This post is a discussion of what I personally think U2 has the ability to be, from the ideas and already established features in devlogs or Trello posts. What I think U2 has to offer to the survival community and not just the survival community of Unturned but to players who haven’t even seen Unturned, but love survival games in general.
Also WARNING: This is my take on the games direction, from the posts and interviews I am putting together a picture of a game I think is turning out. I am not Neslon or speak for him Lol.
(Entering The Rift)
(Picture provided by The Monkey Man)
I really got excited towards the first announcement of U2 thinking of all the possibility. I never really thought too much of what direction the game would take, I was just excited to see Unturned evolve like it had from 2.0 to 3.0. And that is what I excepted, a newer and cleaner Unturned. I was more concerned with small features like boiling water in a can, duel wield, and spears. Small features that would be cool but never really thinking of the big picture, the game’s theme and ability to revolutionize a genre.
I found this forum a while after I got the U2 closed beta. I would watch the Trello wish list and road map like a hawk before I found the forum. I was so excited to see a forum dedicated to U2 discussion and the posts being listed. I spent like 3 days reading through everything. I got a good idea of the games direction through the road map but was really blown away from the forum post Molt made about the Turned and the Excursions. I know he isn’t the official voice for Nelson or the game but to see these ideas being poured out got me thinking what U2 could be. Instead of another graphics update, but a different game, and the possibilities. More than another simple avoid zombie, loot, eat, and raid survival game.
From hearing interviews done by Nelson, I got a better vision of what U2 will be and how it will be different from other survival games and how it really won’t be a 2.0 to 3.0 jump. I think it was a really good decision to make a sequal, and not a game update. Not just the reason for giving the game a new engine but to make its own identity away from Unturned 3.0. Being a survival game that has its own identity away from the many established multiplayer survival game build. So many multi-player survival games have arisen over the years and all have such a similar build. I mean a good survival pvp game at its core needs food and water meters, base building, raiding, and looting. But so many seem to have stopped at revolutionizing the genre and just stick to basic loot and wait for pvp, and I think that is where they fail.
Excursions, NPC trading, more “story mode” zombie AI threat, changing seasons, spoiling food (thinking about preserving food for winter) and AI bandits are all things I would get excited about if I hadn’t played Unturned and loved survival games. Hearing this and being outside the community would definitely bring me in to check it out, and its free right, that’s how I got hooked.
These features are things that (besides NPC and some bandit AI) are all new to the (multiplayer) survival genre. Things that makes U2 a revolutionary step in the survival franchise. Most survival games get stale when you can’t find pvp, 3.0 included. DayZ and Rust are the same way, without something to do (pvp being only thing left to do) people get bored. The thing I think that will set U2 apart is it’s PvE elements. These features are things to do that are fun and keep you engaged without having to battle in pvp. Like having a story mode quality AI experience in a pvp setting. I think too many open world multiplayer games rely too much on pvp being the crutch.
The survival genre (multiplayer pvp sandbox) hasn’t really seen much of a improvement or innovation in its design since its big titles where released back in 2013/2014 era. I mean each title has something special but really all end up being A pvp focused sandbox that becomes an endless cycle of mindless looting/farming and pvp. All have a simple blueprint of loot/base build/raid/pvp. All those things are great and not to shame other games but I think the times are catching up to that stale worn out build for a refreshing game experience.
I have been thinking about this post for a while on why U2 has a potential to be a revolutionary staple in a genre that seems to be getting old. Two things have really inspired this post, one being the recently released COD Warzone (I will explain) and my recent personal experience trying a lot of different sandbox survival titles.
First I will discuss COD Warzone. I have never really been a big Call of Duty fan, played since BO2 back in the day and never really cared for it unless my friends are on it. I got the new Modern Warfare when it released and really resented the fact I payed for it lol. Since Warzone Battle Royale came out its been one of my main games I have been playing, along with a lot of my favorite You-tubers who where not Warzone players. Most of them battlefield players who have been let down by BF5 failures. I don’t think this is a bandwagon thing that You-Tubers jump on solely for the views. I think its just a good game people enjoy playing. Really never been a big Battle Royale fan either but this title has me looking up gun builds and playing by myself. Its a new take on a worn out game mode that keeps true to its original blueprint, but adds features needed to inject new life into the game.
