Plants vs Zombies 2: It's About Time

[Twig]

Snort. Nice!

[thestalkinghead]

i will play it (when it comes to PC) before i make a final judgement on it, but the fact that some plants are only available if you pay money has basically made my decision for me, plants Vs zombies is an incredibly easy game, the fun in it was designing a defence from the zombies, in fact it is most fun when your design isn't about super zombie killing efficiency but more about trying out new designs and tactics that just about do the job, it is more about creativity and variety than gaming efficiency, and getting new plants added to the fun in the design, if the game didn't have these micro transactions and was just a real game that you buy it would still have been about that, but because of the micro transactions it is a game about resisting the temptation to make the game easy buy cheating (i mean microtransactions) and not spending the in game coins to save real money.

[Flynn]

There's a lot of f2p ire in the air, and much of it is landing on this game.

 

And I'm there with the f2p ire.  I think it's ruining games.  I hate hate it.  But the thing is that on the spectrum of shitty f2p stuff, this particular game is leagues better than the others and second only to games with a no-gameplay-effects wall like Dota 2.  I'll explain.

 

Look at the two of the most popular games right now: Candy Crush and Puzzle and Dragons.  The player numbers on these games are absurd as is the income they bring in.  The company that owns Puzzles and Dragons is valued at roughly the market cap of Nintendo and Puzzles and Dragons is by far it's main product... that's how huge these games are getting.  And how do they work?

 

Both games utilize the 'energy' you see in almost every f2p game.  You run out and have to wait real world minutes to recharge... or you can buy more with money.  Even Double Fine's Middle Manager of Justice utilizes this system from what I have heard.  There is no energy system in Plants vs Zombies 2, nothing ever prevents you from playing.

 

In Candy Crush, you will reach a point where only absurd luck or paying for single-use powerups will let you get to the next level.  I just finished all the main levels in PvZ2 without spending a coin, never mind a dollar, and without hitting any difficulty walls.  I'm no tower defense pro -- I could not beat the later missions in Defense Grid for example.

 

In Puzzles and Dragons the real money currency is stones.  Spend stones and you get a slot machine pull of a random monster (5 dollars a pull) and your odds of getting anything actually useful are very low.  Maybe 1 in 4?  This is the only way to get most of the monsters in the game and without them, you will cap out fairly quickly.  The other way to spend your stones if to resurrect yourself and they give you strong reasons to do so.  If you die in a dungeon you lose all the loot you acquired and don't get your energy back.  The dungeon may be quite long and the loot may be very rare, and acquired early in the dungeon.  So you can find a super rare drop and feel compelled to spend a stone to save it... and then die later and have to spend another stone, etc.  Each stone costs 1 dollar.  This is the loss-aversion tactic, if you don't pay, you lose real-world-time, in-game energy, and the loot.

 

There are no slot-machine pulls in Plants vs Zombies.  I'm not sure what determines key drops (new plant upgrades) but it seems to be gated by star progression.   For that matter the levels themselves are not RNG based like the games above, so you can't keep hammering away hoping for a lucky setup.  Instead every zombie is delightfully deterministic.  This means you can iterate on your opening strategies.  Very often I lose and then stop and refine.  I realize that if I stall a zombie here instead of killing it, that gives 3 more seconds, which lets me get one more sunflower up earlier, which means later I have 75 more sun can afford what I need to stop the super zombie.  And so on.  Pure skill.

 

So given all that I'm a little sad that this particular game is talked about as if its a poster-child for f2p bullshit when it happens to be the almost the lone exception to most of it.  True, it does nag you with purchase screens, and it doesn't avoid letting you make the game absurdly easy and boring by buying stuff if you wanted to.  These are negative aspects but truly orders of magnitude less so than almost every other f2p game, and much easier than tune out since the gameplay with them removed is good.

 

Perhaps the craziest irony of the whole thing is that if PvZ 2 had not been f2p, as a casual mainstream game, it likely would have been a lot easier, and I would have gotten a lot less out of it and maybe even quit early, bored.  This is the first time I might actually say a game benefited mechanically from changing to f2p model (not just benefiting the revenue stream) because of this strange side-effect.  Truly this game, without upgrades or coins, hits a nice spot in the challenge zone.  I even being very selective with the wide range of upgrades since I don't have many keys -- it was an important choice like shopping in FTL.  In the first game it had no impact as I assumed I'd grind everything soon enough.  Not to take this particular happy result as a defense of the business model in general -- I'm as shocked as anyone it worked out like this, and this game is surely the exception.  I certainly have never seen a f2p transition work out this in other games.  And maybe the new worlds they add will be full of bullshit, who knows.  But as it stands this one of the very few f2p games not really worth of such ire.

[thestalkinghead]

PVZ2 wont be getting any money from me, end of. shame on them.

[elmuerte]

I don't intend to spend any money on F2P games (or pay2win games), ever. I loath the concept, and I think it's an abusive mechanism. It should come with a warning label for the sheeple.

I've clocked 20+ hours in plants vs zombies 1 even though I generally despise tower defense games. I really enjoyed the game. But I doubt I would have bought PvZ2 if it was a "standard" game.

 

I think the F2P and P2W is the cancer of video games. It's simply disgusting. A different example, Saints Row 4, which I'm really enjoying, has a "DLC" called "The Executive Privilege Pack" which basically unlocks all cheats in the game. So, pay $2 to remove any challenge. Cheat codes used to be gratis. Horse armor used to be free. etc.

