I think Unturned is at the age that it should start moving away from names like “Maplestrike”, “Heartbreaker”, “Peacemaker” etc to “C7A2” (or II should end the legacy of the Maplestrike and introduce the M4A1, assuming II’s first map will be in the US which it should be considering the US is where most of Unturned’s potential players are from,) “SCAR-L”, and “P90”.
Same going for ammunition, instead of “Low Caliber Military Ammunition” to “5.56×45mm NATO” (which goes in the M4A1), and “9mm Caliber Ammunition” to go into many pistols and the Yuri. (This would make the Yuri an actually considerable weapon - because it uses awfully common ammo).
The benefits of moving into this ammunition type is instead of grouping guns by “Military”, “Ranger”, and “Civilian” it turns caliber-based and also manufacturer based. This makes maintaining rarer guns significantly harder because their ammo is often very unique to find. It also makes II’s Grizzly counterpart weapon (if it even gets named that) the hardest weapon to actually maintain considering it uses .50 cal which would be the rarest ammo in the game, nearly as rare as the gun itself, takes a 4x4 slot in the inventory, etc.
This ammunition type also makes it so those “garbage” guns ammo don’t have to spawn in good areas, practically contradicting the point of them. What is the point of searching for ammo for your Ranger pistol when you’ll end up finding an SMG or something to upgrade to?
He gets sued if he doesn’t pay for the licensing. Almost every other chart topping FPS game has gun licensing.
I don’t think it’s particularly expensive and if we consider how much money Nelson’s made on Unturned 3.0 in 4.5 years of the game (Gold memberships, stockpile, etc) he shouldn’t have any problem affording the licensing.
Unturned, just like any other ambitious game, has to have money invested into it by Nelson or else I can’t see it topping charts like 3.0 did.
I find them a bit too “child friendly”, which can disappoint older players or give them the assumption that the game isn’t too “hardcore”, or “not childish” whilst realistic names aren’t child friendly but children and older players can learn to enjoy them.
Maybe a nickname or gun alias concept so we can use the child friendly names to make the guns easier to refer to, so you don’t have to say “M4A1” in a voice chat or text chat and can just say it’s alias.
We can have the best of both worlds. Nelson can name then the usual names, like Maplestrike, Peacemaker, etc, however I’ll see if I can make a quick conversion mod that changes the weapon names to their real life counterparts.
The problem however lies in how this affects other players. Personally I would prefer if this proposed mod only affected the person who downloaded it, however I’m not sure if that’ll conflict with the server or anything.
Perhaps there can be a little “toggle” or “switch” inside the game options so people can choose if they want the simple names, or the realistic names.
I’d think it’d be better off as a player setting, but servers could choose to force realistic names or simple names for the sake of making a unique server environment.
The problem with having the actual name is, like others have said, trademarks and licensing. Workshop creators, on the other hand, aren’t earning money from the use of the trademark and therefore are exempt from this.
I’m aware of this, and as how I’ve replied to Aj_Gaming, the licensing can be purchased.
If Nelson cannot purchase gun licensing that almost every other FPS game has, then I cannot see Nelson investing money in other things that Unturned II will need. Money definitely isn’t an issue for Nelson either.
Ammunition is already “accurate”, so you dont really have to worry about that.
The pros of realistic gun names doesnt make up for the con of Nelson having to throw thousands of dollars at licensing, at multiple companies. Glock Colt and S&W are all notorious for being sticklers when it comes to licensing, and with nelson being a hobbyist developer, I assume he doesnt have any incentive to change the naming scheme, especially when he probably doesnt have an ungodly amount of money lying around. Nelson has already invested all he needs, which is a normal life in which he has free time (emphasis on the free time) to make the game.
This doesnt fix licensing issues. (Just saw your latest reply so sorry for dogpiling a little but hey
Again, what if Nelson doesn’t want to purchase the licences? Not to mention even then some companies may deny him because they don’t want him to misrepresent their product. You really haven’t thought about all these possible problems, have you?
I did a bit of research on the topic of gun licenses:
1: They’re very easy to circumvent. Many manufacturers are okay with you simply renaming the gun but taking out the manufacturers unique name on it. For example, a Colt M16 can be circumvented by just calling it an M16.
2: Many companies won’t bat an eye to simple indie games. If Nelson is true to his word with Unturned having minimal microtransactions, companies usually won’t care. They will care when Nelson is directly profiting from the gun names, which is why games like Battlefield pay for the licensing, because they directly force players to directly purchase guns while you don’t purchase guns in Unturned or do anything close to that for that matter.
3: You can also circumvent it by using custom thumbnail art. Considering II’s low poly style the thumbnails aren’t allowed to be an actual picture of the gun - it has to be made. So you can’t google M4A1 and rip a picture from Google images and call it a thumbnail - companies don’t like that.
4: Many companies just stopped caring on enforcing the gun licensing policy. The AK-47 is literally completely free and no company is currently enforcing the licensing behind it. Almost every other older gun also doesn’t have enforced licensing anymore
In the end, the companies that do exceed the 5 things I just listed then Nelson could just pay for those. But, assuming Unturned II won’t be a massive directory of content like 3.0 was with excessive amount of guns and content, this shouldn’t be an issue.
The current ones i find corny, but i dont think that changing the names should go so far that they require licensing. Dumbing down the “childishness” of the names to things slightly more simple, or even to a play on the names of real guns (like the Uzy from 2.0) would be best imo
Now for actual constructive commentary pertaining to the OP:
I personally am for the idea of keeping the unique (and perhaps somewhat goofy) gun names, but at the same time switching to actual realistic (sounding at least) ammunition types. Since ammunition tends to have many different names and makers for a (relatively) similar bullet (if only in diameter size), it’s not hard to simply say “9mm” or “5.56x45mm” without accidentally running into potential copyright or trademark issues.
Yes, there are certainly ways to circumvent issues with gun names, but I really don’t think its worth all the effort. Remember, the Colt and the Honeybadger had name changes in U3 presumably because of copyright issues.
I personally don’t really see any benefit to having realistic gun names (this isn’t the most realistic survival game to date, I might add), but I do believe that having more clearcut ammunition names can be beneficial as it can lead to less confusion and easier remembrance of what ammo goes to what guns (if ammo types get that specific in the final game).
This would definitely help.
Nelson does a lot right now, even if there’s no daily or strictly weekly devlogs, but i would really like to see a poll or a small update come out here and there and save the Devlogs for larger updates.
I never suggested removing the Maplestrike… at all. I said that assuming II’s first map is US-based, then there won’t be a Maplestrike - because the Maplestrike is a Canadian gun. There’ll be a US AR counterpart, which would likely be the M4A1.
The Eaglefire is not an M4A1, at all. It’s an AR-15/AR-32.
The money that would NEED to be spent on licensing is actually very small because Nelson isn’t SELLING a virtual product named after the guns that are needing licensing.
A lot of the guns don’t even need licensing to begin with, like the AK-47.