(1 of 69) The Turned [mega-reply]
I’m gonna reply to all three of the Turned threads here, since there were things I couldn’t make a judgement on until seeing how they tie into eachother.
My only limits are that they should match the overall art style and every major variation should be visually distinct.
No.
It’s neither better nor worse, but it could be done.
Overall, I’m okay with more damage types, but I’ll get to specific nitpicks later.
Enemies shouldn’t differ based on what equipment you have. They should differ based on what area you’re in. If you want to risk looting an area you’re not equipped for, or you want to waste endgame weapons tearing through the low tier enemies in locations that don’t have the ammo or parts to get them firing again, then you should have the freedom to do so.
If Unturned II sticks to the yellow skin color, I’d say the prime zombies should have a skin color that’s between player yellow and zombie green, and reserve fleshy growths (with their presumably different hitboxes) for other Turned types and subtypes.
What happened to minimal overlap? Or does this get a pass because it’s more of a subtype than a unique enemy? Why do only spores and spitters get subtypes? Wouldn’t it be more important to give more variations to the zombies that play an important role at most, if not all levels of gameplay, or to bosses which play the largest role at endgame stages?
This is probably among the top 5 most pretentious pieces of text I’ve ever read. I get that you’re trying to hype up the bosses, but let’s try to stick to pragmatic information that helps players identify what they’re looking at, predict how it may behave, and determine what they should do next, and not fill the bestiary with cryptic text that might elicit an emotional response the first time you read it, but after that just fills up space when you’re looking for information in the bestiary. (I am of course assuming the italicized quotes are samples of what might be in the bestiary, rather than just filler text for this post)
I don’t like how linear the progression is before we get to anomalies. You shouldn’t have to get to endgame locations where cities are completely overgrown with fastigium and such.
Why are U.S. backed bio-weapons researchers going to Canada and opening interdimensional portals? I think it would be easier to explain that there were organizations in several countries working together to research teleportation or some other technology so powerful it could open a portal to another dimension. Perhaps the reason spores were able to escape beyond their labs was because they had recklessly rushed to compete with parallel developments in Russia or China.
If it’s that fast, then how are you supposed to combat it? With slower moving pistol, shotgun, or service rifle bullets or melee attacks? Why doesn’t it just use its speed to instantly eviscerate you?
Green works well enough IMO. To really immerse players and get emotional responses, I think what would really need to change about the art style isn’t the color scheme, but instead the poly counts and texture quality.
I like to think UII has come a long way from U2.
or we could just drop the comically incompetent bioweapon manufacturer plotline altogether.
The number three works well for rock paper scissors type balancing, but is all things considered a bit overused, especially when diving damage into blunt, cut, and stab, but it does strike a good balance between being simplified to the point of not needing different damage types and being realistic to the point of being unbalanced. Plus, it’s pretty standard from other games, and simply conveyed in most languages.
Any shift away from the tacked on afterthought elemental damage of Unturned 3.X is acceptable.
It’s fine by me, though I can’t decide whether to say all damage types should be relevant to both PvP and PvE and not extraneous information for either or that it would be a good idea to have certain damage types specialized for PvP or PvE, since then players who are interested in one over the other can simply know which armor types to pay attention to or ignore.
Does every one of these questionnaires have to paint something as One small step for Unturned. One giant leap for the industry.
Combining redundant armor types and separating armor types that protect against very distinct damage types would go a long way towards making armor types comprehensible.
If I consider it silly, I probably wouldn’t be to big on it, but that said silliness is subjective, and what I can probably take seriously whatever you’re considering silly. (Of course now that I’ve said that, someone will find something we all would consider silly)
So, what I’m reading is
First, let’s combine all melee and ranged damage. Then we’ll separate them into three types. Then we’ll combine them into one armor type. Meanwhile, we’re arbitrarily keeping explosives separate from blunt damage. (Maybe explosives might need to be balanced separately, but there’s no way guns would need to be balanced separately from melee weapons.)
Could you please make up your mind as to whether or not you want these to be separate things.
If you’re not going to have armor classes, then I don’t see the point of having weapon classes. You could argue that having effects like knockback and bleed applied per damage class would be more readable than having them applied per weapon, but I don’t see how it would be easier to translate, for example 5 points of blunt damage, 3 points of puncture damage, and 10 points of slashing damage into the useful information, rather than simply being told the raw info like 20 damage, armor penetration multiplier of 0.6, knockback value of 5, bleed chance of 5% which would also allow this information to be tweaked per weapon, rather than per damage type.
