Hello all,
I would like to suggest a change to the mechanics by which eggs hatch in PMU. Personally, I feel as though eggs are sort of seen as ‘dead content’ within PMU, and I don’t think I’m entirely alone in this perception. Generally eggs are considered totally non-viable in terms of shiny hunting versus standard recruiting options, and eggs are seen as not typically worth a pick-up when one comes across them.
There is one core reason as to why – the time it takes to hatch them. Collecting eggs means spending time outside of dungeon doing nothing but hatching. Egg hatching happens instead of gameplay, and a full bounty of eggs from a given dungeon might mean spending an entire run’s length of time just dancing back and forth in PMU.
In my opinion, this isn’t great. Hatching eggs comes at the expense of engaging with PMU’s gameplay, and it always serves as a diversion. Oval Charm and Flame Body help to reduce this time, but its time spent not playing regardless. Personally, this is unsatisfying. Eggs do serve a particular niche, that being acquiring certain recruits earlier than one normally could – and I like this aspect about them. However, this is a little too niche in my opinion for such a large mechanic within the game, and I would like to see eggs occupy a much larger place within the gameplay loop.
The change is simple: when an egg’s step counter fills, it queues the hatch instead of blocking other eggs from counting up. Once an egg is ready to hatch, it sits ready for an opportunity to do so, just like they do now. However, in this state they will not count for steps and the next egg in the inventory will count as well. This means that as long as a player is taking steps, they are hatching eggs – regardless if they already have one ready to hatch. This is opposed to the current system, where in practice a player might only get progress on a single egg throughout a dungeon.
This sort of functionality actually exists currently in an odd way; the egg at the top of the inventory will receive the hatching progress, so shifting eggs around allows for multiple eggs to be worked on in one dungeon. This change then would merely integrate this functionality seamlessly. Doing this is somewhat jank, and represents a fairly annoying and tedious process – it’s not something many players do. Making this behavior seamless and automatic means that players can engage with eggs more without having to deal with the tedium of inventory management.
As of current, the situation with eggs is thus: one might collect a batch of eggs, and then upon leaving the dungeon they must go “Alright, I guess I have to stop running for ~5 minutes to get these all hatched.” This isn’t very fun, and represents a halt in gameplay. It also makes eggs a harsh penalty to any level of running efficiency. Sure, the player could instead bank these eggs, but that is merely pushing this problem off till later. With this change, the results are two-fold: one, the player will likely have already hatched many or even most of these eggs through running; and two, the player can hatch the rest of these eggs by playing more. This creates a feedback loop where players can engage with eggs simply by playing more of the game, instead of stopping whatever they wanted to be doing to spam walk on a fencepost.
I understand that this could have a large impact on the balance of eggs – however, I strongly believe that the shift away from the passive and almost punishing system of current would be a great shift. In my opinion, having players stop playing to hatch is counterintuitive, and harmful to the potential of the mechanic. To balance this however, there are some things that could be done. Eggs could have their hatch time increased to compensate, The oval charm could be made a personal item – or could be made to not work at all inside dungeons. Additionally, carrying eggs means committing to them taking up inventory slots during runs.
Lastly, the elephant in the room: Easter HC. Personally, I don’t really have any strong ideas on how this would mesh specifically with Easter. It might not even have that much of an effect at all, due to the very high quantity of eggs. Either way, I would not want to see potential gameplay improvements stopped purely for the sake of a once-a-year time limited event.
Let me know what you guys think.