edited 1/30/22
Covid-19 is intrinsic to Animal Crossing: New Horizon's profile. I have a lot of games I played during this scary time in our lives, but it's AC: NH that defines it; merely days after it dropped, my state went into lockdown. At that point, my family and I were quarantined to try and remain safe in the hopes of weathering out the pandemic. When I think back to those first few months of lockdown, I think of how much of a comfort waking up to play on my island was. I would play for quite literally hours at a time, though I only recently clocked in with nearly 400 hours of gameplay.
All that said, I don't think that this was a game meant to be played for an upwards of 400 hours in less than two years. That might not seem like a lot, but the majority of my playtime these days is firmly settled on maybe an hour a day— when I remember to play, that is.
This game is often, understandably, compared to AC: New Leaf. There's an important piece of that discussion that I feel is often ignored: NL introduced the Dream Suite, which allowed players to create a dream address for their towns they could then share online. This let other players visit their towns without the mayor needing to allow them entry. It essentially was like exploring a cloud backup of a town, and some players got extremely creative with this, giving their towns themes and stories for dream visitors to uncover as they explored. An example of this would be the infamous Aika village. Additionally, the Able sisters' shop had a machine in it where players could make custom designs that they could upload to the internet. Other players could then download it through an assigned QR code that would be punched into the same machine in their game. Players could use this design to customize their town or their character. The 3DS’' touch screen changed the landscape for customization in Animal Crossing. While there was a lot to do in NL, the customization aspect was probably what I most remember and arguably what kept NL puttering along until the big "Welcome Amiibo" update. I think NH is the continuation of that, with perhaps the biggest proof being how quickly Luna was introduced into the game. However, in order to focus on aesthetics, the game has been stripped down to the bare essentials, with Nintendo arguably putting out an incomplete game.
This is a YMMV thing, I suppose. I see people creating in depth, stunning islands, and my immediate first thought when I spot them is that I am frankly not playing the same game as them. In the hands of someone with more creativity than me, I can see how this game could be a personal favorite. Most of the focus has been shifted to online play, trading, and island customization. I've seen "playable islands," which is stuff like island wide mazes, something that Nintendo has gotten in on themselves.
One of the biggest reveals leading up to the release of New Horizons was that your island was fully customizable. You could create your own cliffs, rivers, waterfalls, and there were a number of different customization options for bridges and inclines. DIY’d furniture could be customized, refreshed with a new coat of paint in the absence of Reese and Cyrus’ shop. These two factors, combined with how fast Luna was implemented, seem to indicate that aesthetics were the driving force of development in New Horizons. This would be fine, except there’s a number of problems that become even more strained and obvious the longer they go unaddressed.
Firstly, I would be remiss to not mention Nook Miles. A new addition to Animal Crossing, Nook Miles are a new in-game currency that you could use to purchase different items through a curated catalogue hosted by Nook Industries. You can purchase items, DIYs and Nook Mile Tickets with Nook Miles, but all of these come with a caveat. This title, more than previous titles, has had it’s online play stressed again and again for better or worse. In your Nook Miles shop, you’ll find a street light. Mine is brown, personally, but yours might be a different color; white, maybe. You will only be able to purchase that color from your Nook Miles shop— if either of us ever want a different color street lamp, we will need to get it from a second party every single time we want one. This is the same for any item for sale on the NM shop: Trading is a necessity if you want to focus on the aesthetic of your island, something that is encouraged by the game’s design.
Design surrounding customization and aesthetic in this game seem to be carefully chosen to encourage players to, well, play. Seasonal DIYs drop from balloons. You can only get certain DIYs from completing tasks— if you want the Mermaid series back, you need to hunt for scallops in the Summer so Pascal can pop up and ask you to trade your new scallop for a DIY. Talking to villagers during October can net you some Spooky DIYs. If you notice I keep mentioning DIYs, it’s because New Horizons launched with a limited selection of furniture. The Rococo line is gone, as are a number of others. They could be reintroduced at a later date, but I have to wonder if it’s too little at this point. There are new furniture sets in New Horizons, however: The wedding furniture can only be obtained by engaging in a seasonal daily minigame that loses all its charm the longer you play. The Sanrio furniture line was locked to Amiibo cards that sold out immediately, so your only hope is trading for the items, or buying knock offs of the cards online. Both options technically cost real world money— you need an online membership to trade, after all. I’ve already paid for the game, so tacking on $5 inclements to get more furniture to decorate my island when that’s what was promoted feels… well, not very consumer friendly.
