By James Liu
On January 10th, an uneggspected announcement was made on the Roblox Developer Forums, a “help-wanted” ad of sorts for the 2020 Roblox Egg Hunt. This announcement surprised many, as Roblox recently stopped doing community events highlighting certain games with prizes like hats. The yearly egg hunt was one such event and was expected to be discontinued along with everything else. The popularity of the event is probably the one thing keeping it going, as Roblox usually hits its highest simultaneous players at once when it arrives.
While it’s certainly a surprise but is it necessarily a welcome one? Last year’s egg hunt was a mix of highs and lows, as dozens of games with their own developers were left to create an event on their own. In fact, many will actually agree that the sponsor was the best part of this event, as Avengers: Endgame was released around the time of the hunt and a virtual Infinity Gauntlet was a prize among the eggs.
With all developers left on their own with no collaboration across eggs, this led to some being well done, some lazy, and others infuriating. Highlights included Hacker, which made you scan QR codes hidden in the map to find clues to the egg and Epic Minigames, where you could pay Robux to make the special event to earn the egg appear out of over 85 others and had a fixed amount of winners based on how the minigame was designed; you had to compete for the top, not just reach a certain goal. This made some parts great and others not so much.
Unfortunately, the creators in charge of the event are doing the exact same thing as last year. To quote the post, “Not much is expected on your end as a developer. If your game is selected, we’ll give you an egg assigned to your game specifically. You decide how the egg will be obtained, within reason. You will have to let us know how you plan to make the egg obtainable.” It’s definitely concerning that they’re plainly putting it out there that there are not many expectations for the developers this year.
My prediction is that Roblox will try and outdo themselves from last year with more eggs, but much lower quality in some of them. With many games from last year that were either extremely boring, tedious or just plain unentertaining, more low-quality eggs are the last thing that the event needs. Examples from last year include Roblox Point, Fairy World, Super Hero Life III, The Neighborhood of Robloxia, The Labyrinth, Dance Your Blox Off, and more. If not much is expected this year, I’m not sure what they expected last year with such fun and excitement as being forced to earn first place in a game that I’ve never played before and literally just walking for half an hour.
I went more in-depth last year about the specifics on the best and worst which might make it seem like the event was pretty even in quality, but what I didn’t cover were the dozens that weren’t interesting enough to cover. The ones that I didn’t really enjoy earning, and didn’t bother remembering afterward. If Roblox is going to do what I think they are, this may go down as one of the worst events in history due to sheer boredom and low quality compared to previous egg hunts.
Along with the announcement was an application for people to develop an egg as a part of the event, and it reveals another piece of info about the next egg hunt: Video star and admin eggs are here for another year. The video star and admin eggs are on the harder end of the difficulty scale, requiring you to track down a Roblox YouTuber and a Roblox Admin to earn them in one of the games. While usually some of the hardest and rarest eggs given that you must be present with one of a few specific people, there were some eggs from the event itself that took longer to earn that having to go on a full-scale manhunt, which definitely says something about how much time some of these developers want to squeeze out of you.
Another tidbit that the application reveals is that a piece of gear will be available for use in the event. Gears can be anything, from movement tools to weapons to social items like pizza launchers. It’s nothing massive, but it’s worth mentioning. Be on the lookout for people with… something. Nothing is said about the special gear in the application, which probably isn’t a good thing depending on what it could be.
Overall, I’m watching 2020’s egg hunt with cautious eyes. From what we know of last year’s event and the forum post announcing this year’s event, this year’s egg hunt will be exactly like last year’s: lots of games from lots of different developers, all working individually for one event. It didn’t work well last year, as many felt like a way to force long play times with a few exceptions, and I don’t expect anything different this year. Will I be right or wrong? I’m not sure, but I’ll definitely write again this spring once the event arrives.
