Topic: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

Dude... this seriously is not ok. @NEStalgia is long time highly respected community member who posts his personal opinion without disrespecting anyone else, and you react like this? That is seriously disturbing.

@MarioLover92
I will send you 20 rusty parts via Dodo Mails.
1 letter will consist 10 rusty parts.

Edit: Dang it!
Rusty parts cannot be sent by mail.
I have to go to your island to drop the 20 rusty parts.

@Anti-Matter That's good enough, thank you! Any way I can repay you?

@MarioLover92
Please open your gate.
Rusty parts cannot be sent by mail.
I will bring 20 rusty parts.

@MarioLover92
Thanks for inviting me. 😀
I need Blue Pink public bench, Red Surfing board, colorful playground gym and silver snack machine.
Happy crafting with materials i given to you.

@Anti-Matter Yeah no problem! I'll try to order those things next time I play. I can't order the colorful playground gym unfortunately, that's not on my Nook Miles catalog. Only the white one's available there.

Thanks for the goods and stay healthy. Don't let that virus get you!

@MarioLover92
Oh, you have White Playground gym?
I want that thing. 😀

@Anti-Matter Sure I'll order you that as well. Take care

@Anti-Matter I mean, I'm coming into this game as a big AC fan, same as you. I've been looking forward to "the next AC" for years! But I'm finding it disappointing in terms of a lack of the kinds of content available. Main Street was the highlight of ACNL - I loved the shop district and looking forward to getting more shops and upgrades to shops, etc. And the island getaway to Toritmer Island broke up the grind a little by taking you to a different locale. There was a long term set of upgrades to work toward and look forward to.

So far, it was one set path of one store upgrade, building the 8 houses, 2 total stores, and building all the rooms in the house....and nothing else? That's really disappointing. There's no actual world that unfolds in this game unlike prior ones.

I know you're really big into the sandbox designer thing, but I'm not. It feels less like AC, and more like Minecraft. I disagree that prior AC was also about sandbox decorating. It did let you do that, and I wholly agree that this game gives you a better decorating experience if you're really deep into the decorating. But it strips out most of actual Animal Crossing and instead provides an Animal Crossing themed Minecraft game. Decorating is always part of AC, but the real experience of AC is just "living in the world/town" and participating in its little world - this one doesn't have much of a world/town to live in. The town just exists as a facade over a design sim and feels really shallow unless, like you, you're extremely into designing. But AC has never really been primarily a design sim. It's kind of its own genre.

Contrast it to ACNL and see how much is missing and how empty this feels of everything except crafting/decorating:
ACNL:
-Re-Tail
-Town Hall
-5 different levels of Timmy's store, 2 of which were divided into 2 stores (Garden Shop, Gracies)
-Nooks Homes
-HHA
-Museum Shop
-Shampoodle
-Able Sisters
-Kicks
-Fortune Teller
-Dream Suite
-The Roost

ACNH:
-2 levels of Timmy's store
-Town Hall & Nooks Homes combined as one
-Able Sisters
-HHA and Dream Suite are replaced by built-in features of your own bed and mailbox and are not stores to visit.
...............
That's it.....

I'm not trolling - I'm legitimately disappointed that most of what makes Animal Crossing isn't even in this game called Animal Crossing. If you're not big into crafting, I'm already done the game and barely played it. I'll keep grinding my fossils/money trees for 20 min a day or so to finish expanding the house, and then there's really not much left to do.... I'm not into grinding 200,000 bells just to replace my log bridge with a zen bridge. That's not really the meat of what made AC so delightful before.

I'm also surprised the game is SO popular considering it's devoid of a lot of AC and is mostly a "new digital legos game set in the AC universe". That's not the game I thought I was buying. I keep feeling like I must have missed something and the rest of the game is just eluding me...but no....it really is only digital legos?

And the one thing I probably would spend some time doing the sandbox design thing on is making my market district..........except there isn't one, it's just 2 stores. I crammed all 10 houses into a little tenement ghetto in the back of my island on a thin strip of land and shoved the 2 stores on the coast to make sure I had room for all the buildings I'd end up needing to locate, only to find out...that was it....that was every building in the game.....and all I can do now is move them around and landscape around them?