With the mention of real world money and the previous mention of Nook Miles, you might be wondering how strong the similarity between a mobile Animal Crossing and New Horizons is. In talking about New Horizons, I can’t not also talk about Pocket Camp, the mobile version of Animal Crossing that comically enough has more content in it than New Horizons presently does. Part of this is the paywall— you purchase items to decorate your campsite with, but there’s also more fruit to collect in Pocket Camp, more incentive to catch fish and bugs in order to work up to those F2P options. More crossovers, collabs, more promotions; the list is exhaustive. New Horizons, in comparison, feels bare. Comparing the two feels dirty, because a mobile game functions and plans differently from a console game. When I need to pay extra money monthly to fully experience the game as intended, though, I have to wonder if New Horizons is all that different. If you’re still wondering: I wouldn’t say New Horizons has much in common with Pocket Camp beyond Nintendo’s clear greed and anti-consumer fundamentals, but this isn’t new to Nintendo. It’s simply more frustrating to see laid out in plain text.
One of the biggest misses in New Horizons is just how little time it actually spends getting you to play. There’s a severe lack of minigames, and significantly less traveling visitors to your island. Katrina is missing, and famously Brewster, but Kapp’n is nowhere to be seen either, even though there’s a dock on the beach. All three of these NPCs are associated with minigames or game mechanics, which New Horizons desperately needs. For what it’s worth, datamines consistently show that Brewster is slowly being implemented, and Katrina has been spotted on the Nintendo Online app. The dock has been in game from launch. With any luck, at least this trio might be seen in forthcoming updates, but for now, New Horizons is mostly menus and text.
Speaking of text, you read a lot of it in New Horizons.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a not-insignificant amount of my time in the game is spent doing just that simply due to menus. Since launch, a vocal part of the playerbase has been asking Nintendo to work on bulk crafting options simply because players will often do just that: craft in bulk. As an example, a recommended strategy for the fish and bug tournaments is to craft a multitude of fishing poles and nets beforehand. You go through the same set of menus every time you craft anything, and I can’t imagine that the development team did not expect players to craft in bulk at some point in designing the game— but the crafting menus are not nearly as bad as Orville’s menus. If you want to fly to another island, you’ll need to run down to the airport and talk to Orville, which kicks up a comical amount of menus. Menus lead to menus lead to menus in New Horizons. I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t know if villager hunting was a strategy the devteam planned on players engaging with, but they surely expected us to go to Mystery Islands back to back, right? I’m no longer hurting for resources in New Horizons. I don’t need more fruit or flowers or weeds or trees, so my only reason to go to these islands is to get a lucky roll or find a new villager. In the latter case, I spend much less time on the Mystery Island than in the menus upon menus. It’s odd.
Odd choices are a bound in New Horizons— updates are a Problem depending on who you talk to, but I find a lot of odd decisions are made within them. The aforementioned Nook Miles can also be obtained by visiting the terminal within Resident Services, which is fine because prior to an update where the terminal could now be accessed through your in-game phone, you could only check your new daily set of items for sale by visiting it. Now, you have to walk into the Resident Services, open the menu to get the Nook Miles, and if you’re like me, you already checked the shop, so you just leave.
Another odd decision is that the game functions on a grid. Basically, each part of your island is designed in squares. This means that some items will never be centered, and it makes terraforming— again, one of the Big Promotional Things— a bigger chore than you expect. I understand it fundamentally, but it feels like a midway point where something just doesn’t quite fit. It’s almost there, but it feels clunky and difficult more often than not. Maybe I’m just not good at it.
Additionally, while you can have multiple characters on the island, you can only have one island per console. This is an odd choice for a game where the demographic seems to be families; my younger siblings should be allowed to have their own islands on my Switch. For a game so focused on customization, I don't see why I can't have multiple islands or save datas. Then again, you have to purchase a memory card for your switch in order to have more than a handful of games on it, so perhaps it is simply a memory issue. Regardless, it is a feature I feel is necessary for games like this.
