The current HM system is terrible and ineffective, but it can be fixed pretty easily

Please turn the HM obstacles into NPCs that look like HM Obstacles (or anything else, doesn’t matter). Have the NPCs check if you’ve beaten Sour Root, Sauna, etc and let the player through if they have beaten the required dungeons instead of requiring a specific move be used on them.

Why?
This old system is simply really bad. The game has HM move checks in the middle of dungeons without warning, so players can’t continue when they reach halfway into some dungeons. There are surprise Cut trees in the middle of the over-world with no assembly NPC nearby, forcing people to sigh and backtrack.
Heck, we have Rock Climb available by level-up on some mons, so the Rock Climb places already have an NPC checking if you’ve finished the Rock Climb dungeon. Why even require the move at that point? Players often choose to just fly around any cut/rock smash obstacles they can by being a flying type.

Newer players have said they accidentally entered Cliffside Relic before getting Cut. Later on, there is a Rock Smash check to even gain access to Tanren (assuming somebody doesn’t just fly around it), and then in a path to the right of Tanren there is another Rock Smash check. It’s irrational.

So not only is this system redundant and unnecessary, it manages to be ineffective AND frustrating. Even the main Pokemon franchise has completely ditched this system.

Give us freedom by letting us run more optimized team slots and remove the annoyances this toothless and clunky system creates. If nothing else, HM checks should be cleaned up. Remove HM checks in the middle of dungeons and remove redundant HM checks from regions that already required that HM for access.

Sure, you could make a whole new system that is less messy by making much fancier updates/story/updating the overworld map, but in the short term turning the HM obstacles into Dungeon Checks would work better immediately with significantly less labor needed. I don’t imagine this would be more work than a newer event / holiday cave, but that’s going to depend on how the game and staff or organized, I admit.

I like the idea, but you seem to be thinking about it slightly too simply. The hm’s give a reason you can pass the area, without them things wouldn’t make as much sense. beating sour root allowing you to go past cut trees alone wouldn’t make sense. it’s not too difficult to solve though, for example hm cut could be replaced with gardening shears, these wouldn’t need to actually be an item though, it could just be mentioned in the check and be assumed you’re just carrying it everywhere. or just do some magical blockade and throw some story at it, either way more complicated than you said but not by much

Yeah, this is a very very simple post. I didn’t want to cloud the intention of my suggestion, which is just very flat and functional from a gameplay perspective. There can be additional simple changes like you said (with garden shears over HM Cut), fancy changes that could work with this gameplay change (making story changes/map changes)…but I ultimately want the basic idea of “clear dungeon, gain access replaces literal moves” to stay the focus. I’m not picky about how that would be accomplished, necessarily.

I do agree with a lot of points here, the hm checks can feel pretty annoying to go trough,
but i feel necessary to point out the “can pretty easily fixed” part, as it sounds like you think implementing dungeon checks to be easy work, but its not, dungeons in the system are just a long string of random numbers without any explanation, making searching for them and implementing “if 214432454557658383 is not beaten push player back” very busy work and prone to errors, so staff would need to either remake a simpler system on thier side or chategorize all of the numbers so they know what dungeon they rapresent,
im not trying to say this is a bad idea, or fault you in any way, just want to let you know this is a lot more busy work and time consuming then you may think,
i think while a solution for to change the hm system is being worked on, to quickly reevaluate the position of hms blocks and put them in better spots with assemblys nerbys as temporary solution

Sure, I totally agree! The game already have these blocked tiles, which say ‘You can’t proceed before you’ve completed [DUNGEON]’ or something along those lines. Just put those outside of dungeons (or even in them), and the need for these redudant HM slaves is gone. I think a lot of the unwarned HM checks, stems back to a long forgotten philosophy, the PMU devs have thankfully abandoned. That being to add difficulty by making the game more cumbersome.

Dungeons have numbers attached to them though. For example ( I’m not saying this Is the case, this Is just an example ), Pebble Cave could be number 1 and Wildfire might be 140 or something. If It was that hard I don’t feel like the entirety of the Southeastern Village would have Boggy Waste blocks on the outside

Most on-map functionalities are done through tiles, so, the “dungeon checks” such as beating Tanren Tunnel or Tanren Mines are probably literally the same. Place tile, and tile has an argument to pass a number and gets the dungeon of that number. To be somewhat technical, tiles pull functions, meaning a dungeon check Is just one of the functions

That being said Is why I think It’s not going to be done soon not because “dungeon checks are hard to make” ( they aren’t ) but well, the way It has to be done I guess? If I was staff I would honestly hate working on the game. The system we currently have letting anything able to be changed In real time sucks a bunch and I really wish changes were linked to client updates or something—literally any way to have each change appear at the same time. Maybe then we’d get an actual changelog, and overall It would be a less awkward experience

My point Is the fact that the engine and editing tools suck probably kills motivation to do things like this. I can’t speak for anyone but the HM system still “does Its job” so to speak, so I’m not sure how soon this would even be changed, whether It Is or Isn’t efficient. Whenever any problems exists It’s always “not that high priority”, so I don’t know what Is high priority anymore. lol

I once brought up an Idea regarding Sky Fortress requiring a Flying-type. It was to Instead require the Fly HM since you get way more bag slots than team slots, and I think It could also work In this situation. It doesn’t require changing any HM spots that currently exist. Just require the Item and not the move. It would be like an Infinite-use key which already exist—the Issue Is that I don’t think an Item can function as a TM/HM and a “key” without making a script just for It.

Isn’t that what i said? That the tile check use the number of the dungeon not the name?

I never said it was hard. Just very busy work.
Which you seem to agree later in the post. So did you miss read my post? I’m very confused.

I forgot to elaborate that they do have names attached. If they didn’t then the completed dungeons list wouldn’t have anything to read from among other things

When you Implied even finding what dungeon Is what to actually apply to the tile, It seems like more work than It actually Is. There Is no “Implementation” to be done because there’s already reusable code for “block the tile If x dungeon Isn’t beaten”. It’s placing a tile that uses a certain script and eyedropping It

Beyond that It’s just about the process being tedious though yes

Oh, cool things to know for sure, regarding the numerical strings.
I would still personally find this “easy” by my personal definitions. What I won’t say is easy: finding people who are consistently motivated to work long term on a project like this. haha.

I’d offer to do this myself but I’d only be motivated enough for this single thing before immediately stepping down again, honestly. I’ve been on games projects left and right and it’s always messy, and I just don’t have the wind in my sails to do it long term either. But compared to other problematic game systems PMU deals with (like the mission system, or how floaty the controls can be/desyncs) this is probably a reasonable 1-person-job if somebody feels invigorated.

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