The Future of Unturned's Arena Mode

[P9nda]

I am once again jumping in the cold water with that one, as PVP isnt the most forum members best friend. If you found any spelling or grammar mistakes, you are more than welcome to ignore those.

Its already confirmed that Unturned II will have an Arena mode, and its also safe to say that its going to be better than current Arena.

Intro

First of all, I would like to say that yes, Unturned II is going to be a survival game and yes, it should be less pvp than currently. But that doesnt mean that Unturned II can’t have a “seperate gamemode” that is pretty much only pvp, just like H1Z1 did it, where Just Survive is a survival game and Z1 is the battle royale. Or like Fortnite, where the survival game is seperate to the battle royale. However Unturned II Survival and Arena should be in the same game, so you dont have to download it seperatly. You can then choose weather you would like to play Arena or Survival once you launch the game.

Trends

So far so good but why should Unturned II get a seperate Arena mode in the first place?

Its really not a secret that Battle Royale games are just trending and having a BR in Unturned II aswell can be really benefiting for Unturned II and even for the Unturned II Survival mode. Only making Unturned II Survival, without an Arena will split the playerbase in half (if not even more). Maybe not for existing players but for future Unturned newcomers. Having both modes could attract people to play one of them and also try out the other one. As an example: I first heard about Fortnite when the BR came out and back then I really fell in love. After playing it for a few weeks I decided to try out the zombie mode even tho it wasnt free. In the beginning of playing BR I wasnt attracted by the zombie mode at all, but the interest came with the time I spend in BR.

Pros & Cons

The only downside I see here is that Nelson would have to invest his time into creating the Arena mode aswell, and not only Survival. However I dont think the Arena mode would take more time than the survival one. Guns could be tested and (re-)balanced before adding it into the actual Survival mode. Unturned II Arena could basically “bait” new players to play the Arena mode first and then Survival (possibly). Another pro is that Unturned II Survival could focus more on survival instead of adding more pvp features than needed. PVP junkies could play the Arena mode and survivalists like 90% of this forum, yeah all of you could play survival. The arena mode would pretty much satisfy PVP junkies enough, so they dont have to infest the survival mode.

Official Servers

When it comes to community servers and mods I think the survival mode should be 100% mod-able and customizable. Players should be able to be creative and create cool & unique servers.
For the arena mode however, I think nothing should be mod-able. If someone wants to create battle royale like gamemodes, he can do that but it wouldnt be unturned the Arena gamemode.
Only official servers should be hosted for Arenas, since players could easily boost their stats when having own servers. For example: currently everyone that has a server could basically get in a arena server together with a friend, he dies, you get the win. Possible are even scripts to make it automatic.

Skins & Cometics

Skins & cosmetics shouldnt be shared across both gamemodes, means that you might have a cool looking adidas jumpsuit on the arena one, but not on the survival one. This could be useful to create cool skins and cosmetics for arena players, as its always nice to have some glowing gun skins or badass outfits since its just a part of PVP games at this point. And on the survival mode you could only have “serious” and “more survival looking” skins like forest camos or whatever fits to that category.
Im pretty sure Nelson has mentioned that skins arent planned for the beginning but later on theres for sure possibilities, and that he doesnt want “kinky” items like mythicals in survival. Correct me if im wrong please.

BR

The actual arena would be, who would have thought it: a battle royale. I would even say that its not needed to add anything super unique to the mechanics, to make it stand out from the others, because it already will be. I dont know about any game that looks similiar or even close that is considerably big.
The closest it would get to it probably Fortnite, even tho it does look completly different. Trying to come up with unique mechanics could confuse new players. Im not saying there shouldnt be any… theres plently of stuff that can be added to the U II Arena, it just shouldnt be completly different.

Lobby size

I think 100 players would be too much for a game like Unturned, since the game itself isnt comparable with any of the big ones. 40-60 players is completly fine if you ask me. The map should also not be big at all. To keep up lobbies and make sure no one is queuing for ages each round shouldnt take longer than 10-15 minutes. A casual, easy to hop it - have some fun - and hop out gamemode.