Why is Warzone so popular and stand out from other generic Battle Royal’s? For me its a few simple additions.
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Money to collect and spend. A small feature to spice up boring looting for RNG weapons.
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Quests/Missions to complete for money and map knowledge. Another feature that spices up a game mode focused on eliminating other players. Recon/bounty/scavenger are all simple missions but make for more interesting game play than just loot and kill.
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Load-out drops- To me this is the most important. The ability to spend money and get a choice from your 10 custom gun builds. Battle Royal has all been about getting RNG guns from crates and just makes each game a complete chance. With the ability to call in your specific load out, you are given so much room to choose your game play. Also Cod Modern Warfare has just such amazing gun customization.
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Gulag- And of course the Gulag is a cool creative invention to give a player a second chance to respawn for free.
But why am I talking about a Battle Royale and why is it related to U2, a survival game? I love Warzone because it isn’t just another copy and paste Battle Royale. At its core its a Battle Royale yes but the changes in its game design gives a lot more replay-ability to it over other Battle Royales. I think we can all call to mind endless Battle Royale’s that pop up and die after a month or so. People are tired of drop/loot/die repeat, and I think the same can be said for survival games.
I mean what is the appeal to a survival game? An open world with no score, rules, time limit, or path you have to follow. Just you and the land, against other survivors. The goal for most people is to group up, stake some land out, and become the most powerful entity on the server. Some like to role play as farmers or fisherman and some just want to be bandits.
Rust, DayZ, Hurt-World, Ark, Atlas, H1Z1, Miscreated,Scum, Westland, Deadside, Mist and countless small team survival games are all open world survival games that lack that special something. When I say special something I mean that magic that Warzone casted on dying Battle Royales. Not to hate on those games or say there bad, cause there not, but they all suffer from similar shortcoming’s. Survival games that rely on PvP as there main crutch, games where when players are absent the game is other wise just grind/farm simulators. After so many similar style survivor games the replay-ability gets a little stale, even when a new title is released. For me I can’t get into these new survival games because all though its new I felt like I have already played it.
DayZ has a great survival system, but has bad base building, bad AI threat, and a huge map that is cool but is just empty without pvp. Rust has a great base building system but rely’s to much on PvP rather than survival. Deadside has great AI bandits but is void of everything else that makes fighting AI feel pointless(I know its early development but can’t see it becoming the next big thing). And Ark has dinosaurs lol. All seem to excel in one area and fail in the next. Empty maps with lame AI, leaving the player to search for PvP action.
Trello and Devlogs have already teased and drawn out features that I believe will make U2 not just a great game to Unturneders but to all people who are looking for a survival experience. U2 looks to be a game with survival in mind and AI threats to add to the pvp sandbox experience.
At its core it will be a survival sandbox pvp game with base building, pvp, base raiding, zombies and food/water bars, yes this forms its identity but what features will be added to set it apart? I am going to compile a list of things I have seen that I believe will be U2 greatest changes to the franchise and genre.
- Spoiling of food and changing of seasons
(The rest of this list will not be in order of importance except this one, also this is still on the Trello Wishlist and hasn’t made it to the confirmed list, I am making this point to support its existence in U2.)
I believe the spoiling of food to be one of the most important that could be in U2. Really, you might ask? Above new zombie AI threats, guns, gun play, base meta, and map. All those are important and exciting but to see a survival game where you have to preserve your food, manage perishable food and play around actually surviving. Seems like to many survival games fail to touch on this, and it is a feature that will put U2 on the map.
A survival game where you have to grow your crops in season, and survive the winter. A game where food perishes making canned foods, dried foods, root cellars, and refrigerators a key to success. That alone right there is something I know for a fact would get people to come to check out Unturned. Survival game enthusiast and role-players would love to fill there shelves with cans and jars, along with tending gardens and farms. Procuring food and warm clothes for the winter is content in itself.
