Though PopCap Games’ Plants vs. Zombies franchise has always been about the atmosphere and characters, the narrative has been going places. In Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2, the Zombies rule in an alternate future and it’s the Plants who are the attackers.
Producer Kyle Duncan spoke to Examiner about building a narrative with each new game and stated that, “It’s kind of cool because we have multiple teams working on the franchise. All sorts of ideas come up when we get together with the group and discuss.
“We say ‘yeah, this is a story we want to build on’, show more pieces of it and I think you’re going to see more of that. We may introduce somebody like Super Brains in our game, but you may find him in another PvZ game and find out other aspects of his story.”
There’s also plenty of crossover occurring between players who enjoyed Plants vs. Zombies on mobiles and those who enjoy Garden Warfare. “Mobile is an amazing acquisition. I think they have something like 250 million users that have played PvZ 2. That was part of the reason why we start Garden Warfare in the first place. We learned a lot of those people on mobile are actually console gamers. They may not all be shooter gamers, but they were console gamers and played titles like FIFA and other things.
“That’s why we naturally developed the idea for Garden Warfare because we knew those people weren’t just mobile exclusive gamers. We knew they spent a lot of time on console so we wanted to get them a PvZ product to play on console. It’s something of a more console-style product.”
Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is out in Q1/Q2 2016 for Xbox One, PS4 and PC.