Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2
Also known as: Plants vs. Zombies: GW2 (title screen) Developer: PopCap Games Publisher: Electronic Arts Platforms: Windows, PlayStation 4, Xbox One Released in US: February 23, 2016 Released in EU: February 25, 2016 This game has unused animations. This game has unused areas. This game has unused playable characters. This game has unused code. This game has hidden development-related text. This game has unused enemies. This game has unused objects. This game has unused modes / minigames. This game has unused graphics. This game has unused models. This game has unused items. This game has unused abilities. This game has unused music. This game has unused sounds. This game has unused text. This game has debugging material. This game has a prerelease article

Plants vs. Zombies: Garden Warfare 2 is the second Plants vs. Zombies shooter game in the Garden Warfare spin-off series. This time, the zombies finally took over an acre-sized neighborhood named Suburbia and transformed it to a high-tech utopia: Zomburbia! Now it's the plants' turn to reclaim it. Also, plants and zombies battling... In SPAAAAACCCCEEEE!

Popcap and EA rushed this game, so there's a lot of unused and unfinished content.

To do: Document unused objects. Document unused modes. Document launch build exclusive things, including beta future parrot, beta future dummy, Future tallnut model which is only in launch build, and early 54th rank plate. A tutorial on how to access that build can be found on the Garden Warfare 2 modding server

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Prerelease Info

Debugging Material Put this back in, Jeff!

Unused Graphics Unused abilities, quest items, spotting icons, you name it.

Unused Weapon Data Leftovers from GW1, plus some new stuff.

Unused Bosses Boss Hunted to extinction.

Unused Summons How does it feel to be both used and unused?

Very Early Mock-Up

Found in the files of the game is what appears to be a mock-up of an early version of the game. From here, several differences can be seen.

• The background resembles that of Garden Warfare 1, though with slight differences, such as the sky being more blue instead of purple.

• The ability icons are still the ones from Garden Warfare 1, and also have no border and are a bit smaller than in the final game. Strangely, both the Dummy Shield and the Shield Decoy are equipped, when they are both ability variants of each other and are thus impossible to have at the same time.

• The All-Star appears to have a slightly different design, such as a different decal on his jersey. He is also in a different pose, and his weapon is nowhere to be seen.

• The 8 classes on the side are all All-Star, reusing the icon from Garden Warfare 1, excluding the one at the very bottom, which is Dr. Zomboss's head, likely for the cut Boss Mode.

• Similarly, all of the All-Star's variants are the Wrestling-Star variant, with a completely different icon style

• Three orange balls of unknown significance are seen next to the player's name, most likely the predecessor of Rank Plates.

• Below the level up section of the UI is 5 segments, with the 3rd one being blue. This indicates that there were originally just 5 levels of promotion instead of 6 in the final game. Also, despite presumably being at the mid stage of promotion, All-Star is already at Master. There were also no unique plates for each level of promotion, and were just simple text. The bar was also originally purple instead of yellow.

• Also in the level up UI section, a Hall of Stats area is mentioned, which is nowhere to be seen in the final game. This may be referring to the Stats Boards seen inside the plant and zombie bases seen in the final game. The description also mentions a cut trainer character who would presumably show the player their stats, while in the final game, the Stickerbook shows their stats, like in Garden Warfare 1.

• Near the bottom left corner are 3 bars with a heart, explosion, and arrows at the left of them. This was likely to show the player each class's health, strength, and speed, but nothing like this appears in the final game.

• Several button prompt placements were changed before the final game, such as the Customize button prompt being near the list of abilities instead of at the bottom. There is also no option to view quests yet. The button graphics are also different from the final game, being more flat and less detailed.

• Interestingly, 8 playable characters, excluding Boss Mode, can be seen, when there were only 7 playable zombie classes were available at launch. While the Trials of Gnomus update did add the Hover Goat-3000 as a class, it seems like there was plans to include an additional new class for both Plants and Zombies at launch.

• An unused description for the All-Star can be seen:

The All-Star is the go-to choice for clobbering your Plant enemies! The basic All-Star can be equipped with a football cannon, spike cleats, and more!

• Interestingly, this description mentions the All-Star's spiky cleats, which may imply they may have had a larger role in his playstyle, possibly an unused ability or passive of some sorts.

• All-Star's name is incorrectly spelled as 'All-Stars.'

