Topic: What’s next for Animal Crossing?

Okay, so the masterpiece known as Animal Crossing New Horizons is about to turn four years old. Animal crossing players are getting bored of new horizons and yearn for new content. Animal Crossing Games are usuualllly released every four years, if you count Pocket Camp. So maybe we could expect a remake of maybe Wild World or City Folk in 2024, or even a successor to New Horizons and a Switch 2 launch title? If it is a successor, how could it possibly outdo new horizons? Open world next? And I think Nintendo now prioritizes animal crossing (second best selling game on the switch) and a lot of marketing for new horizons has been seen (Seattle Aquarium and Lego). let me know your thoughts

We won't see another AC for at least 4 years into the next-gen console, they'll take their time with it.

The final frontier

Space

I'd love a shadow drop of a sizable update for New Horizons, adding more interaction options and activities to participate, and blowing the doors off the 2024 Switch 2 speculation.

Time to go to the big city and expand on features introduced in Happy Home Paradise, such as making facilities. My only problem with that is Animal Crossing likes to be inspired by nature, so the next game being the opposite of New Horizons by taking place in a big, bustling city rather than something like a deserted island might complicate that.

No more breakable tools, giving the villagers more dialogue and personality, and not having villagers gripe at you for not speaking to them even for just a few days would be nice. There could still be DIY and customization, but it can be much better. Animal Crossing in its current state is just QOL unfriendly. The next game has got to be better.

Nintendo definitely won't take too long with the next game after New Horizons was a phenomenal success, and even on cultural and personal levels due to the pandemic. No way is there going to be anything like the eight-year gap between New Leaf and New Horizons!

I think the most obvious next step for the series is to have the ability to have shared online spaces. When New Horizons was at its peak in 2020 my sister, my niece and myself would visit each others towns. But that'd involve figuring out who was opening their gates, then you'd go to that town, walk around. Then you'd return and then maybe someone else opened their gate etc, etc. Also when you visited someone else's town? You had no stake in that town. I mean you could see what they'd done and interact but it wasn't a shared space

I think they could improve on that. Obviously keep the same setup with your town etc and with the ability to visit other people's towns. But additionally you'd have the ability to create a larger, shared space, a constantly online space. A space where anyone who is given access can interact with like it's their own town. None of the people involved with it have to be online for any of them to be able to visit it

I just want the game to go back to striking that balance between life sim gameplay and customization. New Horizons ruined that balance by giving the player too much control, and effectively getting rid of reasons for people like me to keep playing the game every day. Flowers no longer die, villagers no longer move out on their own. It feels like a hollow shell of a game, whilst it prioritizes customization.
If this is the future of the series, then I guess this series is no longer for me. Until I see with my own eyes that the next game will approach a more newleaf-like gameplay balance, I'm probably not going to feel any excitement for the game.

The problem is that Animal Crossing isn't really supposed to be a fully "Online" game. While each game always had online components after the DS, most of the game was still focused upon singleplayer play. I personally prefer playing the game on my own, so I never tend to touch the online functionality. I feel like if they focused on a shared "town" idea, the main game will be just as lacking in singleplayer content as New Horizons was, given that it would push decorating and customization over everything else. It would effectively turn the game into a multiplayer dollhouse sim.

Making the villagers have slightly more varied conversation and interactions would be nice in a new game. I'd also like even more physical island customization (at least in the 'late-game'). Having the possibility of multiple small islands with long bridges between would also be fun.

Oh, also make more decorations interactable. If you have a Ferris wheel you should be able to ride that Ferris wheel!

Also, we should be able to raid and murder other islands. 😀 Ok, maybe not. But it would be so satisfying to kill some of those npcs 😅 I doubt it would ever happen but an animal crossing spinoff in an extremely different genre would be super fun.

Honestly I'm not sure of good ideas for really big changes. ACNH was my first AC so I would be happy with some minor remixing and improvements.

@VoidofLight I think the suggestion for online was definitely not to be required to be online but to allow people to be online and more fluidly move between islands and effect things if they want to. Without the very limited visitor size caps and the tendency for the connection to crash and take 5 minutes to travel between islands. 😝 ACNH online was both very fun but also remarkably bad in certain ways. Improving that experience (imagine being able to just row a boat to your sister's island?) while keeping the game fully offline for those who want to sounds ideal.

@Wolfleaf New Leaf is a bit hard to go back to in terms of customization, but the life simulation stuff is way better. Villagers have the ability to move away on their own, flowers actually have a reason to be watered outside of just for breeding them. The golden tools actually have purpose, holidays are actually fun, and the shop has more than one upgrade to it. Bells have a ton of uses, to the point where it never felt like I had nothing to do with them. Where as in New Horizons, unless I want to buy furniture, I literally had nothing to do with my bells.. due to how easy it is to upgrade your home.

I also think an online/local co-op mode would be cool, like the minigames on Kappn’s Island in a past game. Maybe there will be a surprise update for new horizons with maybe an amiibo festival like DLC?

@FishyS @VoidofLight
Yeah, I was definitely going for more of an "in addition to". The online stuff in AC is kinda limited purely because you have to kinda organise to play together. If there was some way to create a shared online space I think that'd be huge. Not as a replacement for the core gameplay loop but as a secondary space you could also interact with

Maybe a job system, kinda like how Fantasy Life plays with the many different roles you could have. Perhaps work part-time at Nook's Cranny or the Able Sisters shop, or transport villagers in some way. Just a couple different ideas I had in mind.

I'd love to see furniture items have more interaction, rather than just being for decoration. There are things like a billiards table, but you can't do anything with it besides just leaving it out. Imagine if one of your villagers visits your house, and says, "oh, you got a billiards table, wanna play a round with me?" That would be cool, and it would build your relationships with villagers that much further. Same thing with the plaza rides that were added in New Horizons. It'd be charming to see your character go on rides like a merry-go-round and a train... doubly so with another villager!