I’ve seen a lot of conversation surrounding the repetitive dialogue in the game, and I will be frank: There is a lot of it. Villagers repeat things, there’s a fair few glitches like villagers “blue screening” and we all had to put up with Raymond in a maid dress. That said, I can’t say it’s better or even worse than New Leaf. I booted up New Leaf because I remembered it very fondly, but after playing around in it for a while, I realized I had run into the same dialogue with my villagers a few times. In my experience, they’re just as lacking as before, but the bare bones gameplay has resulted in this being even more prominent than before. One thing I do miss is being invited over to villager houses at certain times and days, but missing that had no consequence in New Leaf. To be honest, I kind of miss the mean villagers from the Gamecube game. Go figure, right? I want the stress-free game to be more stressful.
This is a lot of text, and you might think I hate New Horizons. To be honest, though, I really don’t I didn’t sink 400 hours of my time into it because I had nothing to do. I got bored of it and moved onto other games: I’ve only played New Horizons in the Spring and Summer, because that’s when I get the Animal Crossing Itch. When I get back to the game, I do spend hours in it. The customization aspect of the game does hit certain points for me, and I have worked a lot on my island. My house is paid off, and nearly all decorated. I don’t open up the game out of spite— I legitimately enjoy it for a half hour or so, and then I’m done. That’s probably the intention of this game, now, but I can’t help but think about how I wish I had more to do in it. How the implication of more is in every corner of my island getaway.
The closed off upper level of Nook’s Cranny, the two empty walls on either side of the top level of the museum, the dock where Kapp’n could park his boat and wait for me to hop on in. The secret beach was eventually revealed to be where Redd docks his boat, and there’s still areas on my island where another building or two could fit. It’s like New Horizons has potential, but it doesn’t know when or how to unlock it. Maybe the problem is me though— maybe I’m looking for something exciting in my getaway package now that it’s started to feel like real life: Trapped in the same routine with no way out, doing my silly little tasks, while I hope for something to shake it up.
Anyway I think New Horizons is not a very good game
ETA: my opinion of 2.0 is reflected in how i took away half a star for it
Covid-19 is intrinsic to Animal Crossing: New Horizon's profile. I have a lot of games I played during this scary time in our lives, but it's AC: NH that defines it; merely days after it dropped, my state went into lockdown. At that point, my family and I were quarantined to try and remain safe in the hopes of weathering out the pandemic. When I think back to those first few months of lockdown, I think of how much of a comfort waking up to play on my island was. I would play for quite literally hours at a time, though I only recently clocked in with nearly 400 hours of gameplay.
All that said, I don't think that this was a game meant to be played for an upwards of 400 hours in less than two years. That might not seem like a lot, but the majority of my playtime these days is firmly settled on maybe an hour a day— when I remember to play, that is.
This game is often, understandably, compared to AC: New Leaf. There's an important piece of that discussion that I feel is often ignored: NL introduced the Dream Suite, which allowed players to create a dream address for their towns they could then share online. This let other players visit their towns without the mayor needing to allow them entry. It essentially was like exploring a cloud backup of a town, and some players got extremely creative with this, giving their towns themes and stories for dream visitors to uncover as they explored. An example of this would be the infamous Aika village. Additionally, the Able sisters' shop had a machine in it where players could make custom designs that they could upload to the internet. Other players could then download it through an assigned QR code that would be punched into the same machine in their game. Players could use this design to customize their town or their character. The 3DS’' touch screen changed the landscape for customization in Animal Crossing. While there was a lot to do in NL, the customization aspect was probably what I most remember and arguably what kept NL puttering along until the big "Welcome Amiibo" update. I think NH is the continuation of that, with perhaps the biggest proof being how quickly Luna was introduced into the game. However, in order to focus on aesthetics, the game has been stripped down to the bare essentials, with Nintendo arguably putting out an incomplete game.
This is a YMMV thing, I suppose. I see people creating in depth, stunning islands, and my immediate first thought when I spot them is that I am frankly not playing the same game as them. In the hands of someone with more creativity than me, I can see how this game could be a personal favorite. Most of the focus has been shifted to online play, trading, and island customization. I've seen "playable islands," which is stuff like island wide mazes, something that Nintendo has gotten in on themselves.
