I've Quit Unturned 3.0

I had ideas for a potential hub for UII content that was basically an upgrade of the Steam Workshop browser but never let the ideas go anywhere. It’d give certain community members permission to vote for a variety of content they felt deserved recognition like a secondary but more minor version of curation as in U3. Officially recognized gamemodes could be given separate pages in this system for displaying content specific to the mode while also giving the creators of the mode special permissions in the category. Popular votes would also be considered every now and then to show what the community enjoyed most for a time period.

I may also consider sharing some of my creations a little more if that early modding tool release ends up happening. I’ve been saving up for something that’s hopefully going to end up with a decent impact. Now if only I knew what the maximum map size currently is in UII.

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Hmm…I’m going to have to really think hard on this one, there’s so much I want to say. Hopefully gonna try to avoid making too much of a wall of text here :sweat_smile:

To start off with, I’ll preface by saying I 100% agree with your and @kvc.6’s opinions, especially where modded content is concerned. If it was a high priority before, it should remain a high priority. UII has extremely good potential as a sandbox game, almost akin to Garry’s Mod but if it had a survival base game.

There isn’t really any single feature that will immediately get things going, but there’s definitely a few major steps that would be profound leaps for the immediate future of UII development. If I were in your shoes, I’d put my focus on mechanics that have a balance of both a notable immediate impact and substantial future implications on UII. The greatest of which is a well rounded foundation, which you’ve been working towards already with impressive amounts of effort/progress.

To name a few specific examples of potential focal points for development in the near future (some of which I’ve wanted to make in-depth suggestion threads on but haven’t had time to yet):

  • The world and environment. UII is understandably still in what is essentially a tech demo stage to most of the public, and a fleshed out environment (equivalent to U3’s Devtest_1/Alpha Valley, or to Pineridge before you redid everything) would help a lot. As it stands while the current testing maps do enough to show off various mechanics, there isn’t really a map yet that ties them all together. A central map that gives off a much more complete impression, and one that you can continue adding features to over time, would be a good priority and milestone for the short to moderate term future.

  • Combat and movement systems. This is something you’ve already focused a lot on which is crucial, since combat and movement are two of the mechanics a player most immediately notices. That being said, there’s still a lot of room to build on, both for first passes and for advanced revisions. A prime example of this currently is melee combat - some basic hand to hand would be nice, but a melee system surpassing that of U3 right out of the box (e.g. blocking, volumetric attack, directionality) would blow expectations right out of the water. I do also hope to see the modularity of firearms apply to all items, including melee weapons.

  • Completion of a second mainstream revision of the UI. Much easier said than done I’d imagine, but currently the UI is still quite clunky and one of the more frequent complaints I’ve heard of, short of optimization and the amount of content. The interface is always subject to change as it was in U3 of course, but nailing an iteration that’s more user friendly early on will be of great help.

  • Modular, easily configurable design. As a finisher, future-proofing huge parts of the game by allowing players to modify them or build onto it with ease, such as with custom gamemodes. I do hope this remains a focus throughout development, since it would greatly impact the longevity of UII, but also because it would presumably open up a lot of other avenues in important mechanics you can add into vanilla. I also hope that this design choice will make interconnecting all the game’s mechanics much easier to do.

It’s really hard for me to summarize this without turning it into a university-level essay, but I tried my best to cover some big points. Looking forward to your thoughts on this!

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This is probably the best takeaway I could give if you asked ‘What worked well in 3.0 and what should I prioritize in UII’. 3.0 was a decent game on it’s own (no offense) but where it really stood out was as a modding foundation to let the playerbase do what it wanted to. RP and Creative servers are hugely popular, albeit controversial, servers where you can pay for in-game content are everywhere, and even the rare survival servers are utilizing great mods like Letgallian’s Furnature Mod and GHJ’s clothing mods, among custom maps and loads of other content.

While at it’s core it’s a zombie survival game, the modular functionality allows it to act as anything you want it to be, and I think that’s the main reason it’s the 4th most played Multiplayer game on steam and will continue to dominate for years to come.

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One thing that kind of shocked me time after time was how a majority of the people that tried to get me to do things for them wanted some sort of RP map or content. Started with That’s Life which I utterly let down (I made a MASSIVE compound bridge because I didn’t know Blender well at the time and didn’t like vanilla bridges for that specific purpose) and then I eventually ended up trying to help out Cryptogram with some Prison RP content around the time that I joined the Modject (also didn’t go well) Here I am now after learning a massive amount of stuff because of @Brivdon. From the days of Deadzone to now, all of us here have gone through some sort of major change and now we continue planning for the future. I have thrown in another repeat of previous conversations so today was successful.

