Although Animal Crossing: New Horizons was only confirmed for the Nintendo Switch in September 2018, unsurprisingly the game had been in development for many years before it was announced to the public. In fact, the deserted island concept dates all the way back to 2012 – not long after Animal Crossing: New Leaf had been released on the 3DS in Japan.
In the same interview with The Washington Post, director Aya Kyogoku and producer Hisashi Nogami spoke about how early development of New Horizons began shortly after the initial release of New Leaf, and well before the Nintendo Switch was even a thing. Interestingly, while the team was busy planning out the next game, it was still working on the 'Welcome Amiibo' update for New Leaf.
Kyogoku reiterated how the development cycle for New Horizons started well before the team began "thinking or knowing" about Nintendo's hybrid hardware. Just to let that sink in, that's around eight years from conception to release. Woah!
[source washingtonpost.com]
Comments 33
Always difficult to say. Most likely not full-on production for the last 8 years. Just a handful of people thinking about what to implement in the new game, concept art, and the last 2-3 years actual game development.
2012!? This makes me even more salty that they never released a real Animal game for Crossing Wii U. Nintendo needs to give us Wii U owners 3DS ambassador style reparations.
Given the attention to detail in this game, it's hardly surprising.
It seems those 8 years were well worth it.
@Octane that’s what I was about to say. There should be a difference between designating a development team and creating/pulling assets and actually spending development money from “hey we just finished New Leaf, we should totally create a sequel around another idea”
Aya has been busy though, since 2012 she has worked on Plaza, Happy Home Designer, Amiibo Festival, New Leaf Amiibo, Pocket Camp, Smash Bros, and New Horizons. That's a lot of work for just 8 years.
It may not look like, but Animal Crossing is quite dense in term of content, so it is not completely surprising that it takes a long time to make a new entry in the series
@ItsOKToBeOK It's same when big companies say ''We worked 7 years on this game, and 1000 people worked on it.'' It's never all at the same time, or during the entire length of development. Most of those people worked on it during the last year of development. But hey, the media loves repeating those quotes, so everyone does it.
It should have been pointed out that a lot of the team that worked on New Horizons also worked on Splatoon 2. So Splatoon 2 came out June 2017. I would say most of New Horizons was 2016-2019, they probably had a lot of ideas and concepts before 2016 though.
> Animal Crossing New Leaf
> Splatoon
> Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer
> Animal Crossing Amiibo Festival
> Animal Crossing New Leaf Welcome Amiibo
> Splatoon 2
> Animal Crossing Pocket Camp
> Animal Crossing New Horizons
All of those games were made by the same studio within Nintendo. So yeah, it's been a busy 7-8 years.
I knew this was the same team as splatoon, interestingly enough when you catch a squid on here it seems to be the only water dweller to have 2 different phrases when you reel in. One is Mario reference about bloopers the other a splatoon reference about inklings.
Considering the amount of Animal Crossing content that has been released from 2012 to now, I believe it. Likely they put and refined many ideas into games like happy home designer and even amiibo festival was a test run for HD and the island setting. Then pitching that to upper management as well as gauging reactions to the animal crossing games released in the interim. Not to mention they did a worldwide release as well which takes time to sync. Development isn’t as straightforward as people often assume. Full steam ahead work likely took place within the last 3-4 years (I suspect some form of this game was intended for wiiu) but they likely have been building prototypes since 2012. There would not have been so many Animal crossing games other wise.
I think because gamers ignore what they don’t want (plaza, amiibo festival) they forget that there is work involved with all of that. It all counts. It’s all concept to finished product and thus time, money and work involved. Not to mention this is the splatoon team.
Paid off too, fantastic game.
@Octane @ItsOKtobeOK Engineer here: Good preparation and planning is half the work! (if not more)
It doesn't come as a surprise that development starts right after the previous game was released. The Legend of Zelda is another example where they do that.
It was worth it too, both me and my partner are really enjoying the game so far. It's so nice to get a game like this at the moment and I'm relieved to find that my worries about possible microtransactions were not founded. You can tell that a lot of care, love and hard work went into New Horizons. Well done and thanks to all involved.