One of the biggest reveals leading up to the release of New Horizons was that your island was fully customizable. You could create your own cliffs, rivers, waterfalls, and there were a number of different customization options for bridges and inclines. DIY’d furniture could be customized, refreshed with a new coat of paint in the absence of Reese and Cyrus’ shop. These two factors, combined with how fast Luna was implemented, seem to indicate that aesthetics were the driving force of development in New Horizons. This would be fine, except there’s a number of problems that become even more strained and obvious the longer they go unaddressed.
Firstly, I would be remiss to not mention Nook Miles. A new addition to Animal Crossing, Nook Miles are a new in-game currency that you could use to purchase different items through a curated catalogue hosted by Nook Industries. You can purchase items, DIYs and Nook Mile Tickets with Nook Miles, but all of these come with a caveat. This title, more than previous titles, has had it’s online play stressed again and again for better or worse. In your Nook Miles shop, you’ll find a street light. Mine is brown, personally, but yours might be a different color; white, maybe. You will only be able to purchase that color from your Nook Miles shop— if either of us ever want a different color street lamp, we will need to get it from a second party every single time we want one. This is the same for any item for sale on the NM shop: Trading is a necessity if you want to focus on the aesthetic of your island, something that is encouraged by the game’s design.
Design surrounding customization and aesthetic in this game seem to be carefully chosen to encourage players to, well, play. Seasonal DIYs drop from balloons. You can only get certain DIYs from completing tasks— if you want the Mermaid series back, you need to hunt for scallops in the Summer so Pascal can pop up and ask you to trade your new scallop for a DIY. Talking to villagers during October can net you some Spooky DIYs. If you notice I keep mentioning DIYs, it’s because New Horizons launched with a limited selection of furniture. The Rococo line is gone, as are a number of others. They could be reintroduced at a later date, but I have to wonder if it’s too little at this point. There are new furniture sets in New Horizons, however: The wedding furniture can only be obtained by engaging in a seasonal daily minigame that loses all its charm the longer you play. The Sanrio furniture line was locked to Amiibo cards that sold out immediately, so your only hope is trading for the items, or buying knock offs of the cards online. Both options technically cost real world money— you need an online membership to trade, after all. I’ve already paid for the game, so tacking on $5 inclements to get more furniture to decorate my island when that’s what was promoted feels… well, not very consumer friendly.
With the mention of real world money and the previous mention of Nook Miles, you might be wondering how strong the similarity between a mobile Animal Crossing and New Horizons is. In talking about New Horizons, I can’t not also talk about Pocket Camp, the mobile version of Animal Crossing that comically enough has more content in it than New Horizons presently does. Part of this is the paywall— you purchase items to decorate your campsite with, but there’s also more fruit to collect in Pocket Camp, more incentive to catch fish and bugs in order to work up to those F2P options. More crossovers, collabs, more promotions; the list is exhaustive. New Horizons, in comparison, feels bare. Comparing the two feels dirty, because a mobile game functions and plans differently from a console game. When I need to pay extra money monthly to fully experience the game as intended, though, I have to wonder if New Horizons is all that different. If you’re still wondering: I wouldn’t say New Horizons has much in common with Pocket Camp beyond Nintendo’s clear greed and anti-consumer fundamentals, but this isn’t new to Nintendo. It’s simply more frustrating to see laid out in plain text.
One of the biggest misses in New Horizons is just how little time it actually spends getting you to play. There’s a severe lack of minigames, and significantly less traveling visitors to your island. Katrina is missing, and famously Brewster, but Kapp’n is nowhere to be seen either, even though there’s a dock on the beach. All three of these NPCs are associated with minigames or game mechanics, which New Horizons desperately needs. For what it’s worth, datamines consistently show that Brewster is slowly being implemented, and Katrina has been spotted on the Nintendo Online app. The dock has been in game from launch. With any luck, at least this trio might be seen in forthcoming updates, but for now, New Horizons is mostly menus and text.