Unused Classes

Giga Gargantuar

Giga Gargantuar is a very unfinished class most likely used for testing. It uses Foot Soldier's abilities, but has a different primary.

Weapons

• Giga Power Pole - A copy of the boss version of Giga Power Pole. Deals 300 damage per shot, and has 200 ammo.

Laser Goats

The Laser Goats are an unfinished goat class that was going to appear in the scrapped Mystery Portal mode "Team Vanquish Goats". They have the physics of a regular goat and the ability to double jump. The Plant version is called Laser Mohawk and has green armor, while the Zombie version is called Laser Horns and has purple armor.

Weapons

• Primary - Functions very similarly to Hover-Goat 3000's weapon, but it has infinite ammo. It overheats like any regular infinite ammo weapon.
• Damage Buff Booster Beam - Same as Hover-Goat 3000's buff beam.
• Heal Belch - An unfinished healing ability that applies a quick healing-over-time effect to nearby teammates.
• Impulse Grenade - An unfinished grenade ability that reuses Gravity Grenade assets. Unlike Gravity Grenade, it doesn't explode instantly upon impact unless it hits a plant. The explosion deals 15 damage and causes knockback.

Unused Game Modes

Taco Bandits

In the launch release of the game up until the December 2018 update, the original Taco Bandits game mode and all of its assets were present in the game. While most of the game mode works fine, most of the issues are in its presentation, as it uses an off-centered broken UI element and has no proper end of round animation like other modes. Reading the mode's logic implies that PopCap updated the game mode, making it easier for them to set it up compared to the previous entry. It is not known why the game mode was never used. It was replaced by the Capture the Taco mode in the December 2018 update.

Unnamed Suburbination Gnome Intervention variant

An unused variant of the Suburbination game mode added shortly after launch. This may have possibly been an unused Mystery Portal mode that never came to fruition. It plays like Suburbination, but every so often Gnomes will intervene and disable a capture point for a certain amount of time. It has a few issues, such as Suburbinations not stopping when a new point is enabled.

Buff Burger Vanquish Confirmed

An unused variant of the Vanquish Confirmed game mode where a burger would appear in the middle of the map, making the player who interacted with it basically invincible at the cost of being extremely slow. It was added in the Frontline Fighters DLC and is only supported on Frontline Flats. Likely an unused Mystery Portal mode. PopCap would later iterate on this concept twice during the Tale of the Taco event with Farewell Taco, and later in Battle for Neighborville with the Crystal Dog weekly mode.

Team Vanquish Goats

An unused variant of the Team Vanquish game mode where players would play as the Laser Goat characters mentioned prior. It was intended to be a Mystery Portal game mode, and would have been released in the Frontline Fighters DLC. All maps that support regular Team Vanquish support the mode except for the Backyard Battleground used in Capture the Taco. According to Justin Wiebe on Twitter, the creative director of the game, the mode was meant to be an alternative to Cats vs. Dinos, intended to prevent fatigue of that mode.

(Source: Justin Wiebe)

Propulsive Salsa

Another unused variant of the Team Vanquish game mode, intended for the Tale of the Taco event that took place in 2019. It was fully finished, being quite polished compared to the rest of the modes, but was cut at the last second. The mode plays identically to Team Vanquish, but around the map there are hidden salsa pickups that give players buffs like low gravity. It would've taken place during Week 2 of the event.

Free Roam

While this is not explicitly unused, as the Trials of Gnomus mode is built off of it, Free Roam goes unused on regular maps. Only two maps have support, those being Colizeum and Aqua Center. While Aqua Center is the standard map completely empty of any enemies, Colizeum's setup of the mode is far more interesting. On Colizeum, the developers appear to have been testing the map for Boss Hunt, with internal map layers referring to it as "bosshunt_servertest". In this setup, the Yeti King and various ice variants of zombies spawn, alongside some turrets and allied plants. All AI will respawn when they are killed. Oddly, the allied plants are immortal, and cannot be killed in any way.

Unused Map Features

This section covers any unused features or oddities relating to maps in the game, such as mode support or unused alterations of maps. While these things exist in the files, they were never used in the final game.

