Immersive Details: Identification

A Foreword

A preface before I begin - for those of you that have been around a long time, you may have noticed I’ve been much less active than before with my suggestion posts. I simply don’t have the time that I used to; however I will still try to post smaller scale or simpler suggestions that are hopefully just as impactful. I will also request some feedback regarding future posts at the bottom of this post. This post will be quite a bit more brief than what you may be used to from me. Without further ado, let’s get started.


I believe that immersion comes from not just one mechanic or detail, but a holistic, comprehensive array of them distributed in such a way that they are constantly noticeable, enhancing the game experience. A few examples of such I will be proposing here, others I will have to cover in other posts.

Now, I’ve used NEO Scavenger many times in the past as a good example of an immersive survival game. That’s because it actually does a very good job with immersion, even though it’s mostly turn based and text based! I’ve seen a few seemingly simple yet impactful features I think Unturned II could really benefit from by considering for implementation. One of these is the identification of items. Confused? I’ll explain, it’s actually very intuitive.

You’re alone, cold, and hungry, hiking through a forest looking for things to forage. Aha! You’ve spotted a few mushrooms growing on the side of a tree! But wait…aren’t some mushrooms poisonous? You realize you have zero botany experience and you have no clue what kind of mushroom you’re looking at. Your stomach grumbles, and you wince in pain. Guess it’s time to find out.

In NEO Scavenger, you will often find yourself having to live off the land. A wide variety of useful (and not so useful) fauna and flora thrive in the area, but without the proper knowledge, you will not be able to identify it all. One particularly obvious example is mushrooms, but there’s also a huge variety of other applications for this.


In the game, if you see these two types of different mushrooms but you don’t have the appropriate knowledge, they will appear exactly identical:
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If you actually do have the appropriate Botany skill, you can identify various flora, including mushrooms, individually. This shows the species as well as a critical descriptor (edible, poisonous, you get the idea). This can be the difference between life or death, as some dangerous mushrooms look identical to edible ones.

In this case, these two stacks look exactly identical, but actually, one of them is edible and the other poisonous. With Botany skill, the two stacks of mushrooms are quickly identified:
image

image

Phew! That was a close one, now I can finally satisfy my hunger for another day.

(Author’s note: obviously I’m not asking every single type of mushroom to look exactly the same. That would just be stupid. Some things in NEO Scavenger are also 100% certainly edible, or 100% certainly poisonous, such as a handful of blue berries always being the same edible blueberry species, or a yellow mushroom always being a toxic species. You don’t 100% need this skill, but it helps VASTLY.)

Now, imagine this being implemented into Unturned II. If you have the necessary skills, you can get better and better at identifying flora of all kinds. Berries, mushrooms, herbs, anything really. The possibilities are immense. Without the proper knowhow, you’d be taking a huge gamble blindly eating forage. This creates a good level of uncertainty that helps with balance, and also adds to the game’s atmosphere.


There’s a second major application of this identification mechanic in NEO Scavenger, where you’re not always able to identify items. And that’s medicine.

I don’t have pictures for this one, but if you for whatever reason find pills outside of bottles, or pills in unlabelled bottles, how do you know what that pill is? Well, in NEO Scavenger, you don’t. The description will just state its general visual appearance (e.g. white tablet, round), and you have to rely on the label of the bottle (if it has one) to identify what it is. With the whole nested storage thing coming up in UII, imagine the possibilities of people putting medicine in various bottles with various labels, even maybe deliberately mixing them up for adverse effects on an unsuspecting victim. In addition, perhaps some sort of medical skill would allow you to better identify medication in general. For bottles this would mean the purpose and side effects of the medicine, as well as the dosage size and potentially a guess at the type of medicine alone in pill form. The main purpose of this mechanic would be realism, but it also gives a logical edge to people who are careful or those who have chosen the appropriate skills.


Conclusion

With these kinds of mechanics, we can make UII so much more of an immersive experience. Unturned is too predictable, too menial, too boring. We need to create a sense of fear, uncertainty, and general anxiousness that never truly goes away no matter how much experience you have. I think small details like this can really change UII for the better.


And you’ve made it to the end!

How would you prefer me to handle suggestion posts in the forseeable future?

  • As complex and in-depth as I typically do while still being understandable (often with multiple subsections/basis)
  • Simple and relatively brief text-only, leaving even more room for discussion/interpretation
  • Add concept art/visual implements instead of large patches of text, sacrificing detail for ease of interpretation (this actually takes me the longest)

0 voters

7 Likes

I’d rather have skills be used to better assess the quality of an item than to tell you what kind of item it is. That way the mechanic would not only be useful for identifying if the food you foraged or scavenged is edible or not, but also to assess whether ammunition is too weak to cycle your gun or powerful enough to damage it, and to assess whether it’s worthwhile to continue sharpening your blade or not. (these are just examples btw)

1 Like

Well, why not have them co-exist?

It totally makes sense to have both.

3 Likes

Wow, a suggestion that isn’t “do something already possible with the 3x legacy editor” or “add gym pls.” My girls would love it. In fact, the first word Caroline said was “suggestion.”

Thank you Hero, very cool!

I like this idea a lot, I think it adds a bit more complexity into maintaining your needs, without being horribly & unfairly punishing.

I’m very interested in mechanics that expand on living off the land - I think this is a sorely underappreciated part of the zombie apocalypse!

3 Likes

I really like this idea. It adds difficulty, but it wouldn’t be something that makes it unplayable. This could link in well with those other ideas about skills and books, as obviously you’d want to read to find this stuff out.

Wouldn’t something like “Fuck it, I’ma eat it” tell you if it the ones alike are poisonous or edible?
Cuz the best way to find out is by yolo-ing. If you live, then the description will read “edible”, if you lose most of your hydration because of it, the description will read “gives you the shits” or something like that

4 Likes

This is pretty interesting. Having this implemented would see a interesting change in savaging from nature, which is something I feel like 3.0 really lacks.

Isn’t that redundant?

Using two examples, having mushrooms be unknown in species and descriptor without botany knowledge, and having the knowledge to be able to really tell when your blade is sharp or dull are two isolated systems, and I don’t see a reason why they can’t exist together.

You know how Unturned II is going to be more hardcore?

Well, eating certain poisonous things will punish the crap out of you. In NEO Scavenger eating a single Death Cap can easily ruin an entire run (it’s permadeath) with diarrhea, rapid weakness, and IRL, is one of the most toxic toadstools on Earth. Ingesting just half the mushroom is enough to kill a grown man.

This is not something you want to YOLO, it will stop you in your tracks if not kill you slowly. Really would make you carefully consider your choices.

But if, instead of using skills to recognize the species of a mushroom, skills were used to just recognize how poisoning/edible the mushroom is, then it wouldn’t need to be an isolated system with completely separate and unique code from a system for using skills to recognize the quality of any other item that it might be appropriate for.

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