An analysis of PVZ3's Soft-launch

so here's a fun little fact about PvZ 3 I thought it was dead 2020 it initially released it a soft release before being completely canned and redone from scratch featuring tons of assets that were newly created for it a whole new art style and tons of new zombies and plants that we haven't really seen since this version is now completely inaccessible and broadly forgotten for good reason mind but utterly removed and will likely never receive a light of day again instead a year and a half later they released a totally reworked and almost completely redone version though after three versions of pre-releases everyone agreed it was pretty bad and so after those three releases Each of which was 6 or 12 months apart it went completely silent rumors went around about the app sun setting and thus being cancel for good and due to a total radio silence surrounding the game a lot of people just kind of believe it it was rumored the first release was canceled for being so disliked by everyone they had to remake it after all it was seemingly not a shock that the second attempt would fall to a similar fate perhaps being canceled outright due to the clear Cuts made a p2's quality over time yet inexplicably somehow I woke up to pings asking me if I could play pz3 I couldn't an article went live talking about a tad bit too early but out of nowhere a game I was almost confident died earlier revived if it wasn't for that mistake we have been completely blindsided by a whole new pz game releasing which says a lot for the quote unquote advertisement leading up to release of course dropping out of nowhere comes with various problems most notably there's absolutely no expectations and as previous pz versions were so long ago a lot of people are coming in totally blind which means a new set of faces are approaching what might just be the most hated pz game of all time for the first time and to say that it didn't exactly change much would be an understatement fundamentally it's the exact same game that nobody liked about 2 years ago and shockingly enough that hasn't changed with time bit long for an introduction to pvz3 I realize but eh game's been around for a while so for me it does make sense to briefly cover this stuff so you know a bit of a context surrounding this game for full clarification pvz3 is not currently available everywhere it's simply a tough launch in a few regions I presume this will receive a full release as they are already updating and expanding the game but it is technically not known for sure yet you can use dpns apks or are other tools to access a game even if it's outside your region as with other mobile games in case they release another update before this video comes out this script is written as levels 151 to 230 have been released I haven't completed all of pz3 but I am aware of all the content that exists within it so I know plant and zombies exist for instance though to be frank I'm sure just looking at the gameplay in the background you probably have some questions worth asking so without f whatever Ado let's get right into it then ehh let's get the cat out of the bag choose your seeds is gone you no longer have access at choosing your plans when you enter the level nor do you even learn what zombies will even be in the level Sun values are also now in multiples of one acting like pz 1's 25 Sun plus Sun pickup almost entirely you're also unable to replay levels your only option for a level to play will be the next level in a row of which there are far more than most of the games thus far these levels are also far shorter than any other levels in the series they take a few minutes to complete at most and barely last any time as a result it is a rarity to get a truly stable defense and when he plant mostly consist of peashooter that's saying a lot even free flag levels can end in the blink of an eye and sometimes you end levels before even getting a peashooter on each lane I personally re this as a change made for the new generation and The Limited detention spans but frankly who knows a still change in how levels work are the waves themselves zombies still come in waves but the player now has absolutely no control over them in all the games zombie waves are controlled by the damage dealt to them so you can Sol waves out by dealing no or little damage towards them in pvz3 waves instead come on a set timer which changes the approach to most other games you always want but Firepower on the lanes as soon as possible installing with squashes or tangle Kelps never truly helps Grapes of Raph are also here replacing plant food they charge up for each zombie death but only slightly and will also charge up over time every now and again they will fill up and fire seven projectiles on the lawn each exploding in a one time one area these Target random zombies in the field though don't do a huge amount of damage it takes two to kill a basic zombie but if all lanes are going down fast not going to be doing all too much and this unreliability can be a serious problem in addition instead of mowers you simply have Mo who essentially acts as a single smart mower that changes Lane to a closer zombie functionally working as a far less powerful emergency option you can let a lane go down Lake game but only one lane and as the levels are so short this is crucial to pv3 levels functioning in any real capacity as otherwise you just stall Theos over and over this change does however make it quite clear that the game is far more willing to make you lose this feels like a good time to point out the live system exists and either cap a five before having to stop playing or spend coins to get more lives you may have spotted the line I in trying to draw here beating levels will give you Taco tickets which are used to continue a narrative sometimes you have choices sometimes it just trace for to do one thing in particular either way these are almost entirely separate of a game play if mode appears narratively they will still appear in a levels for instance and you will never unlock abilities of things during a main story instead you can view these as a s of powerups