Greetings from Finland.
For starters, why should you even read my ramblings about the current state of the game? Well, I might not be particularly experienced in PvP, but I have spent 2400+ hours playing mostly singleplayer PvE, so I like to think I have a decent grasp of the survival mechanics (or lack thereof, more on this later).
To put my opinions bluntly, Unturned has become a cheap knockoff of Rust, with little to no unique qualities aside from being F2P. It needs to distinguish itself to maintain a thriving playerbase.
Looking at the recent patch history of the game, there are basically no changes to the game to make survival harder, or more interesting for that matter. Right now, Turned are at their best a minor inconvenience to the player, and realistically a non-issue once you get a decent set of gear. For PvP purposes the Turned might as well not exist, since they cannot roam outside their spawn area and all the recent curated maps disable building near POIs.
This focus on PvP content is in my view also the root cause of the prevalence of toxicity within the community. Unturned has a gameplay loop virtually identical to Rust, and for this particular loop toxicity isn’t a bug; it’s a feature. No amount of moderation will fix the underlying problems & incentives, more drastic measures are needed. Players need an actual reason to work together instead of ganking each other over loot.
Before I start getting into my suggestions, I am fully aware that they would require significant refactoring/rewriting of the code. I am mostly interested in the general sentiment towards these ideas, and I am not in a particular hurry to see any changes implemented. Also, a lot of mods and maps would inevitably break as a result of these changes, but you can’t really make an omelet without breaking some eggs, now can you?
Basically all survival mechanics currently present in the game could use an overhaul, in addition to new features. I cannot for the life of me find the original roadmap for Unturned II, but I really liked the concepts outlined there. I would like to present my suggestions in order of what I believe are the easiest things to implement in the short term, tackling the involved stuff later in this post.
1. Crafting timers
This single change would slow down gameplay significantly, and in my opinion for the better. No more turning 3 backpacks into bandages within seconds, no more refilling 100-round drum magazines in an instant, and no instant berry pies. New tools and buildables could be added to speed up these crafts.
You would need to plan ahead to a much greater extent with these changes. Got a bleed and out of bandages while on the brink of death? Tough luck. Ran out of preloaded magazines while fighting a Mega? Too bad.
2. Experience gain & leveling
The current system of just killing zombies for learning skills makes skill acquisition trivial. Instead, I believe experience should be skill-specific, and earned while doing actions relevant to a specific skill. It doesn’t really make sense that chopping down trees somehow allows you to learn how to build a generator.
Want to get better at controlling recoil? Shoot stuff. Getting out of breath easily? Start running around more. Wanna get better at chopping down trees? Chop some trees down then.
In addition, certain items could give boosts to experience gain when consumed, or outright grant a level in that skill.
3. Quality decay rework
Currently, food is extremely easy to come by and keeps forever. I wish to change at least the latter.
Have perishable foods decay in quality over time, with some containers being able to slow the decay down. Remove the cooking level-restrictions from some recipes, but allow higher cooking levels to utilize raw ingredients of poorer quality or give the cooked foods additional bonuses.
For tools & weapons, more penalties for poor quality should be present. I may be incorrect, but I seem to recall talk about weapon jamming some time ago. In any case, my suggestions for ranged weapons are the following:
- Progressive accuracy loss after a certain durability treshold.
- Chance to jam after a certain durability treshold, with progressively increasing change afterwards.
- Durability loss modifiers for certain attachments like suppressors or special ammunition.
4. Environment & weather
Unturned has a rudimentary temperature system in place, but its effects on gameplay are very limited. For some improvement suggestions, being cold should impart speed penalties and being excessively warm should increase thirst drain. Temperature could impact crop growth speed, or they could outright die if they get too cold. Rain currently instantly grows crops, make it accelerate growth instead.
Weather should impact the Turned as well. Heavy rain & fog could act inversely to a full moon, reducing detection range for the player.
Fire, acid & related effects should be reworked to be more immersive and useful, being careless with fire should have a risk of burning a wooden house down.
5. Health & medical rework
The health system in Unturned is quite simplistic for a survival-type game. A greater variety of status effects, both negative and positive, would enhance immersion and deepen the survival mechanics further, with some potential implications for PvP as well.
To start out with, the game would really benefit from separating health between different body parts. This would have multiple possible implications, both for players and NPCs:
- Enough damage to a leg would prevent sprinting (like currently)/come with a speed penalty, having both legs heavily damaged could potentially force crawling (this could universally be applied to Turned)
- Arm damage could decrease weapon handling / swing speed / melee damage
- For PvP, good shot placement would be rewarded. Spreading out damage across different limbs would be much less efficient than targeting one body part.
Bleed effects could be separated into light and heavy bleeds. Light bleeds would heal relatively quickly on their own and drain health slower, whereas heavy bleeds would require medical items to stabilize and be more deadly if left untreated.
Medicine items should have more use cases:
- Improperly treated wounds could become infected, and require antibiotics to treat.
- Painkillers would temporarily allow broken bones/pain effects to be ignored, with different painkillers offering different degrees of effect.
- Affliction-specific medical items, like for stopping heavy bleeds. Can’t heal malnourishment with bandages.
6. Total NPC rework
The Turned are in the most dire need of behavioral upgrades. Full-map navigation, climbing obstacles, hordes, players should need to fear the Turned no matter their location. Allow them to break down (some) doors & smash widows.
More advanced NPCs, both friendly and hostile. Ability to use weapons & navigate independently. This is admittedly a pipedream, but the current NPCs are essentially just glorified vending machines.
If I may overdose on hopium for a moment, this game has a lot of unrealized potential. Having this game be able to transition from a first-person Project Zomboid into a robloxified EFT with user-configurable settings would be absolutely huge, but to get there would take a lot of time.
Let me know what you think of these proposals, I’m especially curious about what experienced PvPers have to say on the matter.