Most survival games I know are “Run to the military base and get the guns” (I will also get to that in the next section) Then maybe pick up some food on the way. Players should more worry about getting out of the harsh environments and securing food and shelter. DayZ has some harsh weather but nothing compared to the whole map getting a blanket of snow. Seeing the grass in the beta change from green to brown and then snow covering the map looks so good. Imagine the relief when the snow melts away and the map becomes green and plants start to grow. Or emerging from your base in the dead of a winter night to get some extra logs, shuffling through the snow wearing a bear skin coat. Those are just such survival feels we don’t get from other titles.
- AI threat zombies/monsters/bandits
I will start this off by saying a challenging AI will keep a player engaged while a push over AI will get boring and become background noise. I think a lot of sandbox survivals rely on pvp being the driving content and give us pushover AI to fill cities and military zones. Deadside is a newly released survival game with a really good AI system. No zombies but all bandits. In that game there is a server wide kill feed and I can’t tell unless I see it in the feed that I killed a player and not an AI. They have tactics and flank and can mess you up. Me and my squad took military by force against a decent number of bandits, and while looting a patrol came into the military base and wiped us. They are not to be overlooked which is good, they demand your respect. I played the game for a while and its fun but after a while it gets old because of the lack of content besides AI battles.
One other note is having an AI threat like that creates more of an atmosphere for teaming up. I teamed up with some strangers to go and do a bandit camp raid. It just appears on the map set at 4 different difficulties reaping rewards for its respected threat level, and anyone could go fight it, and I couldn’t carry all the loot myself so bringing other people didn’t cut into my profits. It set an AI threat that was to cumbersome to take alone, so working with strangers actually benefits you. Breaching military for high end loot is also difficult and requires a couple of the bois.
I think having a AI threat protecting high end loot zones will set a tone for progression. Making all that military loot not available to any naked who walks in. DayZ’s military base isn’t hard to get into but hard to get too, it takes a good hour to hour and a half to trek back there (at least for me) because of the map size. Survival games need to protect high end loot zones behind something so naked people can’t just walk in.
I could imagine some zombie hordes or bandits patrolling military base in U2. Would be kinda like an event gearing up to fight for the treasure inside instead of lame pushover zombies.
- Excursions and Events.
Another big ticket item to spice up a dull map and give it some life is the alternative looting option of excursions. Explained in this post ((3 of 3) The Turned [mega-post] – Excursions, loot, and complications) we see a left for dead style mode accessible in the open world. The thing I like the most about this feature is the ability for players to select different levels of difficulties for different rewards. So players in the early to mid game can get a piece of the content without having to advance to the space age and getting a chance to progress.
(that is the bandit camp mission)
Rust has a pretty good event system that allows for more diversity in progress. It has oil rig, cargo ship, attack helicopters, air drops, and a tank boss that spawns in military base. All these things really change up the pace of mindless looting but are really just accessible to high end or at least mid tier players. Also Rust doesn’t have any AI threats to deal with in normal looting zones making looting stale. A game like U2 could have AI threats in towns and roads or roaming the map that make game play more enjoyable as well as things like bandit camps and maybe bandit convoys to raid. Also a feature I like from Dying Light is airdrops will attract bandits, some with melee weapons and some with guns.
I can’t find any screen shots to support it but i remember somewhere Nelson suggesting the idea for hordes to possibly seek out bases kinda like a horde beacon but for your house. He didn’t go into to much detail of the logistics but would love to maybe see a horde event spawn and it would seek out near by bases of certain size. Like I said in Rust the attack helicopters seek out players and teams who feel up to the challenge and can lure it fight it for nice rewards, also it won’t attack offline bases or nakeds. The battle usually takes place at base and is cool to see some AI battles at your base. Also it just looks bad ass at night with the rockets and the bullet tracers flying around a base.