and such if you so wish boosts come in the form of things you can activate before the level starts these come as a rake which functions exactly as a pvz1 version a small amount of starting sun and a gumball machine that when t stepped on by a zombie will deal solid damage to all Target and Screen think of it as cabbage pulls plan food in pz2 and you get the gists you also can get infinite lives bypassing the live system for a short amount of time you get quite a lot of these in the game and a guaranteed 15minute one each day minimum with extras depending on any events and such powerups are used in game and comeon free flavors jalapeno and Cherry Bomb exist acting as they do in pvz1 and PVZ2 except with damage to defeat any targeted hits I should note here pv3 spawning system seems to like overwhelming individual Lanes so jalapeno is actually stronger than normal here alternatively you have chili pepper who Toggs an entire column but will only freeze targets dealing little to no damage towards them you can unlock powerups and boosts from several sources mostly being daily events each week in real life we have a cycle of events throughout Saturday and Sunday will have a gble peashooter that gives you free boost in future levels for each level you beat in a row Monday to Wednesday will put these signs on the lawn that causes zombies kill in these columns to provide points which will allow a group to all claim awards for a few examples these provide boosters SL powerups and other the main way to get them of course weekly the player will also receive deals constantly these are the main way the game makes money and these will sell you powerups at a discounted price and not going to talk about monetization much here but I do want to quickly call out have the prices all set up to make the more expensive version seem like a far better deal after all they only need to get you to buy once then you're far more likely to buy more notably these cycle so there is no emergency rush to grab them in case anybody was particularly interested in that for whatever reason you can also buy powerups and boosters directly for coins you earned from playing in the store and fully refresh a life or 900 coins when you're you're out you may notice that I actually end up with a lot of coins in Paris by playing normally while I don't use anything in most levels you can get a lot of powerups that are entirely free during certain events and sometimes just opening the game on a Monday can get you a whole array of powerups for no additional effort required and you have plenty of coins to buy the powerups you find yourself using the most this might be an unfortunate time to bring it at pv3 as it so happens is by far the hardest pz game they've ever released pz3 is not a very beginner friendly game it's not friendly to verons either frankly this game will spam zombies down at you incredibly fast unlike in previous games there is nothing throttling the zombie spawn meaning that especially during the early game the player has far less control over the game which really starts at your sun production hard one of the the biggest things that is initially quite subtle but becomes far more apparently to progress pz3 enemy spawns are generally Lane based a lot of zombies spawn in the early game they tend to spawn in the exact same Lane in a lot of levels later on four to five zombies can spawn essentially wave one and will all spawn in the exact same Lane maybe an attempt to make the early game imageable if you want to be polite but my mind immediately goes to Jalapeno which feels quite obvious to me as the most likely cause was to me it seems quite clear that the pars have instructed a lot of a design around the game most levels spawn at least a single ganta by the end which is an obvious big Target to hit with a dedicated power up the early games get rushy for the gumball machine to come in handy offer R to come in use and every single night level becomes far easier with a starting Sun boost to make your early game for manageable especially notable the fact that most of the hardest levels I've encountered thus far have been as brutal due to them being set at night that's let us say they are all equal chili pepper and Rags are far weaker than y ternatives but they also just so happen to be incredibly common in deals with plenty them making up the value of them re can instantly kill a zombie but usually only a zombie and in hard levels you aren't holding off on a rake usage later meanwhile the gum machine is strictly always better always dealing enough damage to kill early game threats while having a wider range G area of effects meanwhile truly pepper cannot kill zombies and stalling is far less viable in pvz3 due to zombies heading in regardless so you really aren't ever going to want to use it yet it costs more than a gumball machine does and rs cost the same as the other two boosters allowing them to say they are worth more than they actually are it comes off to me at least like these are the equivalent of stocking fillers valueless realistically which serve to make a deal feel like well an actual deal still powerups are constants you get a lot of powerups for almost anything you do after all which I think to an extent attempts to justify the intense difficulty but it is important to note for a lot of powerups just one won't save you if things are going wrong you generally need several levels like 145 tend to require you to use several powerups to bypass properly as a level overwhelms you just that much for instance a lot of the levels that are hard tend to be so due to special zombies which are generally quite strong and can all be instantly cleared with powerups as you can imagine most infamously of a very limited their specials is Pigeon feeder a zombie that spawns clums of pigeons constantly which are entirely immune to most damage until they land and start attacking your plants where they can be hit and killed instantly they can rapidly become a problem as they will block cage pul shots and against most attackers not killing them instantly can easily result in you being entirely overwhelmed one of the levels