@VoidofLight

Eh, a lot of these complaints are subjective. Flowers can die, but to a lot of people that just makes the game more frustrating and tedious (which is why there's a Beautiful Town Ordinance). I wouldn't say the holidays are any better or worse than New Horizons, they're very similar between games and at the end of the day they're just fetch quests with seasonal decorations. Bells have more uses, yes, for public work projects... which is basically outside furniture which is what you buy in New Horizons with more freedom in how it's customized and placed.

Other things I definitely agree with you on though. Villagers definitely need more autonomy and, more importantly, interesting dialogue options. If that means losing some freedom in how the town is laid out, that's fine too, unless there's a lengthy process you have to go through or a friendship level you have to reach with the villager to convince them to move their house. Also definitely agree with you on the shops needing more upgrades, and just the game needing more progression options in general.

I think @MarioLover92 has the right idea. Introduce more jobs you can work out throughout the town that in turn feeds into the development of your relationships with the villagers as well as the purchase/customization options you have at your disposal. Also definitely agree that items need to be more interactive, especially the bigger attraction set pieces.

@MonadoBoy the holidays were actually more complex in New Leaf. You had proper build-up to them, and had to actually learn more about your villagers in order to successfully execute things. Toy Day is a good example that I use most of the time to explain what I mean. In New Leaf, Toy Day has a build-up that lasts for an entire month. Within this month you have to learn what your villagers specifically want based off of hints. On the night of Toy Day, you have to actually use those hints in order to give them the gift they actually wanted.

New Horizons is just the same concept of Toy Day, where you give the villager's gifts to them.. but the issue lies in the fact that you don't actually have to do any work to learn what they actually want. Instead you just hand them a random gift, and its automatically what they asked for. There's no room for error, and no way to possibly fail.

The holidays aren't really the same each game. New Leaf shook them up a good bit, and then New Horizons basically just copied what they did with New Leaf, yet dumbed it down to a lesser degree. That's what most of the game does pretty much. Dumbs down the life sim aspect of AC in order to give the player a full feeling of control.

@VoidofLight Good points, it's been awhile since I've played New Leaf so I didn't remember the holidays being that involved. I do remember having to get a Santa Claus outfit for Toy Day and different masks for Halloween, so having that element of build-up is pretty nice.

I guess my main point was that New Horizons and New Leaf both definitely had exclusive shortcomings and advantages. I don't want to revert to New Leaf and lose flexibility in town decoration with even less quality of life features. At the same time, I want some of the stuff from New Leaf that didn't make it into Horizons, including the better multiplayer, marginally more independent villagers (which were already degraded in dialogue quality from the previous games), and a stronger/longer sense of progression in town development. Plus some new things as previously mentioned. New and old don't have to be mutually exclusive.

@MonadoBoy I mean, I like some of the stuff New Horizons did. The customization is great. I just wish there were more options for people who liked having flowers die or villagers moving out, along with a bunch more features that were cut. Maybe the next game will present more options or bring back cut features due to having a proper base to work on. After all, New Horizons was the first HD animal crossing title, and the special characters all have models of their own now.

@VoidofLight tbh if there was a setting to have flowers die I doubt many people would use it. 😆 Unless it came with some benefit also.

Different choices for villagers leaving would be great though... the way that villagers leaving is dealt with in ACNH just feels odd.

@FishyS I would use it. Just so I can have something that makes me want to play the game every day.

@VoidofLight The fact that the villagers get annoyed when you miss a day or two in ACNH is what made me want to play every day. As well as making sure not to miss npcs having exclusive items (like uncollected carpets or art). The villager thing is also what made me eventually quit.. If I was gone for a couple weeks it's so depressing to log back on and have them guilt trip you; it just doesn't seem like a game to play off-and-on. If I had missed some time and all my flowers had died I probably similarly would have quit. Actually the weeds growing everywhere is almost as bad.

As for flowers in ACNH though, trying to breed all the special types kept me watering them every day.

@FishyS Ehh. Wasn't the same for me really. Given the villagers couldn't move out and became more annoying, I just usually found myself avoiding them. They had nothing interesting to say, and I knew they weren't going to leave.. so why should I bother with talking to them?

What kept me playing in New Leaf is those busy-work chores that people tend to dislike. It felt like the game was like.. one of those little sandbox gardens that you put on your desk. You maintain it about every day or so, and it keeps you interacting with it. I know a ton of people find New Leaf or previous games "Stressful," because if you were gone for a while the game would slightly punish you for it, but I always found that to be a part of the game's charm. Villagers moving on their own, flowers dying. It felt like I actually mattered without making me outright the center of everything.

New Horizons effectively just feels like you get handed everything, and you don't really have any inconveniences. A big part of the reason why I can't build attachment to villagers in that game is mostly because I know that there's no point. I don't get on the game anymore, since I realized that nothing bad would happen if I didn't play. Nothing would really change. Sure, the town rating would go down due to weeds.. but weeds are a resource that you can use for crafting, so the aspect of what made them so daunting is now gone.

It may sound like I prefer the games holding me hostage, but I've gone a few months in the past without checking into things in previous entries, due to having other games to play. I always come back to my town, and even when I lost that one villager I liked or my flowers died- I end up rebuilding. End up embracing whatever new character moves in, only to form a rivalry with them because they end up being gross or moving into a spot I didn't want them to be. Losing flowers, only to end up reviving them, or getting new ones to replace them. I liked how the game would keep going without me, given that the whole charm of the series was that it was meant to be a secondary world. One which kept going even with the system off, and even when you weren't playing. It doesn't really feel like New Horizons has that effect anymore.