That explains alot, I am betting a good chunk of that was for localization alone.
So I guess from this info it was like Luigi's Mansion 3 where it was planned for Wii U but the system's early abandonment meant it got moved to Switch. That could also explain the 1 island per Switch approach, I remember @rjejr saying that Smash Wii U functioned the same (1 person unlocks something meant everyone on the console unlocks it).
Looks like the mythical Pikmin 4 is the main originally Wii U game unaccounted for.
@Grumblevolcano
Good point. I wonder which major switch titles were supposed to be WiiU games. We already know about botw but now you have me wondering about odessy.
I expect they were developing a WiiU title and then had to shift/redo a lot of work when that fell apart and Nintendo needed something for the Switch. I think that probably happened to a lot of titles!
Not surprised at all. I've always suspected that Happy Home Designer started out as a prototype for a new interior design interface, and Nintendo found it compelling enough in and of itself to turn it into a complete game.
But does New Horizons have overhead fixtures? I haven't seen any evidence of them yet, and it was one of my favorite features in Happy Home Designer.
now we just need to update the game so that the weather can be more realistic. just imagine the weather in the game being able to match the weather outside your very home as it happens in real time. that would be a nice optional feature.
@TYRANACLES
Isn't there 3rd one as well? Saying "..its' off the hook" or something.
Damn all this info about New Horizons is really twisting my arm to pull the trigger and get this game and dive into my first AC game.
That suggests it was considered for the Wii U at one point. Though I wonder what it took so long, maybe they will talk about it come GDC.
Is there as many fruits as before?
In other words, weird cult behaves weirdly.
@Finntendo
Could be, all I know is I haven’t seen any other fish or bug get that much attention yet.
I mean, it hasn't even been a full week yet, but I can't help but feel that, while we have a lot of cool new features, there are things from New Leaf that are absent that I felt were obvious things to retain. From what I can find, there is no swimming, no gyroids, less furniture, bugs and fish, no art for the museum, no mini-game collection, less amiibo support and no coffee shop. And I just find that... strange.
On the other hand, we have the huge crafting system, the island can be terraformed and we can choose where to build essentially everything. The game looks and sounds great, most items do have a load of detail to them, and the villagers are more alive than ever.
I really like the game, but I hope, I really strongly hope, that many of the omissions return in the free updates eventually.
And please correct me if I am wrong about the things I mentioned, if they are in the game somewhere!
@Luke937 They also knew that WII U would be dead very early. With that said.. everything is about timing and now the time has come
And during all that time they probably did not once consider a volume control so it would be possible to turn the sound effects down. They are way too frequent and way too loud.
Even Pocket Camp has volume options (sound effects on or off)
I was also waiting for a AC on WiiU.
There was the Animal Crossing Plaza, AC Amiibos and frequent teases.
Miiverse would have been so perfect for Animal Crossing!
@Heavyarms55
My guess is that features will be added as time go on.
This time Nintendo lets you discover the island one part at a time (first jumping rivers then building a ladder and eventually terraforming) and I assume as time goes on Nintendo will introduce new features like gyroids swiming, coffe and more.
To be fair there were some clues in Amiibo festival, mainly with the desert island escape, with being able to build tools, that also break after use, and looking for materials, food actually having a effect on the characters when they eat them
so far I think new horizons is the best game in the series
@Luke937 It is clear now that it was planned to be released on WiiU and of course the project was moved to Switch like Mario Odyssey.
Zelda BOTW was the last WiiU project released on WiiU because it was already annouce for it. Everything else its just going to Switch plus all the great games that came out have been ported already.
This just reflects how much potential the WiiU had but unfortunately failed miserably.
We wont get any ambassador from Nintendo at this time: WiU is dead already.
One of the things that annoys me the most its that im sure they removed many cool uses of the gamepad in BOTW so the switch version was the "Better version"
They didnt even leave the option to use the gamepad as a map/inventory (like in WW HD): that was really dirty and im still salty about that
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