surrounding them as an example is level 66 a level with focuses entirely in cabbage P hitting Airborne pigeons which is a huge problem cabbage P cannot Fire fast enough to overwhelm the pigeons and if more than one feeter shows up you are simply screwed entirely the game doesn't explain this until later but the only real solution is to use walnuts to block them off before they reach a point in the lawn Ving can start spawning pigeons which is hard to do based on the zombie spam everywhere especially with imps which can posos to be a nightmare early game or you could simply blow them up after all they are a noticeable single Target which deals a ton of damage not hard to H after all regardless this all results in a massive cor problem with pv3 design philosophy but I imagine most people might have missed sure it's more puzzly quote unquote but that's not inherently a flaw it's brutal as crap but P2 was quite difficult at times and certainly didn't have half his issues and yes lacking choose your seed sucks but P's biggest issue is really unrelated you see P3 never lets you feel powerful and that hurts the game a lot when it comes to games in general there are series of feelings that can make you feel but usually constitute as fun some games make you feel like a strategic master mind pulling off an insanely tricky strategy while some games are designed to make you feel like a Sly piece of crap pulling all kinds of nonsense and gting wave it all scoffy you know the kind one of big ones historically has always been feeling utterly unbeatable you feel like the man the guy games like Doom follow this formula all the good Doom games let you feel like an instable brute blasting apart demons and Devils into gribly little bits just look at the original Doom here and the feeling is still felt it's what makes those games so fun to me and this may sound weird PvZ as a franchise pulls off his aim the games give you an insane amount of options and with the sun scaling the game is build for a more difficult early game but a more simple and manageable late game so instead of making the late game hard they instead make it satisfying to throw the enemies to the wind and let you utterly destroy them and he's a kicker even in PC2 at its hardest this is still a thing take ecle for instance a pretty difficult mod that you probably already know of once you get used to it playing ecle levels can feel like you are utterly Untouchable throwing down powerful instant and selling out waves to bring out behemoths with thousands of suns and then watch them solo half a field it's an incredible experience despite the game inherently being really bloody difficult because this feeling doesn't come from difficulty it comes from player power something that pz3 and never grants the player I feel this is a great time to talk about a small hitch of plans in pz3 right now out over 13 plants in P3 the most expensive plant is Bon Choy which costs six Sun of the equivalent of 150 Sun it doesn't exactly hit hard despite being cly broken in game because it doesn't feel great to use against bucket heads and the like and even plants are far worse you don't get repeater your best damage Ys comes into in the likes of lightning Reed and peashooter which is never a great sign plants like snow pee and bamboo shoots make this worse snow PE is for sun now but deals reduced damage when compared to peashooter about half and bamboo shoes does Splash damage and M A knockback but takes 10 years to Fire and takes two hits to kill a basic doesn't exactly feel great combine this with a general HP increase with basic zombies and you have a RP for disaster especially in a game where zombies are spammed insanely hard sun feels a struggle to get and even if those stronger plants existed they'll be almost utterly useless for those aforementioned Reasons I'm going to take an utterly unfounded guess the pz3 is built on the premise of match free games and uses those as a call inspiration for its game play the issue is that match free games have this feeling of power inbuilt as insane combos UR play of Simply matching pieces where the entire screen explodes in light when you simply match a few pieces together with high variance to make this feeling hit hard when it happens while in over simplication for sure I think it's important to note that by base pz3 doesn't have anything like this instead leaving you to suffer with nion beatable zombie hordes with no real chance to gamble a win out of it unless you really know what you are doing this just means van pey free it never feels good to win your only feeling of power comes from powerups but needing to use several to win hardly feels like a good usage of resources because you never feel powerful or truly set by defense due to the levels even being too short to ever truly comfortable well the core appeal of pz franchise seems a little lost to me as a strategy isn't exactly there either it's hard to say all too much great about it to me this means as well and truly lost the main appeal of just just playing PvZ faster to say people kind enjoy it I don't tend to gay keep people from enjoying what they enjoy after all but I personally don't exactly see it I can't find the enjoyment in pvz3 Beyond a very basic feeling of progress which is mostly developed by the narrative inside of the game speaking of which that's kind of half a game experience here so let's talk about it this game has a plot technically let's start off by saying that it is wholly unrelated to the actual game in almost every single way so calling it the game story seems a bit disingenuous as a result the plot meand is almost around the levels and the characters never visit the places where the levels take place in fact events in the story have zero impact on gameplay which is a little more noticeable when some of these include your lawo getting hacked and being entirely disabled there's a point where you meet to mow first in the levels before they get introduced as an actual character where they try to kill another that's not to say the story is inherently worthless it being separate doesn't make it bad by itself but I do again find a story