A highlight of the E3 media briefings this year was Electronic Arts opening with a Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare trailer that parodied their own Battlefield franchise.
The cooperative third-person shooter and tower defense title is refreshingly famil-friendly and funny, especially for a strategic warfare game.
Billed as 'the ultimate battle for brainz', Garden Warfare promises explosive action across a mine-blowing Plants Vs Zombies world.
I interviewed Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare producer Brian Lindley at E3 to find out more about the game. Watch the video or read the transcript below.
Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is a surprise hit of E3. Why do you think people are responding to this game so well?
I think it's an unexpected surprise for a lot of people. But there's a lot of fans of Plants Vs Zombies and seeing it realised in a different and unique way - the way we're doing with Garden Warfare - is refreshing for people and they're responding to that.
The strategic warfare genre is usually dominated by big, burly, masculine, violent games. Did you specifically want to attack that trope?
I don't know if we're attacking that specifically, I think what we wanted to do was blend as best we could what makes Plants Vs Zombies great with what makes a great action game. And yeah, there's an element of violence, but for us it's about how do you make those things work together, in the way that's most fun, that lets people play together, and work as teams and less about the over-the-top elements of it which was violence and all that.
One thing I've noticed through two demos of this game is the laughter it generates. Sometimes when a game is funny, gameplay mechanics might not be so great, for example there may be a funny superweapon that just dominates everything. Can you have strategically solid gameplay in a game that is as funny as this?
I think you can. It takes a lot of iteration, it takes a lot of balancing and play-testing, but it is possible. And I think the one thing that Plants vs Zombies gives us is a lot of great characters, in order for us to balance that experience. We've got a lot of different characters that do different things that we can insert and remove from it as we need, to ensure that it's balanced, and fun, and feels fair to play.
There's some fairly unique, fun looking weapons in this game. Can you talk me through a couple of your favourite weapons?
I think my favourite is the garlic drone. The cactus can call in and control a flying garlic drone that flies above the battlefield and shoots down spikes. But most importantly, it can call in corn missile strikes which are like mortar strikes, or missile strikes from other games, but does it in a fun and hilarious Plants vs Zombies fashion. That's probably my favourite sort of secondary character in ability. My favourite primary character is probably the pea-shooter, which is very much a standard, run-and-gun infantry style character, which is the kind of character I like to play. Every character is so unique, I think everyone is going to find one that speaks to them and their play style, which is why we tried to design it to be so unique and different.
In the demo we just saw there were four players playing co-operatively. Can you play with more characters, and can you play competitively?
There will be competitive multiplayer, we're not getting in to too much detail about that at E3, but I can confirm there will be multiplayer modes. There will be 12v12 multiplayer games. And yes, you'll be able to play as the zombies.
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Plants Vs Zombies: Garden Warfare is set for a 2014 release on the Xbox One, Xbox 360, PC, PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4.
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source: newshub archive
