space Remaster doing well does bode well for the possibility of a new GW game; a game based mostly on GW/GW2 but using some of BfN's better aspects. Give us that sweet GW goodness with some map and balance tweaks, preserve the better ideas (like the Backyard Battleground), and give it active support and it could easily be a winner!
With the latest news we see that the games as a service model isn't doing so hot, but only BfN really tried to do that and it's part of why it didn't end up so well. GW2 did push a few too many packs for real money but a lot of us old-timers already had stuff unlocked by the time they were added to the game, but GW did the best job here with just the game price and coin packs. Obviously, EA/PopCap will want to make money from it, but make it good from the get go and support it decently and without annoying and off-putting monetization and it will do well.
I would love to see GW3 with all the maps from GW and GW2-yes, even Time Park(!), tweaked for the larger characters, balanced a bit to make the GW maps less roof-campy and sniper dominated (and I want to see both Garden Center and Aqua Center available), some balance changes, bug fixes, better netcode (we really need better netcode), more variants, alternate abilities, the better town hall events back and so on. I have almost 3100 hours in GW2 and still playing, but it's been too long since BfN got put into maintenance mode and the community is hungry for a new game like a zombie is hungry for brains!
