Thoughts on the basic Survival gameplay loop and ways to improve it

Unturned U3 Discussion
#1

Tentatively working on a project right now that’s relying to a degree on some upcoming features to Unturned 3, so its release won’t be for a long time. Right now it is in the conceptual stage, but the core concept is likely to be progression-based survival in Yukon or similar.
Regardless, I wanted to start a conversation on 3.0’s survival and ideas for improving it.

Here’s some topic starters:

Can crafting be overhauled to be more involved? Does it need to be?

What are good ways to change the 3.0 weapon meta?

What did you like or dislike from maps traditionally held as more “survival based” like Yukon, Russia, and Canada? Any concepts that could be further expanded on or improved? Anything from the more PVP maps that might also be positive?

What parts of Unturned aren’t intuitive, if any? In contrast, what are areas that could be expanded on without removing their ability to remain intuitive?

Crafting benches, forges, etc: A good idea or is vanilla crafting preferable? (extra clarity: a feature not possible currently but will be in the future)

Lastly, what are the hallmarks of well designed end-game locations? Any specific locations on specific maps that are notable?

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#2

I find Russia to be a really good mix between PVP and Survival. It has a few miltiary locations in where better geared players tend to be. It also has a bunch of town which lower tier gear and weapons. Those areas are usually “noob-friendly”. I would like to see a map like Russia in where you spawn in those lower tier regions and progress the further you go up the map. There has to be some key locations that you will have to visit at some points like the Firewatch Base in Russia. Those are really good for deadzone masks. In my opinion those key locations could be spread further apart so that a player will have to travel a lot to get loot he really wants. Some sort of “low tier military” loot location further away from the “high tier military” locations would be cool too, as it would give players the chance to loot those to take a chance on the high one if that makes sense.

I think what Unturned is REALLY lacking is good base vuilding mechanics. It takes ages to build bases and its really annoying to drop half of your structures everyone you craft then because they dont fit in your inventory. I dont know if thats possible but something more like Rusts building plan would be heaven to any Unturned player. Elver does a better job there with allowing to craft crates and such directly with logs instead of converting them a thousand times before.

Guns should be situational. For example rifles should have less accuracy on longer range or should have less range. There is currently barely any use for Snipers besides raiding or to get the extra 50-100m range. On most maps you will never encounter those long range fights. I would LOVE to see Sniper rifles having a extremly long range possibly even unlimited (Unturned has a certain player render distance anyways). With bullerdrop off this would be very op so might aswell hardcode balistics on in the config.

This might have been a bit random and without much structure, I just woke up and am stil half sleeping but hope I could help you from a PVPer perspective that would like to have more survival aspects

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#6

Not related to map design or anything but I still demand most guns to not have insane zombie damage. The main enemy in a survival game shouldn’t be something that can be picked off in 1 headshot, along with ‘boss’ enemies (Megas) only needing at least 1 or 2 assault rifle clips to take down.

3 Likes
#8

Yep this has been something I’ve been wanting to address, I just want to avoid dramatically tweaking vanilla content unless it is intuitive (which is why I can justify changing crafting recipes since a player can directly see the changes and internally work out why that might be different).

Probably going to just run player damage = zombie damage

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#9

This, alongside making the zombies as difficult as they were in 2.0, with movement speed and all. I feel like if there was a way to address the long standing meta of moving backwards with a melee it would be a bit more interesting and dynamic? Fighting zombies has always been the same this way. Maybe just make backwards movement half as slow as moving forward, and zombies move at 1.1x the players movement speed?

2 Likes
#11

instead of nerfing an all around good weapon, buff the so called “situational” weapons like the SMG to be practical at close range.

Don’t punish players who want to stick to one generic weapon, reward players who go out of their way to waste inventory space and time to get two weapons.

1 Like