Plants vs Zombies: Garden Warfare 3 rumors have been floating around for more than a year, starting with a listing for a comic that leaked the title back in early 2018. Evidence for another entry in the series has been mounting, including this morning’s news about a leaked trademark for the title “Plants vs Zombies: Battle for Neighborville.” Now a few leaked screenshots seem to show that Battle for Neighborville will indeed be a successor in the Garden Warfare sub-franchise.
The screenshots, allegedly from the closed alpha community playtest currently running on PS4 and Xbox One, show off the character classes as well as what appears to be a hub area map. The closed alpha came with a very strict NDA for anyone involved, and EA has been swiftly removing any and all videos and screenshots that have been popping up—apparently there were some videos that actually showed multiplayer gameplay—but not before a few of the screens were grabbed and made it into the news cycle.
On the Plants side of things, we’ve definitely got the favorites returning, including Pea Shooter, Sunflower, and Cactus. There are also a couple of new characters, notably Snapdragon (previously a spawnable plant) and a mushroom character, Night Cap. Altogether, there are 10 plant characters shown, though if the past games are anything to go by, each character will have a number of variants as well.
For the Zombies, we have a similar lineup of 10 zombie characters, from a bunch of returning favorites to a few that haven’t been playable in a Garden Warfare game before. On both sides, the characters are divided out into basic Attack, Defend, and Support categories. The screens also show the ability to equip various upgrades to the characters. It’s not clear from these screenshots how the upgrades will interact with the character variants (or if dedicated variants like Fire Pea or Super Commando are returning at all). It does still look like each character will be leveled up individually, and you can potentially have up to three loadouts for each one.
Finally we get a look at the massive map of Neighborville, an open-world hub-like area. If this is a hub similar to the staging area in Garden Warfare 2, it’s much bigger this time around, though there are some reports of Garden Warfare 3 (or Battle for Neighborville, if the trademark is for this game) having a single-player component this time around. This map could be the play area for that single-player game. You can click on the image of the map below to enlarge it and check out some of the finer details.
Of course all of this is speculation until EA officially announces the game. With gamescom just around the corner and the title apparently far enough along to be in closed alpha tests with the community (a number of commenters on Push Square confirm the validity of the screenshots and I have seen the gameplay videos myself, but they are hosted on sites which could quite possibly infect your computer with all sorts of viruses), it probably won’t be much longer until we get an announcement. All said, we might even get a Plants vs Zombies Garden Warfare 3 release before the end of this year.
[Source: Push Square via GameSpot]