[thestalkinghead]

yeah it's the nickel and dime generation of games developing, it makes me sick, i would literally (meaning literally) puke all over the guys with these ideas to make my opinion clear 

[juffowup]

To confirm what I have heard with my personal experience:

 

The difficulty ramp in PvZ 2 is fantastic.  Buying anything would make the game worse.

 

If you are an experienced tower defense player this game is tuned just right.  Why pay to skip the star challenges when they are the best part!  I'm having to make tough choices right from the first map and loving it.

 

I would recommend self-limiting yourself to also not spend any coins.  You can theoretically grind levels for coins, but if you pre-decide to never spend any, the game has no grinding.  Instead it's merely a question of finding and defeating the appropriate star challenges with smart play.

 

I'm on the last map and have never found myself in a spot where I couldn't progress, and this while not even spending the coins the game gives me.  Consider this third party verification that there are no bullshit Candy Crush walls in this game.  There's no energy system.  There's no loss aversion.  There's not really any of the evil free to play shit.  

 

I can't believe it worked out this way, but the vanilla game, without using coins, just happens to have the perfect difficulty progression for me and probably anyone who plays other tower defense games.  Kudos, I guess?  Weird.

 

This is basically the same experience I've had.  A point I don't see people bring up is the particular choice of plants that cost money--- the grumpy squash, the frozen peashooter, the jalapeno, and a new one that generates plant food.

 

In PvZ 1, I used the squash and frozen peashooter in basically every level.  Between squash and potato mine, you could buy enough time to get an economy going strong enough to immediately fill a column with frozen peas, and then another, and then add whatever you need to deal with any specialist zombies in the game.  These plants also share a lot of the same ideas that one of the new staple plants (iceberg lettuce) occupies---but iceburg lettuce is a much more interesting plant.  It's free but it only temporarily pauses a zombie (squash killed).  When I now play an opening with potato mine and iceburg lettuce used to buy time to build economy, the game is a lot more tense and interesting than games with squash and potato mine were.  Likewise, frozen peashooter was so powerful as to be an always-use.  Its main drawback (you can't use it with a torchwood) wasn't enough to mean that it was the only plant you ever needed to beat many levels.  

 

Instead of viewing this as Popcap removing content and putting it behind a paywall, I tend to see it as popcap better balancing this game and then allowing purchase of game-breaking items.

[TurboPubx-16]

To those of you who are enjoying the game, what are you playing it on? I find it to be very hard to play on my 4S due to the small screen and all the extra touching I have to do.

[Flynn]

Both iPad and the most recent iPod Touch.  I am surprised to find myself by logging a ton of hours on the smaller device even though it is still fairly annoying, as my tolerance for tiny screen gaming with anything is pretty low.

[SecretAsianMan]

So PvZ2 came to Android a few days ago.  I'm not very far into it but I have to say I'm not really bothered by it as much as I thought I would be.  While most of the F2P complaints people have are true, I'm not actually annoyed by them so far.  Yes, there are plants locked behind a pay wall, but playing without them has actually added variety to my strategy since I'm forced to compensate for their loss.  And none of them seem to be the vital ones so I'm not really at a huge disadvantage.  The grinding is also there to a degree but really it's just stuff I probably would have done anyway.  After I completed the main game in PvZ, I went through it a few more times with some self imposed challenges just to make it more interesting.  The only difference between then and now is that it's actually part of the game.

 

So far I don't think it's a quite as bad as most people made it out to be.  I also very much dislike the F2P plague that's spreading across gaming, but I feel like in PvZ2 they didn't purposely cripple gameplay to make you have to pay to progress.  Maybe it will turn into that later once I hit some bullshit part, but for now I'm ok with how it is.

[Dewar]

I'm not a huge fan of the PvZ mechanics, but I was having fun enough playing it until I lost a chunk of progress during the iOS update. I felt that the extra star challenges on levels made them unique enough to not feel like a repeat and I would say that people who pay their way through to the next level are missing out on a lot of fun. I've never felt like I needed to buy a plant to continue, and they surfaced each area of the market only once or twice, not near the amount I was afraid they would.

[SecretAsianMan]

I've found one thing I don't like about this game.  It DESTROYS my phone's battery life.  At one point my battery stopped charging because it was overheating after about 10 minutes of play.

[Brannigan]

Doesn't even work correctly on my phone, got through 2 levels, now it locks up anytime I try to play the next one.

[SecretAsianMan]

This game got a rather large update recently.  They've removed the need for keys almost entirely (now there are only 'World' keys) and the need to grind for everything.  The stars are gone and progression is similar to the first PvZ game with the stages in a linear order (although there's still a map so you can revisit any of them you want).  You unlock plants and upgrades as you progress, although certain plants and upgrades are still locked behind paywalls.  The challenges have become requirements to pass certain levels and there's no longer multiple challenges per level.  They also added the giant gargantuar zombies from the previous game.  Any progress made before the update is carried over into the new system.  And they've finally added a much needed fast forward button.

 

The result of all this is a weird situation where I don't want to play the game anymore because I've beat it now and there's no motivation to replay the levels because the grinding is gone.

[Dewar]

Hmm, I still haven't looked at it since it lost almost a world's worth of progress.