Topic: Animal Crossing: New Horizons

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@Cosmofantasmo So I've spent some time playing with my villagers like you suggested (ohh la la!), and I've come to the conclusion that some of what you said does hold water, but ultimately it's still a sloppy, lazy, half-baked part of the game that blows chainshot through the sails of the prior games. The pool of available text is very shallow, and each character repeats themselves often. Worse, attempting to get interesting dialogue involves abusively badgering them no matter how many times they passive-aggressively point out that they keep running into you today.

How you doin?
"the weather's nice!"
How you doin?
"you hit a lot of rocks yesterday"
How you doin?
"Wearing that aloha shirt makes you fash!"
How you doin?
"you hit a lot of rocks yesterday"
How you doin?
"That aloha shirt makes me think of getting stuff done!"
How you doin?
"So the other day I had this dream about dinosaurs..."

And you do this to every animal every day. If you catch them doing different things (talking to someone else, fishing versus standing) etc, badgering a few more times might get a new dialog. If I see animals in my stores, they recycle the same 3 or 4 lines.

Worse, with 10 villagers, you're likely to get 2 or 3 of the same personality. I agree with you that there are subtle variations between each of their personalities that makes them feel slightly unique. But the sheer amount of copy paste lines from each other breaks the illusion and feels like a menu driven text game from the 80s. Of all resources to add to the game, unvoiced text is the cheapest, even with localization costs. And they went bare minimum in this entry. At a minimum, each character should have had their own dialogue tree, even if they have minimal unique lines within their tree. As-is you have a thin dialogue tree, mostly copied among 1/6 the cast.

I didn't find gifting them made significant differences in interaction. Some will run up to me with wanting to give me an item or settling a dispute (always over snacks...) with someone else. But it's always the same event or having a few word swaps, with one of the same few lines of text.

The little dialog and personality that's there is enjoyable....the first 4 times you see it. I love my villagers, technically. But they're not as quirky as they were. And SNES RPGs had deeper dialogue trees 30 years ago.

@status-204 I'm curious what you're actually finding to do at this point - even to build? I spent some time building. I built my paved plaza entry, lined in shrubs and fountains. I built a 2 tier waterfall on the cliffs starting with a fountain and falls, splitting to streams that split to 6 small falls into a pool with an overlook. I paved and lit my "market district" (2 stores....) a little beach lounge and campfire. I planted palms around the coast. That all took a week or two max. It's not an urbanized heavily built island, but it's the island that I can really build with what's available in a way that isn't just building for the sake of building. I haven't needed terraforming other than the falls and changing a few edges to fit ramps, etc. There's nothing I'd really change about what I have there, and nothing compelling to build elsewhere in the large forested areas that would otherwise not uglify the nature, and without more stores, there's nothing to build "around".

One thing I realized that leads to the "empty island effect" is the "one island per Switch" design choice. The island is "too big for what's available" (or vice versa, what's available has been restricted thus making much of the island excess) because they needed to allocate enough island space to fit a house for all users of a Switch. That would be up to an additional 8, I believe, houses, taking up island space just to accommodate all possible accounts on the console. Unused space with nothing interesting to do with it if you're not playing with a house full of users. (and arguably wasted space if you are, as well )

I built the 3 additional rooms on the house. No attic or basement yet. And all the small size rooms. But at a 750,000 bell price tag after that last one, I'm not finding much incentive to just forcibly grind the rest for the sake of doing so. In older games it at least moved toward unlocking more shop upgrades/Gracie, etc so there was incentive compelling me to update it beyond just getting more space to decorate which, while a great addition, being able/required to decorate the outdoors removes a lot of incentive to want to expand indoors. If it were cheaper, I'd be thrilled to try it, but it would take 15 days of daily tasks to get to the next upgrade. But then the one after that is probably a million? Then more after that? That means 20 days of daily grinding for an average of 50k per day (or a lot of idle fishing) to get that next upgrade which only allows placing....more furniture, which is really all there is to do outside already.

And I have yet to see turnip lady once, because I have never played on a Sunday morning....I mostly see my town at night, and only at night. Not that I fared well in the stalk market in past games, so I usually avoid it anyway

Between the copy/paste characters, and the streamlining of most "places" and "stores" into menus and random events, if you're not building a project, or farming a particular stash of funds/resources....there's decisively little reason to engage with your town. You hit your rocks, plant your money tree, sell your fossils and you're done. In and out in 20 minutes. Not much else to do or interact with. It's not about a lack of "goals" but a lack of activities. KK's fun, but even in the old games that wears off after a few weeks.

