Animal Crossing Listened To Eggsasperated Fans

Animal Crossing fans have been having a pretty good time with the newest game in the series, the aptly-named Animal Crossing: New Horizons. However, one of the game's first big events has been causing a bit of a headache for some folks. New Horizons' "Bunny Day" event involves a character named Zipper T. Bunny sending you all around the island to find hidden eggs and make different things with them. The event is meant to run until April 12, Easter Sunday, but fans have had some issues with how the event has played out.

As explained by Polygon, the biggest problem with Bunny Day is just how heavy the drop rates are for some of these eggs, while others seemed to be harder to come by. This wouldn't be a big deal if the goal of the event was to find and use every type of special egg. It ended up distracting from things like, you know, playing the actual game. 

As Polygon's Patricia Hernandez explained it, "The design palette is the only aesthetically pleasing thing about the egg stuff you can make. If it weren't for the fact that Zipper requires you to make every egg item to receive a goodie on April 12, I would never waste my time with any of these things. The issues go beyond the visuals, though. Having eggs spawning in all these places takes the joy out of things like fishing, hearing a balloon in the distance, or seeing an X on the ground."

Hernandez continued, "But I resent having to put in any effort at all to enjoy the game as I normally would, especially when it's going to be more than a week of this experience. My hope is that future New Horizons events won't work this way. Nintendo has been fairly responsive to how fans are playing the game."

Not to fear, as a new update for the game may have fixed that very problem. Nintendo Japan has released some patch notes for the event (translation via Polygon) that should come as good news for annoyed fans. According to these patch notes, Nintendo heard fans' complaints and seemed to agree that there were just too many eggs. In this latest update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, "the appearance rate of some eggs [have been] adjusted."

Beyond the drop rates, the event was notably glitchy. One of the ways you could get eggs in the game were to pop balloons that had the chance to drop eggs. Unfortunately, as noticed by players on Reddit, players cannot pop anymore balloons after popping 300 of them. 

This was a major problem, which was pointed out by one user who wrote, "This can make the recent Bunny Day event unplayable for many, considering that Egg Balloons are a thing. The higher frequency of them spawning can also make people hit 300 easily too." 

Not to mention, some players complained that they don't see balloons nearly as often as others. One person asked, "How have you guys popped 300. I have popped like 5." In other words, spawn rates in Animal Crossing: New Horizons seem to be wildly inconsistent. Hopefully this update will address that issue as well.

These issues have led some players to feel like Bunny Day wasn't thought out very well by the developers. Like Hernandez mentioned, there's a hope that Nintendo will take notes from what went wrong with Bunny Day when planning future events. We know that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has a ton of new DLCs on the horizon, adding everything from different outfits to new island activities. It would be great to see Nintendo continuing to listen to fan feedback as New Horizons goes forward.

Apparently, the update's changes haven't been super noticeable. As Polygon notes, "Unfortunately, the [Nintendo Japan] website is vague about what, exactly, these egg adjustments are. Polygon downloaded the patch and spent about 30 minutes futzing about, during which the fishing egg drop rate seemed to be about the same, but fewer sky eggs than usual were generated."

You know who wouldn't have any problem getting all the eggs they wanted? Resident Evil 3's Jill Valentine dressed like Isabelle from Animal Crossing. She's an expert shot and none of those balloons would stand a chance. 

All joking aside, it's great to see Nintendo attempting to rectify issues in such a timely manner. It should hopefully make Animal Crossing fans feel very optimistic about the future of the game. Nintendo is obviously much better at reading a room than Animal Crossing's Isabelle.