Discussing More New Horizons Details

It’s been a week since Nintendo revealed Animal Crossing: New Horizons for Nintendo Switch. Since then, additional details about the game have come out in various articles and interviews. In this entry, I’m going to share my thoughts on some of the more interesting details.

Confirming Neighbors’ House Placement

Source: IGN

When you first start out, two (“or so”) villagers will accompany you on the plane to the island. The “or so” indicates that the number may change by the time the game is finished, but that does sound low. I hope it’s not indicative of a low villager total in New Horizons.

But the more interesting part is that they will check with you before deciding on a place for their home. So if it’s in a bad spot, you can choose where they will live! I’m actually surprised they’re going to give us this much control, but I’m glad to see this happening. No more houses landing on our paths or in other bad spots.

Also, villagers will start out living in a tent, just like you do. And they’ll have to pay off their own debt to Tom Nook before they can upgrade to a house. That will be very cool to see your island build up from scratch. It reminds me of building Tarrey Town in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (but with even more control, of course).

Changing Your Appearance at Any Time

Source: Polygon

New Horizons will have new skin tones and new hairstyles, and you’ll be able to swap between character features “at any time.” This certainly makes things more convenient. I can think of at least one possible down side, though: It would make it easy to impersonate others during online play. That could cause problems if someone swaps their appearance to look like someone else and then steals an item, tramples flowers, or otherwise causes harm to your island.

Only One Island Per Switch

Source: IGN

Nintendo confirmed to IGN that you will be limited to one island per Switch system. If you make multiple accounts on your Switch, each account will have a house on the same island. On 3DS, players could simply buy another copy of the game to make a second (or third, fourth, etc.) town. But Switch saves data to the system itself, not the cartridge. So even buying another copy of the game would not help.

Many players enjoy having multiple towns, and I think Nintendo is going to lose out on some game sales by doing it this way. I’m hoping that they reconsider and provide an alternate way of making extra towns. One idea I have is to sell some DLC that allows a second save file on your Switch.

Even though I’m generally not a big fan of paid DLC, I think this makes sense. Creating a second town is something players would normally pay for anyway (by buying another game cart, or another memory card back in the GameCube days). And not providing an option for multiple towns would alienate many of the series’ biggest fans. So let’s hope they change course on this issue.

No Cloud Saves

Source: Gamekult (French)

Nintendo has confirmed that Animal Crossing: New Horizons will not be compatible with cloud saves to backup towns. This is not surprising news, but it’s disappointing nonetheless. They say it’s to prevent cheating; for example, players could save a bunch of money or valuable items to the cloud, drop those items off in a friend’s town, restore their saved town, and then pick up their original items to duplicate items or money.

While I can understand that perspective, it doesn’t seem fair to penalize those of us who don’t cheat. If our data gets corrupted and our towns get erased, there will be no way to recover. And Animal Crossing towns are something that many players put years into. It’s so much more important to a game like this, than it would be to save your progress in a Mario game, for example. I don’t think Nintendo appreciates how important our towns are to us Animal Crossing fans.

It would be nice if Nintendo could reach some sort of compromise. For example, what if a cloud save only saved things like the town layout, villagers, town/shop upgrades, and town history…but not money or furniture/items. We would still have to replace all of our stuff, but our towns would still be intact. That would be preferable to having to start out all over with a new town. And it would make things very difficult for those who wanted to use cloud backups as a way to cheat.

Auto-Save

Source: Mashable

A surprising revelation was that Animal Crossing: New Horizons will save your game automatically! This is quite a departure from how the game has operated since the beginning. I know a lot of players won’t be happy about this, although I don’t personally have a problem with it. Basically, the only times I saw Resetti were after a power outage or dead battery.

This change also puts Resetti out of a job. I imagine they’ll find a new job for him in the game, though. Or maybe he could at least reprise his role that he had in the GameCube game…as the Groundhog Day groundhog mole.

No Direct Connection Between New Horizons and Pocket Camp

Source: IGN

When Pocket Camp was announced, Nintendo stated that it would connect to a core Animal Crossing game, though they didn’t elaborate. Some thought that meant it would connect to New Leaf, but that never happened. So the only other choice would be the upcoming Switch game. However, Nintendo has backtracked and said they won’t connect directly.

And that is perfectly fine by me. The GameCube version of Animal Crossing had several features that could only be unlocked by connecting a Game Boy Advance using a special link cable.

Some of those features made perfect sense and were helpful to players who already owned both systems (like taking the pattern design tool with you, or downloading an NES game to the GBA).

But the main attraction was the tropical island. And it made no logical sense to prevent players without a GBA from visiting the island; the game already has a fully functional version of the island that you can play on GameCube. So it seemed like a blatant money-grab to require the purchase of another system to access something that’s already in the game.

So I’m glad New Horizons won’t be doing anything similar (even though Pocket Camp is a free download, it still requires a reasonably current smartphone or tablet). And linking systems up can be a cumbersome process that likely wouldn’t be worth the effort anyway. Just put those features into the game by default, please.

Other Stuff

Other details have come out, including confirmation that Isabelle will return in New Horizons. And sharp-eyed viewers have noticed many details from the trailer itself, like the fact that players can wear backpacks and players’ pupils are no longer fixed in place. 😀

A week after the reveal, I think I’m most excited about the outdoor furniture and path-making tool. Nintendo is clearly giving us more power to customize our towns the way we want them. Those tools will allow us to create truly unique towns.

As someone who has visited hundreds of dream towns in Animal Crossing: New Leaf, I’ve learned how rare truly unique towns are. Lots of towns are beautiful, with lots of flowers and public works projects (PWPs). But after a while, you end up seeing similar towns all the time (as nice as they may be). That shouldn’t be a problem in New Horizons (hopefully), and that will make the Dream Suite (if there is one), even more enjoyable to use.

Is there a certain feature of New Horizons that you’re dying to try out? Leave a comment below!

Update: Voice Chat Requires App?

Just one other thing I want to mention. That first IGN link says that voice chat will “likely be done through the Nintendo Switch Online app.” That sounds like a bad idea, unless they can make the chat play back through the game, so that everyone can hear what’s going on.

Animal Crossing is a social game; much of online play is communication. This isn’t Mario Kart, where you have a race to compete in, and hearing others isn’t crucial. In Animal Crossing, if someone says on voice chat “let’s play tag in the museum,” and only some of the players can hear him/her, that is going to cause confusion and exclude those without the app.

Wii had a separate mic accessory (called Wii Speak) that was used in Animal Crossing: City Folk. The good thing about it was that even those without the mic could still hear the others and keep up with what was going on. Let’s hope New Horizons doesn’t take a step backwards in terms of communication, and provides a way to include everyone.