Queue

You should be able to queue up in solos and trios. Having more modes to choose from will split the players in different lobbies and make queue times longer. Being able to queue up alone or with friends is the best solution in my opinion. You can also queue up with 1 friend and dont let any random queue with you, but still play in trio lobbies.

Pre-Game Lobby

After you queue up with your friends and got connected to a server, you are in a FFA type of area while waiting for more people to connect. People can just kill each other while waiting for the game to start. This will obviously not affect stats at all.

Leaderboards

There should be daily, weekly and monthly leaderboards that display:
Rank | Nationality | Name | Wins | Kills | KDR | Matches Played
for example:

1. German Flag P9nda | 100 Wins | 1000 Kills | 1000 KDR | 100 Matches Played

Leaderboards should be sort by Global and Country and wins and kills. They encourage players to play the game mode active and they have something to grind for. So I could for example check how many kills I have compared all other germans or everyone in Unturned.

Rewards

Players should be rewarded with some sort of currency that lets them open boxes to get new skins or spend in the Item shop directly. Players could potentially also buy this currency with real money, also a good way to support the future development of Unturned, and maybe allowing nelson to invest in ads ,promotional videos or something else.

Outro

Anyways, thats pretty much my idea for a Unturned Arena mode. I tried to cover the basics and didnt go into detail by any means. I think this idea could be really solid and work out to make everyone (especially me ) happy. Giving PVP players their own territory to have fun while the survival fans play a game with (probably) less toxicity and less “we need to pvp to have fun” moments.

I dont think Unturned II should become a PVP game. But why not adding one to help me game grow, stay alive and add more variety to it. Let me know what you think about this idea.

This took me ages to write and never have I ever posted something even close to this, so danaby better smash like.

[Panda3d]

Br is getting boring and stale, and attract players that will not even play the base game.

[P9nda]

Replying 3 minutes after posting this without even reading what this is about and not giving it a chance is boring and stale.

[Panda3d]

@P9nda

Players should be rewarded with some sort of currency that lets them open boxes to get new skins or spend in the Item shop directly.

It is confirmed that there will be no skins in unturned 2

[P9nda]

This was only because Nelson didnt want the survival feeling to get affected by those.
Having them in the seperate Arena gamemode would be alright since skins and cosmetics wouldnt be shared across those gamemodes.

[Codian]

I agree with pretty much everything in this post, however I am very afraid that people will just lose interest in survival mode. As you said, BR will attract some players to survival and so on, but it will also deduce a great amount.

I think leaving arena mode as a separate “add-on game mode” if you will that servers can choose to enable (same with stuff like melonbomber, horde, etc.) will be better.

+1

[Whistleblower]

i don’t care about arena

so this must be good

[Owl]

Gotem

[SuperDuperSeb]

Do you want a pvp-focused game? Because that’s exactly how you get a pvp-focused game.

[Aj_Gaming]

Not really, People who want to pvp go to arena, and people who dont want pvp go to survival… well lets hope thats how it is in 4.0

[calamari]

people already dont play survival whats with people being scared of that happening

[RainOfPain125]

@Panda3d

Br is getting boring and stale, and attract players that will not even play the base game.

So? It attracts more people in general, adds more content, adds more to the game. And because of the module-system or gmod-like way 4.0 is being setup, Battle Royale / Arena mode will be it’s complete own gamemode. Modders and plugin creators could develop this gamemode well beyond a simple drop-in-get-guns-kill-eachother game to whatever they want.

So whether or not Nelson officially adds BR as apart of the official game, other devs will come in to make it. Just how gmod only comes with Sandbox but tons of other people came and developed their own gamemodes.

However, it would be much better if Nelson were the one creating BR, as again, it will add to the base of the game and provide more foundation to build off of for devs to create other modules / plugins / gamemodes.

@P9nda

I think 100 players would be too much for a game like Unturned

I’d hope 4.0 could pull off at least 64 players. I hope the net-code is exponentially faster / better than it’s current state.