I'm pretty much turning the entire island into a dense hardwood forest. I just plant my money tree every day and leave it there....it's not like I'm using the land for anything else!

I was looking forward to the next AC, and it looks like it still hasn't arrived.

@toiletduck @status-204 Thanks!

@NEStalgia
I honestly do not like the old Animal Crossing from Gamecube, Wild World and City Folk.
They were too primitive for me.
No outdoor decorating as ACNL and ACNH.
Their body proportion were looks weird, too short for Chibi proportion.
Villagers still moving out without my acknowledge when i going hiatus.

Honestly, when the first time i saw ACNH was like ACNL in term of graphics similarity , i was quite disappointed.
I was expecting ACNH was much like Dragon Quest Builders 2, Full 3D, 1st person and 3rd person mode, crafting, terraforming like DQB2, etc.
But i got ACNH with similar looking like ACNL.
I still wasn't really sold with ACNH until i saw Terraforming. Instantly sold for me.
I bought ACNH late but as i watched ACNH gameplay videos, it built my hype slowly until i saw recreation videos from other tv series or movies by using ACNH characters / villagers, it boosted my hype even more.

Maybe the concept of ACNH being crafty like Minecraft disappointed you, but it boosted my hype as i have played Portal Knights, The Sims games and Dragon Quest Builders 2.
At least ACNH is not HHD.

@status-204 Exactly, that's just it, I think. Prior AC felt like there was a living little town going on where everyone had their own little lives and you would stroll around, go to the shops, encounter the people doing their thing. Crafting is a cool addition but there was something about just "living" in the world...not producing it, but buying, selling, trading, just co-existing in that world with the animals that somehow sounds boring but was also exciting, in part because it would evolve on its own a little.

ACNH is more of a god-sim....the world is yours to shape as you see fit, and your denizens are playthings to move around for your grand design, and seem like little more than tools and placeholders you work around rather than exist with. They don't seem as interesting in personality, and the town itself doesn't have much of a role as its own character, becauase, largely, it just exists as raw material to shape. It's all simpler. Less, "place" to it, more consolidation and minimalization. Prior games had a town, with what seemed like a life you'd want to live. This game has a town hall and 2 stores with 10 houses . It all feels so....empty? Lifeless? Like, if the town had no animals at all, and just menus to buy and sell....would it even be much different? Largely, the market district/main street was the "town" itself, and it's been removed. Where's my old animal town, and why can that not coexist with outdoor decorating?

The idea of building it out in future patches seems lackluster as well. If there was nothing in the town now but they add it 6 months from now....it doesn't fit any natural progression of the game. It seems like either an unfinished product or like you're part of the social marketing engine and would be better buying the game near the EOL of switch so you could get a complete game that unfolds naturally. I don't know who that strategy is supposed to benefit other than their monthly sales charts.

Good to hear that it's not just rose tinted glasses with ACNL. I had considered that it might be. I adored that game! Which makes it twice as disappointing this time.

I really went into this one with a lot of caveats starting with the breakable tools. But I started having fun with it once I started building everything to get ready for KK. I started seeing the charm, and arranged the whole island with plenty of room for more interesting venues, only to suddenly get to there being nothing left to really do....just endless landscaping in a fairly lifeless town.

I never thought I'd say this but I'm hoping for some DLC.....because this is half a game. And I hate paid DLC.....

@Anti-Matter I certainly agree outdoor decorating is a great new feature. And I agree that I don't like how villagers used to leave and basically enslave you to have to play the game to not lose them....that's all better. I don't mind the old aesthetics. Certainly this one looks better.

But you're right, the concept of it being like Minecraft is a massive disappointment to me. Now, I hate Minecraft. Well I don't hate it, but I don't "get it" - it's not really fun, it's also just a big empty canvas. I love DQB1 and DQB2 however. But that said, AC is AC, not DQB. I love AC, I love DQB, but I don't want AC to be DQB. I want AC to be AC.

This AC is really neither. It stripped out most of AC, but didn't add a lot of what makes DQB great either. It's more Minecraft than anything. But even there, a very simplified Minecraft mixed with some HHD (but agreed, not as terrible as HHD!)

