In the current version of Unturned II, the plate carrier along with other items slows you down when it is worn. You cannot sprint at full speed with armor on and move slower with it equipped. While I support adding disadvantages for wearing armor and filling your inventory, I feel that punishing the player’s movement speed is an annoying feature that will end up angering players more often than actually adding to the experience.
Here’s an example (although one that’s slightly exaggerated). Imagine you are looting a notable place such as a town or a city in a future version of UII. You feel obligated to explore these areas for materials, food, and possibly even an weapon. You are short on inventory space, but are carrying mostly light items. You only have enough room for a 5x2 sized gun and a vest. After entering a room, you come upon both: A Timberwolf freshly spawned and a ballistic vest.
Unfortunately, upon entering this room, your footsteps alerted a group of turned. You rush in and grab both items, the vest automatically equipping itself. All you need to do now is get out of doge. But now the weight system is punishing you. Your sprint speed is now a measly jog. The turned catch up to you, and despite your efforts, they overwhelm you. You go monkey mode as the Unturned Theme plays in the background.
In this example, the game encouraged you to go and fill your inventory to the max with goods. Yet it punished you in a rage-inducing way when you indulged in filling your inventory. How can this system be solved? Remove the speed debuffs from weight and instead implement a weight system that affects your player’s stamina regeneration.
Only ridiculous amounts of armor, such as the classic “juggernaut” style of armor should reduce your speed. Other armors (and getting loaded with items) should not. Instead these armors (based on weight) should increase the stamina consumption of your actions. Wearing a lot of armor is tiring. But it should not slow you to a crawl. If you need to run, you can run. Just don’t expect to sprint three miles when wearing a plate carrier.
TLDR Armor and weight should not effect movement speed except for a few rare exceptions. Instead replace speed based encumbrance with increased stamina usage based on how encumbered you are.
Here’s a poll below. But more importantly, what do you think?
Some ideas:
Heavyweight armour will soft cap your sensitivity
A pace setter so you can choose to flat out sprint and burn stamina or a slow jog to have economy. It’d also help mitigate armor a bit but would still give the endurance penalty due to you burning off more stamina.
I think that games with storage or capacity restrictions for bags, clothes etc should not have a weight system however if a game has no space limitation in the containers there should be encumberance. So if U2 is gonna be like 3.0 then there should be no encumberance, however if U2 is gonna use a fallout style system with no capacity encumberance should exist. Furthermore i feel that regardless of storage system the weapons you hold should limit movement.
Boots could just increase speed to help balance the weight mechanic
This could be integrated with progression, Ex.
Civilian shoes = ~ 5 - 10% speed increase
work boots = ~ 10 - 15%
military boots = ~ 20%
The speed increase could also work in rates such as 0.5% per kg instead of a constant 20% to stop people from wearing boots while naked and running at the speed of light
I’m definitely an advocate for the speed mechanic
Didn’t think of an economy mode. I think this is a great idea that could put the variable speed system to good use. I don’t think that reducing looking movement (soft capping sensitivity) with heavy armors will have much an effect as I usually play with about 600 dpi.
Keep in mind it’s a beta this means the end game is going to be different maybe in the future will be a vest that dont punish you so much in speed, light guns and weapons and maybe skills.
Im glad this is being added because of modding, Like lets say you make a medieval mod, you can have a dude with heavy ass armor that is strong af as one play style or choose to go for weak armor but be very fast. 3.0 Armor sucks cus theres only a simple value and thats it.
EDIT: Just finished reading what you said, I think having both would be good, Very little on the speed and you need to have a LOT of weight to see a noticable difference, but have the endurance be the main thing.
On one hand having heavy armor and guns slow you down makes lighter armor and weapons give a different play-style and has a lot of influence in gun fights and player choice. Like an SMG granting more movement speed over something like an AR or LMG. But I am also curios about how much items like beans and water will weigh us down.
I know DayZ does this (endurance encumbrance) and it caps out your stamina bar to about 25% when you are max weight. Was playing the U2 beta the other day and was fighting some other players on sandbox normal and noticed the guy I was fighting was considerably slower than me cause he was loaded with plates and guns, vs me being naked with an AR. He soaked a couple shots in the vest but died because of how slow he was. I like this aspect of the game but again am concerned how slow we will go just on a normal loot run.
This is why I liked your post so much the other day about the workbench being able to hold our building supplies and if in the claim area we could draw resources to upgrade from the bench. I think this will make something like building and upgrading less tedious as I am guessing lumber, rocks, and sheet metal will be quite heavy.
@Bru
I like your idea about combining both of these. After passing a certain threshold, the player should start to be slightly slowed down. However, this threshold should be affected by the clothing you are wearing. For example, most average clothing items should have a threshold higher than what’s possible to carry inside of theme. However, if you were to collect a rare Death Stranding-like backpack, then you be slowed down a reasonable amount when you exceed the normal carrying capacity. This could also be done for makeshift welded steel armors. These armors would be tough but incredibly cumbersome to wear while also loaded with a full inventory.
@The_Berrie-Man
I think the clash between changing combat styles with plate carrier vs. no plate could be done be reducing types of mobility other than the base walking speed. Jumps could have longer recovery times in their animations (recovery as in the player jumps just as high but takes more time to recover from landing). If there was a dash feature, then the dash feature would have a longer “recovery” time as well. These would have to be very well done though, such as the recovery time still allowing the player mobility, but also adding debuffs to weapon sway and maybe stamina usage. Another example could be that during a recovery moment of an animation starting other actions could cause them to be slower or to have smaller ranges.
That’s a lot in one post. These are some okay ideas I just mentioned, but I think it will take a lot of testing and time to get them in a comfortable place. This is probably going to be my last post/reply for about a week as well. Going to spend some time with the family camping while hopefully not running into anything worth posting on /x.
No I think it’s fine as it is, if I wore 50kg on my back I couldn’t run as fast of course but if a stand still I could catch my breath in the same amount of time as me wearing nothing, the speed debuff should be kept but no endurance debuff
I like the system used in DayZ. The more you carry, the less stamina you have. And very heavy items then actually affect speed like a tire or something.