Plants vs. Zombies is a game whose name gets every gamer in their nostalgia. It’s a very famous and old strategy-based game that was a huge success after its release on mobile platforms. It was the top and most addictive game of its time. So what led to the ‘Fall of Plants vs. Zombies?’ Let’s find it out…
Plants vs. Zombies (The first game)
Launched on 5 May 2009 the game was a major hit by making about one million dollars in its initial 10 days of release. The main objective of the game was to defend the player’s own virtual home from zombies using the plant characters in their lawn, given in the game. The game is a masterpiece, and one of the best of its era with its interesting characters for both the zombies and the plants and some of the extra game modes which can get you involved just as the main levels.
So far everything was awesome about this but after the involvement of EA in this franchise, things started to go a little downhill and the seeds for the fall of Plants vs. Zombies started to grow.
Plants vs. Zombies 2 and The coming of EA (Electronic Arts)
Plants vs. Zombies 2 was very much similar to Plants vs. Zombies but with new levels, characters, reward styles, and most importantly with one bad thing that in this game some characters are unlockable by money only! And also in this one game, the gameplay was much more intense than the first one and the levels get too much difficult to play without the paid characters or the power-ups, making the game partially a pay to win. So far it wasn’t that bad and the game was pretty good.
And most of the levels were clearable at the last with some frustration if you don’t have the money but this was expected by any game by EA
The Garden Warfare series
This series was a great idea for the survival of the franchise which also became successful as it was sold just as much as the original series, it was more of a TPS-based game than a strategy-based with awesome graphics.
Its sequel PVZ: Garden Warfare 2 was even better with all the new characters, customizations, and the TPS experience with those great graphics which was one of the main reasons for the success of this series. Overall the Garden Warfare series was great and ‘PopCap’ and EA did a great job here. Even it also had some elite characters which can be bought from money but they were also available with the game currency making them available for everyone!
Plants vs. Zombies: Heroes (Where it started to go wrong)
So everything was going great till now then which lead to the downfall of the Plants vs. Zombies franchise, well it all started with creators coming with some lame and forced ideas like PVZ: heroes. This game was more like a ‘Hearthstone’ version of the original one which was like an experiment that was horrible not only in the sense that it was not as much good as the other games of the franchise but also with the aspect that it was mostly a pay to win the mobile game which was also not available for the other platforms.
It was more like a collectible card game which is not the problem but more powerful cards you have mattered the most, making it difficult for the free-to-play games and easy for the ones who can just afford these cards.
PVZ: Battle for Neighbourville(fall of the Garden Warfare series)
Battle for Neighbourville was another game for the Garden Warfare series with a new graphic design.
The game went downhill due to these aspects :
- Removal of the card system.
- Decrease in variation in the design of the character.
- Fewer rewards are earned per match.
- Fewer character customization.
- But the game also introduced new lore which was nice but they ultimately took away the joy of playing matches making the game duller once you finish the lore.
- This ultimately leads to the downfall of the Plant vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare series but we can always hope for a comeback from the developers.
Plant vs. Zombies 3 (why this one doesn’t give any hope?)
A new version of the original series is coming as Plants vs. Zombies:3, it’s not released globally but you can see the gameplay on youtube which can easily show us why this version is just going to boost the downfall of the franchise.
Here are the main reasons for it:
- The iconic and nostalgic character designs that were associated with the franchise are no more there and the new character designs are not even better.
- The difficulty of the game is increased more than PVZ: 2 making it way too difficult to play it casually.
- The rise in the difficulty level makes the game more and more pay to win.
- Ultimately the game will be just another PVZ: 1 with the unwanted level of difficultly, a U.I. that they mostly took from Clash Royale, and more pay-to-win.
Ultimately, if we see the above things it’s pretty clear that the downfall of Plants vs. Zombies came from the greed of money from the EA making every game more and more pay-to-win, some experiments done by PopCap that turned out to be bad like PVZ: Heroes and we can say that one of the parts of gaming nostalgia is coming to an end and the PVZ franchise is going towards its death.