extremely Meander you often need to go to x location for X thing and then the characters clean it up then move on to the next area not to say events don't happen however there are arcs so to say such as M gang hack need to be restored of the gang sign in the zombie war of a rocket powered chair they happen to be sleeping on which is really where the entertainment lies honestly if more of these Shenanigans happened I would enjoy the story a lot more frankly I'm not exactly a story writer but this game is very strangely Ru at times I would watch my video on my first Dream playing pz3 for a good example of a game going completely nuts but long story short it is heavily implied that one of the characters actively slaughtered PL children and boss called it a Gore Den very weirdly we're in though realistically it's F been the only time I've seen dialogue like that it's generally a lot more safe Crazy Dave goes on adventure of Patric and mo mo being B Mo and Patric being then niece on a granded venture to build a fog vacuum to clean up Neighborville as they clear out the area nearby and come across new friends on a journey otherwise it's very standard for a story I'd argue it's not terrible the players basically no input and isn't even a real character you said mostly watch Dave and friends do random nonsense to kill time and eat up your Tacko tickets it's not the worst thing ever seen and I think the alling sections really shines through the all direction is overall quite nice unless you're playing the actual game which is certainly a choice but it helps these sections stand out more and they are genuinely unique among the pey franchise you are also encouraged to go through the story as I do give rewards for doing so this includes generally quite large infinite life boosters so the narrative does actually flow relatively well assuming you are doing all right but it is not uncommon to get completely locked off in progress by a particularly difficult level and to be frank you are not able to play 24/7 So eventually the infinite lives just straight up run out and you have to play about bogging down a pays hard and makes a story somewhat hard to follow I should also note that these are very fan servy to a specific source of all things the PVC Comics most characters here are from the comics and they clearly have implied plans to add new characters from them patc Tugboat and even this ugly pig dog thing are all from the comics with clear plans for a timely in search after it's a fun fact but barely means anything may want to develop a pan of characters to work with in future py media and to quickly get people to like them they just use comic book characters I'm not really sure regardless this definitely contributes a unique value to pvz3 that I honestly don't actually hate well unique among the P franchise at least not among other games considering how this game takes quite literally everything from Guns Scapes and other match free games like [Music] it guns Scapes is a match free mobile game mostly known for the terrible ads regardless this game to my knowledge popularized the classic story structure of many mobile games where in between levels you get resources to continue the main story where you usually get access to several options proed and get powerups at doing so needless to say PC3 is quite similar to it but the comparisons go quite a bit deeper than you may initially think so remember those grapes weird mechanic you make progress on them through enemy death and through time and acate automatically when it fills well G Scapes has this wheel which fails when you get powerups off and when full automatically places one of these balls that kind of remove all pieces of the same color at a random position somewhere on the board the powerups themselves are also very similar to Common match free powerups a fin explosion a lan clear and a column range ability in fact the very position of these powerups are the same which is extra interesting as the previous game put them in a wholly different position down here and having separate boosters which mostly give you bonus of a star a level well guess what other game just happens to have those of course this goes yet deeper you know how on different days you get different boosts guess what game also does that including the exact same power boost gimmick where playing levels in a row can give you extra boosters as long as you keep winning all the story stuff is from gun Scapes a game where the entire plot is restoring an old Garden going place to place and adding new stuff as you go even minor stuff like time skips are also done in guns Scapes even newspaper appear with no element of how P3 presents his story being unique it's really hard to emphasize just how similar these really are and how absurd it honestly gets when I say that pz3 doesn't have an original bone in his body I do truly mean it like this goes so far that even some of this gimmicks can be traced back to this game if you try hard enough I think it's important to note that just completely shock me at first but honestly more so comes across me personally as just well sad realistically this isn't even an issue of pz3 but the very nature of mobile games and how far they have really devolved realistically gunscape clones are a dime a dozen these days and what pvz3 tries to do is far from special in taking these elements it's unfortunate how all these games are so similar though frankly I'm not really upset about this whole ordeal which may seem to be a bit of a surprise to many but honestly I don't really care that much because to be real here py3 being bad should be a surprise and furthermore pz3 doesn't really matter to a lot of people PC3 was a rude awakening and a sudden shift in game quality for those who have played most of the games at release and not much else if you've been around for the past year though you know this isn't quite true I think pv2 especially makes us obvious for the past year updates have been to put it lightly weak and ever since battlea nville released this game hasn't exactly had an update that really did all too much while this game has been broadly