so, the first hc of the year has just ended, and i think everyone can agree this event was certainly very interesting. now, with its closure, i think now would be the best time to offer my retrospective evaluation of the good and bad of 2020’s first holiday cave.
this thread is for fair discussion and constructive critique only, and my only purpose for creating this thread is to share my thoughts on this dungeon’s general design philosophy and how the dungeon felt to engage with and experience as a player. i do not have any desire to attack or insult the staff who came together to make this HC happen, and as always, i appreciate, respect, and am thankful for their attempts to make PMU an enjoyable community experience.
to break my perspective down to digestible chunks, ill be elaborating on these points as follows:
first, the good:
- interesting concept given the circumstances of skipped hallo hc
- unique dungeon design
- compelling recruits
- responsiveness to patching dungeon bugs/design oversights
elaboration on the good of this hc
1 - the concept of “nightmare before christmas hc”
when i heard this year’s winter hc would be a combined halloween and christmas hc, i was really excited and invested in the idea. i think this take on a hc is very fresh and interesting and i would have never thought of doing so myself. combining the stark themes of the two holidays was probably very difficult, and i think the pokemon within and the dungeon’s design suits the theme very well. everything in this dungeon was mapped in a visually appealing way and the scenario of an npc in town returning as a villain in a hc is very cool and unique. the movie the dungeon was based on is also enough of a classic that i think it was a good choice to base the theme of the dungeon off of it.
2 - the dungeon’s overall design
i really, really enjoy the subtle change from winter to halloween path and vice versa. the way
the christmas path slowly begins to look nightmarish and the halloween path slowly becomes
snowy was an incredible touch and i have to give kudos to the creativity shown in tileset use. i also think the strange diamond shapes in the early halloween path are very cool and i hope as a result there will be more dungeons with interesting layouts like that.
3 - compelling recruits
not much to say here. i think the recruits chosen for this hc were pretty good. i understand the
lack of new exclusive recruits due to unfinished moves, sprites, etc. and lack of options as a majority of pokemon are already in the game, but i think komala and furfrou were both very solid and seeing lillipup back is nice too. also worth mentioning is the gen 5+ shinies available. thanks to the staff team for their efforts in starting on a highly anticipated feature of the game and im excited for more shinies to come as a hunter myself. also excited for when furfrou’s different cuts come out as i think those will be a highly sought after collection of mons
4- general staff helpfulness in fixing bugs
many staff helped to improve this hc after its initial release with general rebalancing and making additions to various aspects of the dungeon and i think it deserves mentioning. i really appreciated the responsiveness of the team to player queries and input in making changes to items and recruits, and its those kinds of things that show that the staff really cares about the player experience.
and now, the parts i thought weren’t great:
- excessive difficulty for little reward
- misleading pr
- shortfalls in level design
elaboration on the not as good parts
1- disproportionate challenge for a small chance of being rewarded for your efforts
i think the biggest problem i had with this holiday cave was mostly that there wasnt a heavy incentive for running the dungeon. of course, there was komala and furfrou, and the shiny pokemon, but it had a lack of any sort of concrete reward you knew you would recieve or you could aim for
for those unfamiliar, here is a brief description of the playerbase response to the end of the dungeons: after people saw that there was no end box, and only droppable disguises from the bosses, they would get all the recruits they wanted and stop trying the dungeon. only later was it updated and revealed halfway into the event that one of the bosses could drop a key at a very low chance (perplexingly, only in one path, leaving you with absolutely no incentive to fight the other path’s boss) to unlock a room with a single endbox. this endbox contained traps, tm infestation, another disguise, a… joke item that called the player a “terrible person” and other items nobody was able to obtain due to the sheer luck that getting the item would involve.
i have no issue with HC being difficult, or the end rewards being rare, but this felt almost demoralizing, especially with a 2 week time limit. the need to re grind within the dungeon to survive, the rng regarding finding sticky and cleanse items for the frequent traps, and the challenging enemy npcs heavily limited repeatability of this HC, and your opportunities to get to the boss to begin with. even if you managed to get to the (correct) boss, odds were against you to get the key to enter the secret room, and even after all that effort, you could walk away with very useless items, or one that even insults your efforts entirely. i think these odds weren’t very fair, and discouraged people from completing the dungeon any further after getting their desired recruits. it’s also worth mentioning most staff had no idea about the plan to do this as far as i know- only the dungeon creator themself.
2 - deceptive advertising of the facts about the dungeon itself
within the discord and over global chat, it was implied that there was a “secret” from the beginning of this holiday cave that people had to work to discover. this was a very interesting hook. many people came to hc in hopes that they would be the ones to uncover the mystery of this dungeon. there were many things tried: using honey in various rooms, trying different paths and combinations, using specific moves or pokemon, but nothing worked. then, 5 days in, a warp was added to the end of the path with jack skellington and co., as well as a droppable key from furfrou
this… isn’t a secret. implying the players haven’t “solved a puzzle” when it was simply something that didnt exist at all is misleading at best and a lie at worst. i suppose the fact that nobody knew how to obtain the key is a secret in of itself, but this was something that should have been in the dungeon from the beginning, and certainly was not a puzzle. you can also blame this on player error/assumptions, but i dont think that’s very fair either, considering the ARG-like way this information was presented.
3 - level design that didnt really work
there were two main things this dungeon presented as “challenges” that seemed very unfair and unsatisfiying: hidden stairs and warp traps into unescapable rooms. the hidden stairs could be argued to be the same as pitfalls in that theyre an inconvenience that could maybe lead to you losing a recruit or held item in a worst case scenario. overall, i think the trap for that purpose is alright. however, the issue with these traps was that it made it difficult to hunt for the recruits you wanted for no real reason. there was no way to avoid these unless you dragged along a friend. unlike checking the stairs, which had a visual indicator to show which path you would go to if you entered them, these would force you off your path with nothing that you could do about it. this could cause you to lose out on an entire floor where a rare recruit could spawn, and i wasn’t a big fan. in addition, pitfalls can be avoided with trap scarves, but there is no way to mitigate these because you cant bring items into hc.
the warp traps on the very early floors of the nightmare path were also not very fair, i feel. these could happen at any time due to the enclosed rooms in the wall, and if you went into one without a ghost type or ability to warp out yourself, you were trapped basically forever. of course, there were ways to mitigate this, because ghost types were encounterable and recruitable, however the dungeon had a low spawn rate, and your wind timer could run out before you could have a ghost spawn in your enclosed area that you succesfully recruited with the very low recruit rate. i was told there were warp scarves and warp seeds, but i personally encountered neither on all my runs, only stamina bands and slip seeds, which aren’t helpful for this. getting softlocked in a game should always be able to be mitigated the best one can when designing a game, and i feel this trap didn’t do enough to help players who were caught by surprise by this. this was patched early on into the dungeon’s duration but when queried about it in the discord users were initially told it was intentional, so i want to bring it up
that’s all i wanted to say regarding this event. i hope the staff will continue engaging with the playerbase and providing us with opportunities to discover and work hard for exclusive recruits. thank you very much for reading, and i hope that if other people have thoughts about the event, they will share them as well. if you do though, please try to be fair and respectful even if you too have qualms. the existence of all hcs are due entirely to the hard work of the team.