Boss Hunt on Launch Maps

All of the maps shipped with the game at launch have support for the Boss Hunt mode. Out of them, only Sandy Sands, Frosty Creek, and Time Park use the support. Certain maps in this list include early setup for the Sasquatch Boss Hunt. These include: Zen Peak, Lunar Landing, and Z-Tech Factory. The early set up for Sasquatch was built around his unused appearance in Story Mode, so it is no longer functional with the final version of the game. The various support for the mode would've likely been used had the unused Story Mode Boss Hunts made it to the final game.

Lunar Landing Soil Survivors

Lunar Landing has support for the Soil Survivors game mode, but the map was never aired in rotation when the mode was used in Mystery Portals. This is due to an error that the developers did not fix where a certain spawn point has players spawn outside of the ring.

E3 Leftovers on Z-Tech Factory

While non-functional and being stripped of all logic, leftovers still remain of the E3 demo of Graveyard Ops from 2015. In other files found in the map, the only remaining leftovers of the E3 demo with logic intact are related to the spawning animation of the Giga-Torchwood seen in the stage demo.

Wall-nut Hills Night

As Wall-nut Hills is mostly a carbon copy import of the map from Garden Warfare, it has everything that was present in that game ported over. This includes the Wall-nut Hills Night variant. The visual environments are very broken normally, and have broken depth of field effects, looking very blurry. With patches to fix these errors, it appears to be a copy of the original lighting, just broken due to changes in how the lighting engine is handled. In addition, the lightmap for Objective 1 is broken normally, so various objects are not lit correctly.

Unused Private Play Support

Two maps, specifically Wall-nut Hills and the multiplayer version of the Backyard Battleground, have unused support for spawning Private Play AI in their supported modes. This support goes unused, however, as the two maps cannot be selected in Private Play without mods. In addition, other maps that received support for Capture the Taco and Soil Survivors have support for spawning AI in those modes too. Due to Capture the Taco and Soil Survivors not being selectable game modes, it goes unused.

Unused Multiplayer Playlists

In the Tale of the Taco update, various images were added to the files intended for multiplayer playlists. These include playlist images for Capture the Taco, Soil Survivors, a playlist consisting of all four Mystery Portal Boss Hunts, and a Mystery Portal Super Mix Mode playlist. Additionally, on the servers, IDs for 3 playlists exist that are not normally accessible: PL_08, PL_09, and PL_10. Attempting to force the game to connect to these playlists will result in a soft-lock, as they have no data set on the servers and thus default to loading the splash screen map, which can only be loaded when booting the game. It is likely that playlists for these modes were planned to be added as the developers knew support and live services would wrap up soon after the update, but they never implemented them for unknown reasons.

Unused Animations

Unused Super Brainz Animation

An unused animation of Super Brainz charging up in some way, flying in the air a bit. The animation is named SuperHero_Explode internally.

Crazy Dave

An unused idle animation for Crazy Dave.

Unused Music

Audio	Notes
	Would've played during Story Mode on the Plants' side. Unused music setup implies that it was meant to be used as an alternate version during certain moments.
	A version of the above song for the Zombies' side. Same usage case as the plant version of the song.
	Takeover music for the Great White North stage. Only one song is ever used in the final game, regardless of what zone is being captured.
	Takeover music for the Great White North stage. Only one song is ever used in the final game, regardless of what zone is being captured.
	Takeover music for the Great White North stage. Only one song is ever used in the final game, regardless of what zone is being captured.
	Would've been used for a Legendary Hat for Kernel Corn. None of his legendary hats, or any of them, for that matter, use this song.
	A short, dramatic song. Where it would've been used in unknown

Unused Crazy Settings

So Small & Cute Mode

There is a unused crazy setting named "So Small & Cute Mode"; when activated, it makes the character 50% smaller. It was likely scrapped due to being unfinished; character collision is not affected by the character's scale, and some animations completely ignore the character's scale.

Ink Painting

There is a unused crazy setting referred to as “ink painting”; when activated, it makes everything black and white with thick outlines, and also makes particles invisible.

Tale of the Taco

The Tale of the Taco event, which was leading up to the reveal of Battle for Neighborville, has many scrapped features. Originally, in the player's backyard, they could interact with a telescope in which they could've interacted with a character named Talk-o, which is a giant taco on top of the Town Hall. The taco was able to speak, and would refer to itself as the "taco of your dreams." After the dialogue with the taco, the player would see a screen that would have shown rewards. It is presumed that these rewards would have been for Battle for Neighborville, as the name for that game was also found within the UI setups for the reward screen. In the weeks before the event, the unused features were easier to access, still being enabled on the server end. As the event grew closer, the ability to interact with Talk-o and see the loyalty rewards screen would be disabled.