Imagine a map like this. Towns and cities with low to mid tier zombie/monsters/bandits, roaming mobs, bandit camp events, maybe small zombie hordes, excursion option, dead zone and military having high tier loot protected by high tier mobs. Along with surviving the elements, base building, and pvp we would see a new era of survival game. Those features alone have tons and tons of re-playable content.
- Official Servers
I think Official servers will be of huge success to the game. Something players especially new can jump into and get a official vanilla experience. One of my favorite Youtubers Stimpee tried Unturned and got into a low population TPA/KIT economy server. He got a bad task in his mouth for the game and was just killed by players with kits on the beach. He left a bad review for the game and it hurt to see, cause I love Unturned and know that’s not the genuine experience. I mean a TPA server is fine every once In a while but players especially new need a clear path to put them in a genuine server.
Official servers will offer a clean straight forward reassurance that this server will be up the next day, and when it will wipe. I am not against community servers but Official servers need there own page and clear separation. I know Nelson discussed his concern for a Official Vanilla server support in one of his interviews, so it is important to him.
- Sleepers (my opinion and totally subject to change)
Know this point ties into the official servers part. Nelson not so long ago put this on the road map as a potential idea. Three posts as well went up about its discussion
(Sleepers)
(Sleeping players in Unturned II)
(Way to keep people from putting their Important loot inside their inventory when they log off)
Also it was discussed in an interview with ZOOM B at 21:43 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm10RnPfvBc&t=1303s)
But I thought I would bring up again not just as a feature but the role it plays in making a genuine game experience. Also to have this feature work correctly or consider it we can not base it off the mechanics of 3.0’s base building system, we can reference it but can not come to the conclusion the raiding system will be the same. If this feature is to work we need to see a rework of the base building and raiding so players aren’t just easily wiped when logging off. We need to consider raiders and base owners in this feature. Is a base and its time spent building it worth the time to protect your stuff? Also just as important is raiding worth it, was the time spent grinding explosives worth it. IMO in 3.0 I just don’t raid metal bases cause its not worth it. Not just because metal has more health after the raiding patch but the fact that players log off with all there loot with in the base, after wasting your days explosives on one metal base, you get the scrapes of the base. As well how easy it is to rebuild a broken base.
What is the two points of raiding a base? One to wipe a threat of the map, and two to gain gear. The problem with players logging off with gear is one, we see players log off with all there weapons and explosives and two they can respawn in the base to repair the second they get on. Your raid has done nothing and the player is back to full strength.
This feature plays a role in the games integrity, why would someone stay and replay the game if the game can be easily exploited. Placing weapon racks everywhere and logging off with gear affects the ecosystem of the game, the rise and fall of nations. I believe this is one of the two reasons players are not playing Vanilla in Unturned today. Bases don’t resemble a players power, because it is all hidden. And two because community servers come and go, when was the wipe day? Will this server be up tomorrow?
I love Unturned but a lot of my friends tell me it just isn’t worth it to play. Your grinding to keep loot offline and raid empty bases. The name of the game should be taking down bases and defending your own. Sleepers make the game more legit and more competitive. I am not overly competitive but I want to see a game I can take more seriously.
I thought I would make this to not really bring up new subjects but to reinforce them and discuss there importance they play in the building of the Unturned world. From someone who plays a lot of other Sandbox survivals I see a lot of things games do right and wrong and what they lack, not just from my perspective but from others who play as well. I believe potential ideas that have been brought up by Nelson give remedy to these issues found in other games and 3.0 itself. Giving a new fresh look at an stale genre. I love too that as a community we have this forum and access to Nelson’s ideas and his active development. Most game development teams probably have talk groups that bring up ideas and debate balance. As Nelson is solo we on this forum act as his idea team, I mean at the end of the day Nelson makes the call and has a general vision he is working on but it is cool to see a developer read and link our posts in his Trello’s. Something other games just don’t have. This game is being made for the survival community (and role-play) of Unturned but I believe with features disgusted it will bring a lot of other survival fans in from other communities making a really good game.
