Layout of Towns in II

Towns in 3.0 are pretty weird, to say the least.

Every single one of them is essentially a square of buildings tightly packed together, connected together via empty roads with nothing along them. While I recognize that towns usually have centers where most of the buildings are, and that some small towns can indeed essentially look like 3.0 towns (trailer parks come to mind), this isn’t usually the case. Before I go further, please note that much of what I’m going off of is the style of towns and cities I’m most accustomed to, which is primarily American New England locations.

I believe that town design for II should be different. Towns should be more spread out, with houses along a good amount of the main road, leading into the center of the town, where streets branch out and then houses are along those streets. No more circular shaped towns.

Of course, there should be a difference between small villages, towns, large suburbs, and cities.

Layouts

Small villages should be fairly spread out, with houses on either side of the road with a small center where a couple of stores can be found (usually just a gas station and a general store).

Towns should be fairly similar, but instead of a small main area, it should be a larger town center, including buildings such as a town office, police station, etc. Some towns could have small general stores, gas stations, or restaurants that are not found in the center of the town and are rather on the outskirts of the town.

Suburbs should still have some outskirt houses, but there should mainly be large blocks of housing fairly packed together. I’m not really knowledgable about towns/cities and such so I don’t think I’m really correct in separating suburbs out from towns/cities but idk. Either way these suburbs would be the middle ground between villages/towns and cities.

Cities would be somewhat like Unturned 3.0 cities, but obviously, a bit more spread out, with (hopefully) various districts tied to certain things (industrial docks as an example, or even a warehouse district).

Overall, I just want a more realistic design ideology when it comes to villages, towns, cities, etc.

The main idea is that they’d be more spread out, and stray away from the generic square/circle design most of 3.0’s locations have, other than when it’s realistic, such as in urban suburbs, or other places where tightly packed buildings may occur.

Hopefully, the idea would be to make it so that the long stretches of roadway that cover most of the maps in 3.0 have buildings along them, both in the form of small villages, as well as outlying buildings for towns and cities, and perhaps the occasional side street with several more houses on it as you get closer to a town/city.

I think this would also make scavenging more interesting; do you want to risk entering a town center where better loot is likely to be (but more Turned), or do you just want to go after a few solitary houses on the outer borders of a town and get bare essentials and likely not much more?

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This is entirely reasonable from a realism and even difficulty perspective; when looking at ultra-realistic survival games such as Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, you can see this specific design philosophy in use with their town generation. However, there’s a significant difference between Unturned and Cataclysm: Cataclysm is a 2D game that, in the default format, relies on ASCII to display graphics, and can therefore take greater liberties with their design, while Unturned is a fully 3D game that is much more intensive, GPU-wise, and as such has to make some sacrifices for the sake of performance. While I’m not saying towns, cities, and villages on this scale would be impossible, it wouldn’t be very easy, to say the least; there’s a reason why games like Arma 3 have no furniture.

In addition to this, would it really be an enjoyable addition to the gameplay? While it may be more challenging and realistic, there’s a reason that Arma isn’t as popular as CoD; having to go through legions of suburban houses before actually getting anything that can put up a decent fight against a zombie would create a very frustrating barrier to progression, and would make the early game, more than anything else, a boring and repetitive experience. And will it really serve as an actual real hindrance in the long term? No matter the designer, no matter the dev, you can always cheese a game; as some U3 players may know, you can simply just ignore entire cities of zombies with the “z” key. Compared with the relative downsides in both the technical and game design aspects, implementing the idea would sacrifice a wide variety of resources for overall very little benefit.

TL;DR: Good idea, but it doesn’t really mesh all that well with technical, and balance considerations.

There’s nothing here saying any of these towns would be 1:1 scale. Assuming that is kind of silly to be honest.

These kinds of layouts can already be done in Unturned 3.0 as is, so I really don’t see why they’d be a struggle in II.

To achieve the balance effects you described, you would need quite a step up in the number of houses; to really get to the level of suburbia and city centers you described, you would need quite the increase in buildings. And yes, they can be done in 3, but with some severe framerate issues; computers already start to chug in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and compared to the idea you’re proposing here they’re toy sets.

You literally just need to spread the houses out and remove the square design. I’m not even suggesting adding more houses (although I think it is more than fair to assume II will be able to have more houses to begin with).

Mate chill, it would work a charm. Most suburbs have strip malls mixed in. Houses have a lot of stuff anyway. You can find guns and weapons in them.
Even if you can’t find any guns or weapons there, camps and farms will have them and will actually have a use beyond a nearly starting location.

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