With the exception of DQB, I don't like "empty sandboxes" - they feel like shells of games that they forgot to actually put a game into and expect you to make your own. AC has never been an "empty sandbox" but its own unique type of game that you kind of live this simple pseudo life in this kind of laid back town as a participant. And that's what disappoints me here. They basically changed the genre. It's not an AC genre game anymore, they removed most of that. Its a Minecraft type empty sandbox game but with an AC theme and characters. But only shells of them.

In a lot of ways I think of this more as an AC spinoff, like HHD, than an actual AC game. But the kicker is I know that means I'm never going to get an actual AC game again, probably.

@status-204 Yeah, it's extremely depressing. And for all the wrong reasons. I don't think this AC sold so well because it's such an amazing game that appealed to everyone that much more than prior AC games. I think it was the social media effect during lockdowns when "everybody else wanted to do whatever everyone else was doing" and determined what everyone else was doing by looking at social media. So everyone bought it because everyone else appeared to have bought it, and it fit. That boosted sales artificially and sends the wrong message to the AC devs that this is the ultimate form of the game. It's not that sales wouldn't be fantastic either way, but not this overwhelmingly exceptional sales pattern without proper criticism. To me, this probably means ACNL is the last real AC, and I will probably not buy an AC game ever again. I loved the genre it was before. I've never liked the genre of what it has become. In any form, be it Minecraft, or GTAV Online. It's crushing when a beloved series is discarded and replaced with a whole new genre (and they didn't bother to tell you...)

I agree about BOTW in that regard, and was thinking the same thing (and to a point I think this new AC is the result of that - take what worked for BOTW and make it AC too!) OTOH, I think BoTW represented, primarily, a return to roots. So the oldest Zelda players like myself found it right at home - a re-imagining of how it all began, while newer players that started with OOT or TP found it jarring and the end of the series they knew. AC, though, this isn't a return to roots but a complete departure from them. Like they decided to add on to HHD instead of AC main-line..

I have 3 accounts on my Switch. The avatar on each of them, are Tom Nook, the Nooklings, and KK Slider. So for me to go from being that big a fan of the series to thoroughly disappointed....that's a sad, sad day.

@Anti-Matter I just gifted you the red surfing board. I placed orders for the public bench, snack machine, and white playground gym. I'll start mailing them to you tomorrow. Glad we could help each other out.

@MarioLover92
Thanks. 😀
I will check my ACNH later after working time.

@Anti-Matter You're totally welcome! Have a good one and stay safe.

@FattyWhale_42 I promise that once I get his baby boy of mine on some sort of schedule, I will join you to try your board game! My times on the game are so sporadic and I need to be able to hop off at a moments notice. ):
Are you able to mail me fruit cardboard boxes for cherries and peaches? I thought I cataloged them but then remembered I haven't been back to catalog on your island since you got it all completed!!!! 😳

@NEStalgia

Never played NewLeaf but I heard it had updates too and not all the features you mentioned where right there from the start. The idea that this should be different right now and everything from the last game should be in the new seems illusory to me. If anything everybody should be full of hope for the future because Nintendo said they will support the game and the updates come in a good frequency. Maybe store upgrades and new buildings will fill your island in the near future.
Not least you mention the effect of the pandemic for the sales but not for the playing time. Almost everybody is further in the game then they would be without the lockdown and with the constant updates you wouldn’t have reached a point without something to do.
So I understand your points but not your overall negativity.

@Cosmofantasmo new Leaf had one update a few years after it released and everything he mentioned was in it from the very beginning.

@status-204
Alright, my bad. I mean I get it that the list from ACNL is obviously longer. But isn’t it still valid to say that it’s maybe worth to wait for the return of these things before someone says something radical like it’s not the same series anymore and he will never buy another AC game.
There can be various reasons for not having every feature from the beginning starting with timelines for game production and not ending with the friendliness for newcomers of whom there are plenty I guess.

@foxyflimflam No worries! I totally get it. (>^_^)>

Also, 2 cardboard boxes headed your way. xD