“Unturned” was once a thriving survival game, but its decline in popularity can largely be attributed to its lack of clear direction and the fact that many of its features and mechanics feel incomplete or half-made. While curated updates generate brief excitement, they often fail to hold players’ attention in the long run, as the new experiences are usually specific to the maps and don’t carry over into the core game. As a result, many servers die out soon after the hype fades.
In my opinion, the game’s creator, Nelson, should continue his recent efforts and focus on creating a refreshed vanilla experience. The last couple of updates have shown potential, like the Carr update, but the game would benefit greatly from a more comprehensive overhaul. Revamping key gameplay elements such as crafting, skills, movement, and melee combat could bring new life to the game. A refreshed vanilla experience would not only make the game feel more cohesive, but it would also help unify the community around a core experience, rather than relying on fleeting map-specific updates.
What “Unturned” has is an incredibly strong community of dedicated players who truly love the game and want to see it succeed. By focusing on the core gameplay and polishing the experience, Nelson could revitalize “Unturned” and ensure its longevity in a competitive gaming landscape.
I agree with most of this. Though, there’s one more thing that needs to be added:
Nelson, please: Break. Our. Mods.
Sacrificing the future of the game for mods that should be redone anyways just isn’t worth it anymore. Sure, some mods that are massively used will permanently break. However, this would give the community a chance to make better versions of the broken mods. Also, servers would be encouraged to support new modders by using their mods instead of just using mods made in 2017 by creators that left a long time ago.
The argument goes the same for plugins. The plugins that people really want will be fixed or replaced.
I feel like this would likely to backfire, I think it would be good to revitalize old or broken mods/plugins but we may want to find a way to incentivize it. For example, let’s say you have a favorite mod(s) you like to use but the creator no longer supports it. Well now you can’t use that mod and now are more likely to quit the game.
Depending on what causes a mod to break, some stuff is fixable by anyone (without re-uploading the mod, or needing the original mod author). A fortunate silver lining, regardless of whether or not the breakage was expected.
E.g., using Master_Bundle_Override to reuse models but change its in-game properties, or using IsOverride to completely replace a map’s spawntable.
I understand where you’re coming from but I feel like there’s more upsides than downsides. Sure, some people will leave. However, the community would be able to go forward. People who miss old mods would be incentivized to learn how to mod or support new modders. Also, for most mods that are still supported by their creator, they could be fully fixed or redone in the time it would take for the update to fully release since we have the preview branch.
Though, I would say that Nelson should have a longer preview period for any updates that are guaranteed to break mods. Just so modders have more than enough time to fix broken stuff.
With plugins in particular, we have plugins and frameworks that are fairly old and pretty unoptimized. By making big changes to the game code, you can raise the likelihood of breaking these older plugins that need to be replaced by developers who are more invested in modern solutions.
For instance, uScript has not seen major updates for several years. It has a lack of proper multi-threading and uses older events and methods from the game. Because it uses obsolete code, it should be considered obsolete as well.
Another prime example of why we need new plugins and frameworks is simply because of the development environment. .NET Standard 2.1 brings about so many other libraries that we can now use (if Mono lets them function properly). However, a lot of those older plugin projects do not use the .NET SDK and still use .NF. .NS2.1 brings about features that should be used more often, such as Spans, default interface implementations, and more.
Agreed. As a curated dev, there is certainly some hassle when it comes to keeping stuff up-to-date, and sometimes life gets in the way of being able to get stuff fixed in a timely manner, but I would much rather the game have big improvements for new modders and players, than for me, who’s largely retired from the scene.
+1, there are plenty of examples from the past couple years of major mods that have been broken (primarily from Unity version changes) that other modders go out of their way to update. No mod is truly gone forever in such a community, except the ones that the community has forgotten.