So long as the product would justify solving the complications.
Why is this a question? Headshot multipliers and destruction/maintenance of clothing/armor can basically be taken as given. If there’s a more specific function for these mechanics you’re soliciting opinions on, then don’t phrase it so vaguely as to include other things.
Nope, but I would hope that what loot is found through excursions from different maps is just as flexible as loot spawning in the maps themselves. It would be a shame if Yukon had to exclude excursions because exosuits, fastigium bows, and raiding LMGs wouldn’t fit in its sandbox.
I had been thinking that excursions would be accessed by crafting some sort of one trip portal from resources found at endgame locations, and would have as seamless of a transition as Nether Portals in Minecraft have.
I’d prefer avoiding that if possible, but they could be solutions to some potential problems.
I’m not sure why people would bother crossing dimensions if there’s better loot available on the map, but I wouldn’t say a map’s progression should never be designed that way. I wouldn’t say that excursions should always be available; IMO they seem more like mid-, late-, or end-game mechanics than something you should be doing as a freshspawn or in the early game, but some sort of tiering for them would be fine.
Nowhere really. If something is unimportant it can just be put off until everything of higher importance is already implemented perfectly.
No. If the infection progresses or changes, it should through player progression and interaction with the world, not through arbitrary timers.
- Automatically determined by player data. (i.e. levels of ingame skills or number of previous excursions in that server/life)
That works well if tiers are determined in the first way, because there would already be a UI for selecting such things, but less so with the second, third, or fourth way (the one I added above.) Some other potential ways that story based or premade excursions could be accessed include going to a specific gateway, opening the portal in a specific way, or automatically being sent to them based on player data.
I don’t know how you could possibly have this setup to not kill the mood and atmosphere of it all.
What kind of savages don’t use the ingame storage mechanics smh my head
These could be fine additions to the game, but I’m not sure what the list of “unique loot” are supposed to be exclusive to. A tazer that can just barely get you past endgame electronics, seems like it would belong at a police station, a cattle prod of the same quality at a ranch, an exosuit in excursions, and fastigium mass wherever the fastigium has overgrown.
Handguns can already be made relevant by their light weight, compact form, and one-handed manipulation. The likes of the FK Brno Field Pistol, S&W X-Frame, Magnum Research BFR, IMI Desert Eagle, Česká Zbrojovka P-10 C, and SIMA-CEFAR MGP, could just as well be endgame handguns, even though they have trade-offs for their ease in storage and manipulation.
So what are the zombies just queuing up for the next wave? Maybe they’ll pause to stretch their calves, since they have a moment to spare. Waves offer good pacing for things like horde mode or tower defense games, where they offer a moment to catch your breath, collect yourself, sweep up any stragglers, get a slight reprieve from the growing tension, prepare your defenses and steel yourself to hold your ground through the next trial, but excursions should be designed to get players to grab the good shit and gtfo. We shouldn’t be breathing a sigh of relief until we’re completely out of that dimension, and shouldn’t hope to fight them off.
Yes. Absolutely yes.
Here’s an idea how we could make the more basic zombies more suitable for various levels of play, more spread across different levels of mutation, and more varied, without just adding more turned variants: All zombies (walkers, crawlers, sprinters, leapers, screamers, and spitters) should be able to have growths on their bodies like bony plates and spikes, or fleshy growths filled with spores, pressurized gases, acids, electrically charged substances, radioactive substances, coolants, and/or pyrophorics.
Generally yes, but I can think of some exceptions. Fighting small, maneuverable swarming enemies like Minecraft’s Silverfish or Halo’s Flood Infection Form, would be pretty unbearable with a kitchen knife, but could be pretty fun to spray away with a shotgun, SMG, or incendiary device, and could also fill some interesting mid or late game roles, (a zombie variant could release several of these upon death, they could be spawned as part of a boss fight, or something could trigger them to emerge from fastigium growths.)
This post isn’t about what they would be, it’s about one of the potential things they could be. The part you put in quotation marks is still all that’s anywhere close to set in stone, so if anyone had imagined something else, it’s still not too late to share.
Remember when Yarrrr did this, but kept it all on the same topic, and didn’t need three posts to do it. I think we all know who the best moderator here is.
Even if exosuits did offer advantages of that sort there would still be tradeoffs, debuffs to other stats, occupancy of slots that clothing items with other benefits would otherwise be put in, and dependence on resources that can’t be found outside of endgame areas (needed to power/repair the exosuit.)
You can say that again.