To keep playing, you have to have something to engage with. To do that I presume you have to be building something....but what on earth can you actually build if you're limited to dropping furniture from what seems like a very finite list, and an inability to build actual structures? I keep trying to see what people are able to spend so much time on....and keep failing. Heck, some folks here have spent more time on this game than I've spent on pretty much any game ever. I just go in, get my rocks and fossils, yep, everything's here still...aaaand done. I want to find a reason to engage with it more....it's a charming world....but a charmingly empty world. I'll keep poking in for seasonal stuff and rocks, but at this point, I can't even see finishing up the house. It's grinding just for the sake of grinding. I'll probably do one more expansion, maybe two. And grinding is so. Much. Slower. than catching stags in Tortimer. I had finally started gaming some of the stags I do have...then summer stopped and there's few if any beetles on trees anymore.

@Anti-Matter "Time Travel 😁
That's my main activity on ACNH."

LOL, that summarizes what's wrong, I think. The game should be giving you a lot more activities than changing your console's system date just to have something to do in the game

I haven't time traveled yet. I'm still afraid of messing with the cloud saves on my other games...and backing out and changing the date all the time doesn't sound terribly fun either. "Cheating" is the wrong word - it's not cheating. Cheating requires having a goal, and bypassing the systems designed to make achieving it a challenge. You can't cheat in AC. It's not possible. It doesn't have actual goals, or structured challenge to achieve them. Time travel reveals the actual problem: There's little to actually do in the game, and the only way to provide something to do is to keep changing the date to bypass the 23h of nothing to get to the 1h of something That's cool that you and others found a way find fun in the game mostly by bypassing most of the game...maybe I'd feel more engaged with it if I tried that. But...it still feels like it also misses the point of what should be making the game a joy.

I am grateful that villagers don't leave though. After the next few weeks I will probably only boot up the game around holidays or seasonal changes to see what's there. And it was always depressing when villagers left as a result!

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@Anti-Matter Yeah, I mean, I know you actually didn't like the old games, so this game being very different makes it more appealing to you specifically because it's a very different game. But I still think this game should have been a spinoff, like HHA was, and therefore tilted even harder into being a building sim. That would have made a better building sim in the AC universe for you that you didn't feel you had too time travel just to build the way you want, and would have not stomped on the life-sim main series that some of us liked as it has. Instead they made it kind of half-way in both camps, not wanting to make two games, but awkwardly trying to combine what should have been two. Instead of getting a new AC life sim with "dialog 101" that we wanted, and a complex building sim game set in the AC world that you wanted, we get this kind of "half way" game where we get some of the charm, but not the dialog and environments we want in an AC game, and you don't get the normal paced, full freedom building game you want, so you end up having to time travel to work around the life sim stuff you don't want in your building game, and we try to invent life sim activities that aren't there in a building game.

You're actually in the same camp as us in terms of having strong criticisms of the game. It may seem like we all disagree, but we're actually all in agreement on this! What you said about time travel being necessary and that you don't have time to sit around and wait and all to play without time travel, you're kind of saying exactly what we're saying about what went wrong with the genre-mashup. You having to work around it by literally modifying the game's state just to get the game that plays the way it ought to. For us it's not the AC life sim it should be, for you it's not the town building sim it should be. We're all kind of trying to make-shift the game we think it should be and working around what we actually got.

Your time travel works better to get a good builder than our "imagining stores and conversations that don't exist" does to get a good sim though

@Xyphon22 Yeah, I don't get how the game seems to reward endless clutter. It's supposed to be an island. My "clutter" is just endless treed areas....I don't put a bunch of furniture and stuff out, just carefully placed items. I think my 2D top-down town design ideas are too influenced by old Square RPGs to be what NH wants.

@status-204 I'm not even sure what the target demographic changed from and to. I'd commented in the article yesterday about the demographic data reported by Nintendo (mostly 20-30 demographic) and Nintendo seemingly making excuses for it not being loaded with kids, that it seems like their intended demo is children for this series, and they seem almost put out that it's mostly adults playing. I was curious what the data was for other ACs, such as NL, that also released in Spring, up to the point before its first Christmas (which is what Ninty is pointing to as the cause of the lack of kids playing this one - no Christmas yet.) They talked about the need to keep changing games to keep up "with the times." etc.

