Ahai, i’m new to the forums. I’ve been a lurker but i just created this account. But the main focus is not me, whatever. Let’s get into the post…
Alright, so the main thing that led me to make this post is the fact that unturned is so boring when you don’t know what to do. This is going to be a mix of a rant, a discussion and a suggestion
Unturned offers a lot of gameplay. You can go looting, you can go hunting, you can kill other players, or team up with them, or team up with them to kill other players, or you can die in many ways etc. But, there’s a core problem with the entire game. After you explore the world of unturned, you know what to expect everytime a new map comes out. PEI was the first map to be an island map. Washington was the first map to be based on PVP, Yukon was the first map to have snow, Russia was the first map to bring easter egg puzzles, trains and NPC on the table. Hawaii was the first map to have lava caves. So what’s left? Greece had two npc factions but it was no more than each faction hating each other. The game has very little replayability. Nowadays it’s like “Oh a new map? k cool”
There’s one dominant playstyle in the entire game, and that is killing as many players as possible. A new player will immediately get into pvp because other game mechanics are not interesting enough, or once you do them you will just get bored of seeing them on each new map that comes out. Many people will prioritize multiplayer first, and then pvp. You will rarely see people that are interested in singleplayer or multiplayer pve.
- So what’s the root of this problem?
It’s how little the world changes. You will go into a multiplayer server, and see some bases, and that’s all about it. There’s no active events going on the map, therefore singleplayer gets very little love. The most you’ll see in singleplayer is just some rain. When you look on the map from somewhere high, you’ll always see the same thing. Same day and night cycle, clear sky, zombies standing still until they’re alerted. NPCs staying still until you go stand in front of them and press F looking at them to have a dialogue.
- NPCs
I actually want two npc factions fight each other, and want to fight besides with one. Current quests are all about “kill this many zombies” or “find this video card”, they’re basically all the same. All NPC dialogues only happen when you press F looking at an npc, other than that, they always stay there looking at you. Their quest rewards are not satisfying enough, too. What do i get after catching a squid? Some xp that i can get by killing a couple zombies. Great, that was a waste of time. NPC quests should offer rewards that you can only get by spending a lot of time otherwise, or cannot get by looting at all (which was somewhat done already with fighter jet questline and suppressed bluntforce quest on russia, but they’re not useful at all. Fighter jet isn’t the best vehicle out there, and i don’t think most of the playerbase don’t even think suppressed bluntforce exists. It’s only available on russsia too)
I specifically mentioned “pressing F to have dialogue” because i also want NPCs to do things without player’s direct interaction.
Gibberish ahead, gonna leave this here to show my thought process The best example i can give is on greece, let’s say you joined omega, and went to the base of the other faction. These two dudes guarding the entrance and pointing their guns at you, but then what? They just look at you. Let’s say as soon as you go down the entrance, a dialogue will pop up saying “Don’t get any closer, or i will blow your head off!” You can either choose to fight back, or run back up. If you get closer as they say, or pull off a gun, you will get shot. Very similar to bandits conceptdfgshj crap this sucked
For example, when you go a certain position, a dialogue will appear. or when you go into a house, an npc in it will start shooting you. This is the simplest example i can give
They might also just run around and do things without player’s interaction. You see how the professor in liberator is not actually doing anything, or you see how the doctor in the same place is not doing anything but standing still. [Open to discussion]
- Zombies
Isn’t it weird how zombies always stay still unless provoked? You expect them to roam around, do stuff. When they’re provoked, they always choose the closest path to the player. They have no understanding of obstacles, barricades, etc.
They also lack variety and difference. Their variants rarely ever change how you deal with them. Flaming zombies? It’s just a matter of shooting a bullet. Acid zombies? Again, just shoot a single bullet and it’s dead. A mega zombie-dragon hybrid? I’ve got my hell’s fury.
The solution here would be improving the AI of zombies. Instead of these zombies just going in a straight line, they should try to swarm the player when there’s a certain number of them. (i’m very well aware this is hard to code without any bugs but it can be done) If the zombie is alone, it should be hesitant and try to go away unless it’s very close to the player and is able to do an ambush. These flaming, acid, invisible zombies don’t increase their difficulty at all, they are just more annoying than a regular non-special zombie. They would be more interesting if they spawned and didn’t have a random limb (like for example, if a zombie doesn’t have an arm, it will do less damage on each hit. or if a zombie lost one or both legs, it will be a crawler zombie except a zombie with one leg will be faster) and one way to make them harder would be increasing their default speed etc.
- Loot and playstyles
this is the biggest problem in the game. It’s so easy to get from 0 to 100. It’s stupidly easy to find a gun and find an ammo for it. It’s stupidly easy to find food and find some magical insta-healing bandages and medkits. This heavily affects people’s playstyles, they don’t have to worry about shooting a zombie or a player because they know they can find more ammo easily without any effort at all. This also causes KOS to happen more often because of the same reason.
So the reason players prioritize PVP is how little time they have to spend in to get some good stuff in the game without exploring game mechanics. Gun, bullet, food and medical stuff spawns are too frequent and takes no time to loot, but crafting a bow and hunting a deer takes a lot of time with little reward. This could be solved by decreasing the loot spawns and forcing the player to invest more time in looting, crafting and doing quests.
So all this connects into one single problem. The player gets too bored quickly and doesn’t find many game mechanics interesting at all when there’s already one dominating the game, and the reward in giving them a shot is basically not worth it
Ok so i finally finished the post and realized how unproductive i was, i’m sorry lmao. I was gonna rewrite most of the post as i had a quick change of mind but i’m just saying f*ck it and posting it