April 2nd 2018 by SDGNelson

Small status report of the last two weeks:

Pineridge

Now entering Pineridge!

I'm now up to ~250 new environment props for 4, which is a lot compared to 3.x having 600ish (ignoring color variants)! This covers little details like buttons for crosswalk signals to big models like the tracks for garage doors.

Performance / Optimization has gotten another pass as I aim to improve over 3 in that area. My targets here are at least 30 FPS on really low-spec PCs, and 120 FPS at the high end which is currently on-track.

Beta Timeline

Admittedly: my bad - the beta keeps getting pushed later and later in time. It's tricky because I know that a lot of you are super excited to start testing, playing, modding, providing suggestions, etc, but on the other hand I've seen some very strong concerns about 4, so I really want to make sure the first beta is a good quality impression, not to mention with more to do than the first 3.x beta (was literally just walking around, had essentially no features at that point!)

To help keep you in the loop I've been thinking about priorities, and will have a Trello page up soon with information on what still needs to be done, what I want to do soon after the beta launch, and what will be done over the months following the initial beta launch.

In this pre-beta to-do category right now:

Finishing Pineridge

Polishing up the existing core gameplay e.g. fixing remaining bugs, getting rid of programmer art, making stuff more intuitive, etc

Map select screen (missing right now) and creating some quick small test levels like a shooting range and a demo level of all the props.

Horde Mode! This is asked for super frequently, and will help with testing so many things + give more to do in beta that I think it's worth throwing together a basic horde survival mode for the initial beta launch

Free to Play

There've been a lot of questions about how 4 will be priced, will there be microtransactions, etc. I've of course been considering this heavily over the past several months, and I'm happy to say:

My current plan is for Unturned 4.x to be FREE without any in-game purchases/cosmetics/skins, aside from the exception of a Premium pass that grants access to Official Servers. (Server hosting is expensive, so it would not be feasible to have official servers available for a purely free game.) This means also that 4 will be completely separate from 3 in Steam, which I think makes sense considering they're going to be such different games.

I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this and any other feedback! I'm also definitely planning to have some sort of status benefit + discount for existing Gold members.