stuck in the same state in fact the last new set of zombies were added back in 9.4.1 on December 13th of 2021 since then only few zombies that either exist in pz1 or pz3 or Nutcracker who looks like this it's very clear to me that PopCap lacks a manpower to create the great experiences that were so iconic in the times of old and frankly if you think pz2 is bad there's probably only been a single good PVZ Game Ever Never released so being shocked that pz3 is bad just seems well dumb to me pz3 just doesn't matter it's not trampling on a legacy of a one's great series or anything that be pz match a cheap game the community initially F to straight up a knockoff yet is an official spin-off to series acting exactly as the name implies it even has the exact same gunscape systems NOP really they legitimately made two games of almost identical systems of gwn Scapes in the P franchise I guess that's becoming the new PvZ thing and to be honest I don't think PvZ 3 is irrevocably terrible there's enough here that I can see some people enjoying it more absentmindedly and in the modern mobile market it's not the worst thing on earth and to be real here it's not as if PC games historically have always had great launches I feel the need to remind people that unreleased pz 2 was actively terrible it had an entirely different system to unlock content there were required an ungodly amount of grinding and lacked a lot of key features we have now such as no zom bosses or gantas it's not completely implausible that PD's issues can be fixed and at a glance it doesn't seem impossible they will attempt to Nerf some of the heart levels down and as far as I can tell plants like sunflower already have received Buffs since I played so I'm sure the game will improve as time goes on though I genuinely don't care personally look we live in a world of repetive game sequels and spin-offs as companies are beginning to double down on IPS they already own instead of developing new ideas so frankly I'm not that bothered that one of them is bad it didn't come out of nowhere for me I knew it was going to be bad what 4 years ago so it would be weird for me to be poet and realistically for me I have been playing new plan vs Zombies for years now in between fan games and mods which have become more and more popular over time so for me wasting time playing and looking at pz3 is just that a total waste of time there's better things to talk about than a single crappy game this video is honestly inherently kind of pointless because any analysis can't really provide more than a glance or play can't tell you do I need to explain why having levels that last less than a minute is a bad idea do I need to explain why relegating instant plants like Cherry bom jalapeno to parps only result in a cheap experience do I really need to explain why having night levs with early waves that look like this without sunroom or Puff shroom could be problematic do I really need to explain to you the zombie design looks a little off when goanta look like this pz3 doesn't matter because there is no real reason to dedicate time to it there's no interesting insights to gleam from it there's nothing of Worth to gain from playing it and there's certainly nothing worth spending money on here it's just a bad game as far as I'm concerned I don't care if that is linked to pey franchise as franchise loyalty is a meant to sell more sequels I don't really care about pop cap are the original employees who made the games I actually care about are as far as I know long gone and Ral of pz 2's credit show that who works it now likely aren't happy of doing so pz3 is a product created to make money out of the Beloved franchise nothing more and frankly I don't think it's worth my breath to care about a product any more than I already have greatest video I'll get back to playing with py games that are worth playing The Watch created by people who I know for sure care about these games and making a fun experience the fan games in mods created by fans for fans i' ever play a game then be marketed to with my final force of away I think it's a decent spot to save a Christ making this scriptor Hearts frankly I've made this video more so out of obligation than anything I'd rather want to do and honestly it's really difficult too because I feel obligated to try to say something of substance out of a game that I genuinely believe has nothing worth saying in a video like this hopefully you learn something from this because God knows that I am not making another PC3 video unless I get pushed hard like they fix a darn thing or do things so stupid I have no choice but to comment on it to be honest it kind of sucks me too I've been trying to move away from being so negative all the time and talk about the stuff I actually like so people dropping in immediately this year dismantling all that is is not ideal again I already knew it was bad so it's not pleasant to come back to suddenly see it show up while I was trying to focus on more positive videos this year then I take up half a year this far pain whatever I think the more interesting aspect of all this has been the commed reaction which I was originally going to talk about length but cut cuz I felt telling people what to think was a bit eh follow myself essentially to talk for a bit about being too direct a lot of people seem to have ideas to fix pvz3 but I don't understand the core issues of the game itself cuz I haven't been able to consider the deeper ramifications for actions and the underlying why certain decisions were made think choose your seeds and so forth still P releasing is a big deal and help that I evade my fortunate clear as day it's been a pretty long video but it seems that it's a theme this year turns out my next few videos are likely be just as long maybe my next video will be shorter just to break that up uh we we shall find out together I I I don't know yet yet regardless this has been creeps and have a good [Music] one

Channel: Creeps20

Views: 288,123

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Id: YrnIvTSP3Bo

Length: 32min 46sec (1966 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024