Development of Unturned II has not been abandoned. The roadmap for the game itself is not paused, although we have stopped posting active updates to our Unturned II Roadmap board. Internally we discuss Unturned II all the time, and the game is worked on just as frequently. Most recently, we have done some prototyping for one of the core gameplay mechanics.
We love being transparent about what projects we’re currently working on, but that is not always realistic for us. We do not want to show off things that are not particularly interesting, nor things that would portray the wrong idea about the game due to the arduous process of early game development. I completely understand that it is disheartening to not receive consistent updates regarding Unturned II’s development from our official communication platforms.
We have been trying to do better about what we choose to announce, discuss, and showcase. In the past, we discussed a lot of things we were working on (or going to work on), but were not going to be able to show off for a while. Meanwhile, we showcased a lot of the non-gameplay elements like the day-night cycle and optimization techniques. We don’t want to waste your time with boring updates, nor to unduly get people’s hopes up.
The next time we make a major official news/announcement post about Unturned II, we want to do better. We want to show off tangible gameplay mechanics, not something like “here’s a realistic day-night cycle you can only experience with console commands”. If we update the beta, we want to beta to be fun and playable. We want to showcase things that are actually fun, interesting, and ready.