Board Thread:Biweekly discussions/@comment-26239911-20190827201336/@comment-27385163-20190828150218

Oh and the other art styles- I completely forgot.

I really like Garden Warfare's art style. In terms of art direction, it takes a lot from its tower defense predecessors so people don't feel too unfamiliar with it, especially with the characters and locales. What's funny is that PvZ1's joke of a premise was based on zombies' relevance in shooters. Now, that they finally have the budget to actually make a game on the same scale as the games they're parodying, we get to see this style of humor in full swing in this game and they pull it off well.

The texturing is very realistic but not too jarring. The game hits for an uncanny valley realistic cartoon look but it's not so weird that it's weird. It hits a perfect middle ground. The backgrounds and characters still have their cartoony proportions, but the realistic texturing adds a whole new layer of weird to it. It basically parodies and knocks on shooters while looking just as good as them, just with a whole new twist to it. It subverts your expectations, and it perfectively incapsulates the spirit and humor of the franchise.

Garden Warfare 2 in terms of art direction is a lot more original, since they were confident that the brand could follow through since GW1 was likely successful. However, I'm not a huge fan of the original designs and I prefer the ones from the game's predecessor but, whatever. A lot of people love them, I just personally don't. Visually, it's very much competent and follows a lot of what worked in the first game. Not much to say here, really.

And Project Picnic is super cool! I like that the team is confident to experiment more and more. It's really satisfying to see the growth of the development behind these games. They first started by making a game based on a lot of shooter games tropes as parody. In the sequel, they wanted to push for a bigger game with more original concepts and ideas. Now, in this, we get to fully see the team go completely nuts on the idea of a standalone PvZ shooter.

And the art is a shining example of that. The art is a completely new refreshing take, it still takes some notes from its predecessor but goes for a shiny clean cartoon look and is more closely related to Plants vs. Zombies 2. Some of the character design overhauls are a bit jarring, like Rose most notably but the new art style is welcomed, I really think it's a good direction for the series. I'm glad to see the artists, and developers in general have dropped the tagline of just being a weird/parody shooter and want to pursue being a standalone good cartoony shooter alongside something like Splatoon. And I really hope they achieve that.

PvZ Adventures is atrocious in my honest opinion. Animations are at a really low frame rate, the art isn't...very good. The game only has a handful of memorable character designs. The only thing I can say it gets off with is that it's cute, and it's appealing, and yeah, it is. It just doesn't hold a candle to its predecessor nor does it really hold anything as big an improvement as its successors. It was a weird, and shortlived time for PopCap..