@P9nda

The map should also not be big at all

Doesn’t have to, but would be cool. Bigger maps that contract due to a zone, storm, whatever it may be always give players a much bigger space to ■■■■ around at the beginning and loot - however the extra space becomes more and more useless as the zone gets smaller. Hopefully 4.0’s optimization / rendering will be constructed in such a way that it can easily ignore all the extra non-used space on both the client-side and server-side

@P9nda

Skins & cosmetics shouldnt be shared across both gamemodes

If we’re heading for a gmod-esque apparoach to 4.0, I don’t think cosmetics should always share among game-modes (For instance survival and murder - which could definitely become a game-mode) but it definitely should save amongst the base gamemodes, such as Arena and Survival

@P9nda

For the arena mode however, I think nothing should be mod-able. If someone wants to create battle royale like gamemodes, he can do that but it wouldnt be unturned the Arena gamemode.

I think everything should be 100% moddable. If a server isn’t official, then the “”“”“stats”“”“” they get from it don’t count towards their official-verified stats. Similarly how playing on community CS:GO servers won’t boost your rank, but playing on official matches will.

@P9nda

The only downside I see here is that Nelson would have to invest his time into creating the Arena mode aswell, and not only Survival.

I think it would be relatively easy and straightforward to create a separate module / game-mode for Arena.

The absolute BIGGEST problem I see is guns and arena. For far too long guns in 3.0 have been nerfed and buffed based on the map they’re on. A good example is the Zubek. It used to be mildly different, but when Russia came out it’s “purpose” was changed to be a cheaper lower-tier AR that fires faster and does less damage - because it spawns more commonly.

Map developers and map making in general for 4.0 will have to base their map around the guns, rather than the guns based around the map.

Or maybe they could create separate guns for each to tweak it on their own terms; but thats complicated.

@P9nda

Rewards

Players should be rewarded with some sort of currency that lets them open boxes to get new skins or spend in the Item shop directly. Players could potentially also buy this currency with real money, also a good way to support the future development of Unturned, and maybe allowing nelson to invest in ads ,promotional videos or something else.

This whole rewards thing ruins it for me as thats just integrating Arena further into the base-game to the point where it has it’s own cosmetics, points, or etc. I merely wished for it to be game-mode. I don’t have a particular problem with the concept, its just too wonky, too early, and too uncertain. Plus Nelson doesn’t want unrealistic skins or etc, I based my entire emblem post around the fact Nelson doesn’t want that.

@P9nda

Having them in the seperate Arena gamemode would be alright since skins and cosmetics wouldnt be shared across those gamemodes.

Arena is still surviving against players. I wouldn’t appreciate it to be full of flashy neon maplestrike skins. And I wouldn’t wish for there to be two entirely separate cosmetic economies. That will just devalue them further, and complicate things, and etc etc

[Hwan]

As much as this is a good take on the genre but not being keen on Battle Royale to be the main focus of the game while yes it could be seperate but I would rather not see Battle Royale being focused a whole lot more than the survival aspect, even if it does become more successful when Unturned launched back in 2014. With an example of Epic games shifting their focus on Fortnite BR than any other game they have because Fortnite BR ended being more successful than their titles and shutted down Paragon but however this is not what the topic is about. Again, I don’t really want to see Battle royale being the majority of Nelson’s focus if it does end up being successful than what he launched in 2014.

While smart business move yes cause its trending, you also get people who think this Battle royale trend is a meme, boring and stale like my friend said its bad because all what Fortnite did was force developers to do their own, most of the time its not fun to play, I did play Apex Legends and I don’t think its not bad but its not for me felt like this trend is either have a Battle Royale or go broke cause the media thinks of not having one is “Bad”, hence the reason I don’t like the trend and neither my friends do, neither Battle royales shouldn’t be forced down a game’s throat because it will attract more people to play it, relatively boring gameplay.

Hoping it doesn’t end up being the majority of Nelson’s focus.

[KingFrog]

If you want Battle Royale in unturned II, then you should check out Fiffe’s mod when it is complete.