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in my experience i find my self only playing the game when there is a good vanilla server up
Until that server eventually dies, and then wait for a new one to pop up and the cycle continues

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yeah

honestly it’s a shame, I’ve been playing since about early 2016-ish. The game was much better, it just felt much friendlier. Now the only servers seem to be horrible pay to win RP servers full of screaming children, or PvP servers full of hackers.

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ok millenial

There is still many servers that are good in unturned still which has kept me around for a while now.
my main advice would be stay away from server chains and to find servers that are stand alone servers and start playing there with a couple of friends and eventually more people will come along.
Last but not least if 4.0/II doesn’t have enough survival aspect to it then it will just become 3 again.
People play what is fun.

Im nearing 3k hours in, and when Unturned was still in roblox, and when it became an actual game on Steam I played 2 weeks after release. But I do take breaks from the game, but overall all the plugins and mods, if you’re on a good server it makes the server much more enjoyable, especially when its custom mods. Like my server I have a raffle ticket which can be bought in game, and then you can purchase anything that costs real money.

The only thing I have to add to this is to make jumping ether prevent you from shooting or you get a massive accuracy and recoil penalty from shooting while jumping

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Agreed 100%. Using a weapon while doing anything that would logically render you much less combat capable, e.g. vaulting over an obstacle, jumping, falling, etc. should have tremendous debuffs, for ranged weapons this would be massive accuracy and recoil penalties. I know U3 isn’t a great example of realism in many aspects, but what really takes the cake is having near-perfect accuracy with a gun while literally plummeting off a cliff.

That being said I guess if you were using a melee weapon, such a motion could possibly add momentum and even improve attack power, at the cost of reliability, physical exertion, and difficulty to perform. On a slightly unrelated tangent, I’d love if charging with a melee weapon was a mechanic.

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Giving this some further thought, I wonder if the 3.0 to 4.0 map upgrade tool should be an immediate priority. It would give us some proper maps to play around with the features on until 4.0’s main map / props have a clear direction.

Clearly mod support is the winner interest-wise on the forum, and I would be glad to establish some dimensions for anyone interested in creating models. Right now the blocker there is deciding how to proceed with destruction and how it affects model design. I’m also considering working on some blender tools for that pipeline.

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canyon arena in unturned 4.0

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I think this would be a mistake to make this a priority.

I have heard community members say they felt Unturned II wasn’t different enough or they felt like Unturned II was simply a re-skin of Unturned 3.0 where nothing would change in the end. Adding the exact same maps would feed into this feeling, giving it real justification.

Also large maps we have already fully explored won’t make Unturned II more enjoyable. Features will do that, features like save data, server administration tools, and item pools.

Personally I have put many hours into games like DayZ and H1Z1 when they had just come out. The only real features were looting, traveling, and fighting. While both those games failed eventually because they never expanded past that, Unturned II could be enjoyable in the short-term with only those mechanics.

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Fair points. The early days of 3.0 were also that core gameplay loop, and there is something to be said for it. One of the biggest problems in that regard right now is that the gun features aren’t interconnected yet e.g. running while shooting.

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elitists talking to noobs: git gud

nelson talking to his guns: git gud

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Unturned 2 Really needs a Main Map that evolves with new bioms locations ect. we dont need 5 official maps like 3.0, most 3.0 maps suffer from bad balancing or bad game-play Due to flawed systems. thats why most players who want to play vanilla survival, play Russia because its the least flawed map

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I’d definitely enjoy something kind of like that. Using Project Zomboid as an example, you have one main map but you can choose which town to spawn in. And any other towns in the map can be reached through walking or by car.

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Honestly for me it would be two things:

  1. Longevity of base-game: Add plenty of things to do within the base game, even if they seem stupid. The reason why games like GTA are so successful is because of the overwhelming amount of things you can do within the world. Add more types of cooking, achievements, farming types, quests, etc. All of this stuff will help keep full-vanilla servers alive for a few years at least because people won’t get bored of it any time soon.

  2. Convenient Mod Making/Using: Make community content, such as mods, maps, plugins, etc have a lot of different possibilities, and make it so that everyone can learn and take part.

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