Tale of the Taco would've originally had 8 weeks, likely starting earlier than it did. Week 2 was originally going to feature the unused Propulsive Salsa game mode, but due to the actual event only having 7 weeks, the mode went unused. While it has never explicitly been known why the event was cut short, it was very likely to due with Battle for Neighborville's Founder's Edition being a surprise release.

Unused Text

Unused Private Play AI Names

Certain variants that do not spawn in Private Play have unused names in case they were to appear. Due to these characters not appearing in any of the character sets, the names go unused.

Variant	Unused AI Names (separated by dashes)
Unicorn Chomper	Unicorn - Cousin B
Disco Chomper	Dancy - Jiggly
Iron Citron	Iron Round - Legendary Citron - LC-1000 - Unstoppable Orange
Computer Scientist	ASCII Madness - Monochrome Mayhem
Toxic Brainz	Toxic Man! - Revenge of Toxicity - Noxious Nomad - Wholesome Grim

Early Mission Names

Several of the Story Mode missions had their names changed during development. Not all names are available, as these early names are pulled from unused strings that were left over, and only exist for zombie missions. Some of these names imply different ordering of certain missions, as each string mentions the mission code within it.

Old Name	Final Name	Notes
Top Secret	No Baloney, No Problem!	None
Flower Power	Ancient Knowledge	This name seems to be mismatched with the current placement of the mission "Yuck!" Further evidence to this is that, internally, the mission uses a prototype prefab as its name, hinting towards it possibly being made later.
What's the Zombish word for friend?	Yuck!	This mission may have possibly been different earlier in development, as this name has nothing to do with the final quest placement.
19 Imps and Counting	Imp Roundup	None
I need a vacation...	Steve-cation	None
Brainvengers, Assemble!	The League of Awesome	The old name is a reference to the Avengers
No Autographs, Please	The Bean Situation	This name is rather confusing as it makes no mention of the Super Bean boss fought during the mission. No remnants of if this mission was different before release exist internally.
Gray's Anatomy	Hitting a Snag	According to Chassel, one of the developers of the game, said on Reddit that the Shark stuck in the side of the boat in Captain Deadbeard's ship was originally named Grayson before being renamed to Snaggles, explaining the old name.
Deadbeard's Big Surprise	Ol' Deadbeard's Big Surprise	Very minor difference, only having "Ol'" added to the beginning of the name.
Booty Call	Gold Rush	None

Branching Zomboss

By clipping out of bounds with All-Star in earlier versions of the game and heading above the sewers, the player can talk to an unused NPC known as 'Branching Zomboss.' Attempting to interact with Branching Zomboss would give the dialogue "I got no Quests!" After responding with the only available option, being "What?", the dialogue "Come Back Later..." would be given, with both the response options of "YES" and "NO" ending the dialogue. In an unknown update, all references to this character were removed.

Off-Screen Wizard Hat

Via the use of a now patched glitch, one can use the Garlic Drone to fly themselves into the changing booth area. From here, they can find a wizard hat on top of a table, which cannot be seen by any other means due to it being directly behind the camera. The top of the closet seen near the left also has a sort of top hat, which goes higher than normally viewable.

Oddities

Out of Bounds Objects

In the Great White North stage, two out-of-bounds gravestones can be seen off the map.

The Zomboss chair model is located under the Great White North map.

(Source: Hey1mJay)

Upgradable Turrets

In the Wall-Nut Hills stage, near each base, the Defender Bot that Engineers can build are actually leftover Zombot Turrets from Garden Warfare 1! However, when it's upgraded to tier 2, becomes a broken and glitch-prone tier 3 bot.

Internal Oddities

Grave Digger Textures

In the textures of the Gravedigger (who, fun fact, is an unused class turned unused boss from Garden Warfare 1) found in one of the test tubes in the Z-Tech Factories map, textures for an unknown SWAT Zombie can be seen. Given how in the files of Garden Warfare 1, references to a scrapped SWAT Zombie class can be seen, this may suggest the textures for the Gravedigger cameo were directly taken from the scrapped textures back when he was going to appear in the first game!