Speaking of text, you read a lot of it in New Horizons.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if a not-insignificant amount of my time in the game is spent doing just that simply due to menus. Since launch, a vocal part of the playerbase has been asking Nintendo to work on bulk crafting options simply because players will often do just that: craft in bulk. As an example, a recommended strategy for the fish and bug tournaments is to craft a multitude of fishing poles and nets beforehand. You go through the same set of menus every time you craft anything, and I can’t imagine that the development team did not expect players to craft in bulk at some point in designing the game— but the crafting menus are not nearly as bad as Orville’s menus. If you want to fly to another island, you’ll need to run down to the airport and talk to Orville, which kicks up a comical amount of menus. Menus lead to menus lead to menus in New Horizons. I couldn’t tell you why. I don’t know if villager hunting was a strategy the devteam planned on players engaging with, but they surely expected us to go to Mystery Islands back to back, right? I’m no longer hurting for resources in New Horizons. I don’t need more fruit or flowers or weeds or trees, so my only reason to go to these islands is to get a lucky roll or find a new villager. In the latter case, I spend much less time on the Mystery Island than in the menus upon menus. It’s odd.
Odd choices are a bound in New Horizons— updates are a Problem depending on who you talk to, but I find a lot of odd decisions are made within them. The aforementioned Nook Miles can also be obtained by visiting the terminal within Resident Services, which is fine because prior to an update where the terminal could now be accessed through your in-game phone, you could only check your new daily set of items for sale by visiting it. Now, you have to walk into the Resident Services, open the menu to get the Nook Miles, and if you’re like me, you already checked the shop, so you just leave.
Another odd decision is that the game functions on a grid. Basically, each part of your island is designed in squares. This means that some items will never be centered, and it makes terraforming— again, one of the Big Promotional Things— a bigger chore than you expect. I understand it fundamentally, but it feels like a midway point where something just doesn’t quite fit. It’s almost there, but it feels clunky and difficult more often than not. Maybe I’m just not good at it.
Additionally, while you can have multiple characters on the island, you can only have one island per console. This is an odd choice for a game where the demographic seems to be families; my younger siblings should be allowed to have their own islands on my Switch. For a game so focused on customization, I don't see why I can't have multiple islands or save datas. Then again, you have to purchase a memory card for your switch in order to have more than a handful of games on it, so perhaps it is simply a memory issue. Regardless, it is a feature I feel is necessary for games like this.
I’ve seen a lot of conversation surrounding the repetitive dialogue in the game, and I will be frank: There is a lot of it. Villagers repeat things, there’s a fair few glitches like villagers “blue screening” and we all had to put up with Raymond in a maid dress. That said, I can’t say it’s better or even worse than New Leaf. I booted up New Leaf because I remembered it very fondly, but after playing around in it for a while, I realized I had run into the same dialogue with my villagers a few times. In my experience, they’re just as lacking as before, but the bare bones gameplay has resulted in this being even more prominent than before. One thing I do miss is being invited over to villager houses at certain times and days, but missing that had no consequence in New Leaf. To be honest, I kind of miss the mean villagers from the Gamecube game. Go figure, right? I want the stress-free game to be more stressful.
This is a lot of text, and you might think I hate New Horizons. To be honest, though, I really don’t I didn’t sink 400 hours of my time into it because I had nothing to do. I got bored of it and moved onto other games: I’ve only played New Horizons in the Spring and Summer, because that’s when I get the Animal Crossing Itch. When I get back to the game, I do spend hours in it. The customization aspect of the game does hit certain points for me, and I have worked a lot on my island. My house is paid off, and nearly all decorated. I don’t open up the game out of spite— I legitimately enjoy it for a half hour or so, and then I’m done. That’s probably the intention of this game, now, but I can’t help but think about how I wish I had more to do in it. How the implication of more is in every corner of my island getaway.
The closed off upper level of Nook’s Cranny, the two empty walls on either side of the top level of the museum, the dock where Kapp’n could park his boat and wait for me to hop on in. The secret beach was eventually revealed to be where Redd docks his boat, and there’s still areas on my island where another building or two could fit. It’s like New Horizons has potential, but it doesn’t know when or how to unlock it. Maybe the problem is me though— maybe I’m looking for something exciting in my getaway package now that it’s started to feel like real life: Trapped in the same routine with no way out, doing my silly little tasks, while I hope for something to shake it up.