So it almost seems like reality and expectations are colliding with unintended results in unintended ways. On one hand, from Nintendo's perspective, it seems like this is a game for kids, in a series for kids, which suggests they changed it to a Minecraft type game because "that's what all the kids are into these days." Yet in reality, kids seem almost instantly bored to tears with the game, and it's the 20s & 30s demo that's actually getting obsessed with the game. I don't think we can tell how much of that is "the demographic changed" versus "the social media fueled pandemic following lead tons of people who otherwise wouldn't play into playing and the game utterly failed with the actual target demographic." We'd have to see the post-Cristmas demographic play data, which I doubt they'll share, but it would be burred in the AGM transcript if they did.

That's a little dangerous for the series if it's the latter, because it's reminiscent of the Wii (and to a degree DS) phenomenon, that it's great for the bank at first, but eventually leads to a WiiU type conundrum of trying to please two demographics at once - one that's gone and not coming back, and one that wants something different than what's on offer, and lends itself to offering the wrong product, that fails, next time. And they're already basing their future on the sales of this game. Good for us - dropping mobile expansion and focusing on console - but also taking some lessons from tremendous sales of a game that might end up stranded with no solid demographic of its own, and trying to apply that thinking as a "new fad." The pandemic buyers will be gone next time just like the Wii fitness fans. The kids don't seem too interested with this format despite the Minecraftification seemingly being tailored for them. The long time series fans are put out. I don't know that we know what the new demographic is, and it seems like Nintendo doesn't either. Or if it's largely a temporary demographic of severely bored people doing whatever trends on twitter. It's a single franchise replaying the rise and fall of the Wii. It should be called Animal Wii-ing. Wait....

I do agree though, the real pain isn't what they added, I was one of the people calling for them to add some of this stuff after NL (even NL burns itself out at a certain point, and I thought for sure resource gathering, crafting, outdoor decorating, etc would fix that!) but it's what they removed and streamlined. At first I thought they didn't understand what made AC AC. Accidental prior success. That may be true, but after I remembered it was delayed for 4 months it seems more a case of they struggled with implementing stuff, probably terraforming, and ended up having to cut a lot to release product on time.

I think outdoor decorating is great, but I think terraforming, personally we could and should have done without. Bridges, ramps, etc all make sense (and existed in NL, at least bridges.) And to a degree terraforming helps fit those features in where you need/want them. But I think the idea of reshaping the physical island is problematic in three areas. First it's primitive. If we're doing terraforming, we should be able to terraform and really shape complex elevations and angles. 2 levels + water isn't very useful. Second, it's clear it really messes with their ability to implement other game features. It becomes terraforming vs. everything else. This is a technical problem. If you can move the ground at any place or any time, it's impossible for them to have meaningful NPC behaviors, or a variety of structures, because it all has to be makeshift by definition. And the third is the way it breaks the role of the player. Living in your island ended. Presiding over your island was a good way of having control without breaking village life. Even as a building/decorating sim there's a difference between having free-reign of building plans versus literally reshaping the universe on a whim. It creates a sense of player agency that changes the player's relationship to the world around them in a way that breaks the illusion of the world. In that regard, terraforming, not crafting, is the feature that broke the "AC" part of it. And oddly I haven't really found a use for the feature. Part of that is just my play style I suppose, I don't see a need to reshape the universe, I'd rather work within the land as-is. But I've only changed some cliff edges for ramps and built that waterfall. The rest is the land as it existed before time.

People point to Stardew Valley (which apparently has drawn kids more easily than this as well.) But the problem with most indies is they lack scope. Stardew is kinda fugly (and more a Harvest Moon game.) Indies don't have the budget or scope to do "all the little things" Nintendo does. Twirling your umbrella if it's raining and the water splashing off. Sandals have different sounds than shoes. If you put a fan next to a balloon, the balloon blows in the wind. Nintendo gets all these little details that, especially in AC mean everything. No indie can duplicate that. Nintendo still got those things right in this game, but they missed the core tentpoles of the gameplay experience while chasing new ones, that somehow appear to have reeled in an unintended audience, and not hooked the intended on. (Fishing puns...see what I did there? Still more dialogue than the game... )