Anyway I think New Horizons is not a very good game
ETA: my opinion of 2.0 is reflected in how i took away half a star for it
2 Comments
i'll try to keep this short, as you can see i can ramble about my disappointment in this game for many many pages lmao
for me, it's both. the base game is boring, lacking in QOL and stuff to do beyond decorating. i know it popped off in NL and the creative community around it is what kept NL going but NL also had a lot of mini games in it. i don't think that the villagers were better, i don't think that there was some kind of magic in it. i just think that they knew how to keep you playing, and it wasn't just islands and holiday items. the best way to illustrate this, i think, is brewster. i said i'd love to see him back, and my excitement was immeasurable at first, but... in NH, there's no coffee shop minigame. you don't serve coffee to the island residents. you walk in, order a cup (with no choice-- brewster gives you the same cup every time), then leave. it feels like a bland attempt to appease the loud people in the room. there's no variety to it beyond the first like, fifteen times you show up. even that gets old really quick, because it's largely pointless differences. he gives you an item, and then you leave.
the treatment of these npcs is also... bizarre? reese and cyrus are on harv's island. why. harv's island only gets new items at the beginning of the week. i have no reason to go more than once a week except for katrina whose RNG is generally bad, so i rarely get an item out of her. the shampoodle quiz is gone. red, saharah and tortimer are... fine? i don't get why tortimer is there, but sure. shampoodle is still gone, and likely not coming back, which sucks: the quiz and RNG was another gameplay mechanic.
i also think it's worth noting that players have been vocal about wanting a furniture store since launch. during the nintendo direct where the update was detailed, they also detailed happy home paradise, the paid DLC. the furniture store was on it. the DLC costs almost 30USD, and the base game is nearly 70USD... you're definitely paying around 90USD for the full "experience" of new horizons. having the furniture store be on the other island which is paid DLC only strikes me as a calculated move; they also locked partitions to this DLC, even though, frankly, it revolutionizes decorating in game. the furniture store and partitions should be base game, imo.
hopefully this all makes sense. the tl;dr is that you're right on both accounts, but i also think that i was frankly wrong for wanting more npcs lmao. i should have known they'd strip them to the bare essentials.
for me, it's both. the base game is boring, lacking in QOL and stuff to do beyond decorating. i know it popped off in NL and the creative community around it is what kept NL going but NL also had a lot of mini games in it. i don't think that the villagers were better, i don't think that there was some kind of magic in it. i just think that they knew how to keep you playing, and it wasn't just islands and holiday items. the best way to illustrate this, i think, is brewster. i said i'd love to see him back, and my excitement was immeasurable at first, but... in NH, there's no coffee shop minigame. you don't serve coffee to the island residents. you walk in, order a cup (with no choice-- brewster gives you the same cup every time), then leave. it feels like a bland attempt to appease the loud people in the room. there's no variety to it beyond the first like, fifteen times you show up. even that gets old really quick, because it's largely pointless differences. he gives you an item, and then you leave.
the treatment of these npcs is also... bizarre? reese and cyrus are on harv's island. why. harv's island only gets new items at the beginning of the week. i have no reason to go more than once a week except for katrina whose RNG is generally bad, so i rarely get an item out of her. the shampoodle quiz is gone. red, saharah and tortimer are... fine? i don't get why tortimer is there, but sure. shampoodle is still gone, and likely not coming back, which sucks: the quiz and RNG was another gameplay mechanic.
i also think it's worth noting that players have been vocal about wanting a furniture store since launch. during the nintendo direct where the update was detailed, they also detailed happy home paradise, the paid DLC. the furniture store was on it. the DLC costs almost 30USD, and the base game is nearly 70USD... you're definitely paying around 90USD for the full "experience" of new horizons. having the furniture store be on the other island which is paid DLC only strikes me as a calculated move; they also locked partitions to this DLC, even though, frankly, it revolutionizes decorating in game. the furniture store and partitions should be base game, imo.
hopefully this all makes sense. the tl;dr is that you're right on both accounts, but i also think that i was frankly wrong for wanting more npcs lmao. i should have known they'd strip them to the bare essentials.
earthandspace
2 years ago