Topic: What’s next for Animal Crossing?

@FishyS I pretty much ended up dropping the game about a month after launch. I came back to check out each update, but it didn't grip me like the other games did. It just kept that soulless feeling, even before the first year was over. Sure, you had the holidays.. but those ended up being shallow and watered down in comparison to what they were the previous game. Characters like Gulliver and Whisp lost their luster after they constantly showed up on my island week after week. The bug off and fishing tournaments were fun in previous games, since you could actually do them on your own.. but New Horizons basically makes it impossible to win them without friends.

I'm not really big on collecting furniture or decorating. Most of my fun basically came from the progression system in the previous game, along with grinding for bells. New Horizons doesn't really have much to spend your bells on, other than either your house or buying furniture. The house upgrades are far fewer than they were in New Leaf, so it feels like I was able to upgrade far faster without doing much work for it.

I don't know if its any different for new players now, but back when I played the game the update model took a lot of wind out of my sails. It felt like instead of having this content at launch, and having proper progression systems for you to obtain that content, Nintendo basically just trickle-fed the content to you, and told you when you were able to actually have it. All the free updates were effectively just content that should've been in the game at launch, given it was in prior games at launch. Other than cooking and farming, not much was actually added to New Horizons outside of the customization aspect. It just hurt to play as apart of the demographic that NH doesn't cater towards. The half of the fanbase that basically valued the other aspects.

Waiting at least 4 years into a new platform is illogical. No mainline AC game (save the JP-only release on N64) took that long.
You're essentially saying the next Animal Crossing shouldn't launch until late 2028 or later. That's over 8 and a half years after New Horizons, breaking the record of nearly 7 years from New Leaf outside of Japan to New Horizons globally and over 7 years from New Leaf in Japan to New Horizons globally.
Nintendo needs to drive the install base of the next platform, and waiting a long time for a follow-up to one of the best-selling games of all-time doesn't seem like good business sense. It doesn't need to be rushed, but there's no point in putting it off.
March 2025-March 2027 is the best window to release the next mainline Animal Crossing to capitalize on NH fans and longtime fans while bringing in new players.
As for where the series goes next.
-Shared online spaces like a city or islands that aren't player islands.
-Bring back the 15-villager limit from the original game, or maybe even up it to something like 16. 20 or more villagers as a limit seems unyielding, but 10 is small.
-Job system (the first game had a very basic version of this)
-Bring back some of the spicy nature of the villagers. They're very friendly in New Leaf and New Horizons, and I would like some shade in their personalities to return.
-Biome player islands. Most people will just go with temperate that has four distinct seasons, but choosing a single biome from a selection, or even multiple biomes in a single island would be so cool.

I personally just want to see longer support. If there is a poster child for a live service game...AC is it. New Horizons was the first AC I actually played (I own the whole series) and I really enjoyed it but once support died... I kinda walked. Even though I still have tons to unlock.

@Ryu_Niiyama No. Please no. The update model for New Horizons absolutely killed my interest in the game. They literally cut content and trickled it back to the player. If they do this again, I’m seriously not getting the next game in the series. It was god awful.

@VoidofLight ok, I just stated what I personally would like to see. That’s all.

While I'd always wholeheartedly prefer a game to be released in a 'Complete' state, I could live with them rolling out certain updates like additional items, HHD, new events and activities, there are fundamentals that just need to be there Day 1 so that the player knows it's worth sticking around for, forging relationships with your NPCs etc. and for me it comes down to the interaction with NPCs - I want to be able to ask them more than just "What's the latest?" or "Have you lost this?". Conversations are far too one-way and one dimensional.

I wanna be able to invite NPCs over for food, hold multi-character conversations, ask them what they think about food/clothing/decor etc. I like New Horizons for what it is, but the lack of progress in the relationships with the NPCs was really disheartening.

@gcunit I just want more progression systems effectively. New Leaf had a ton of stuff to do at launch, whilst New Horizons still misses the mark on progression. I think if the next game has a lot of content on the level of New Leaf and does updates of brand new content that hasn't been in the series before, I could get behind that. Just please have things like the complete museum, all the shop upgrades, diving, the dream suite, and gyroids/the roost in base game.

@skywake I had the same idea!! Wouldn't it be awesome to be able to start an island with your friends and you could go online whenever you wanted and do stuff?
Also I think a good idea would still have the ability to start your own traditional island/town for the "offline mode" or "traditional mode" or smth and to also keep the ability to visit other peoples islands like in ACNH, but to add this new feature you can have 2 islands, 1 with your friends and one like normal.
Just spitballing here but I think that it would be awesome to be able to share a island with someone else.

Hope you don't mind me dragging your quote in here to avoid off-topicing the Direct thread.

In the GameCube original, inside buildings you can slightly shift the camera angle to the left and right. On the 3DS, you can shift the camera right around 360 degrees, in 60 degrees steps or similar. On the Switch, you can freely rotate the camera. In doing so, the Switch version lets you view every angle of every item in a building, making rooms and items feel that much more real. In a good way.

Or do you feel that the Gamecube version does it better because it has more charm that way? And if the limited indoor camera movements on the Gamecube were more charming, why did the devs give us a free camera on Switch?

@gcunit The camera inside the house is different from the camera outside. It makes sense to have the camera inside the home be free-roam, given that its a far more confined space, and furniture in this series is rendered from all angles. You need to see what you're doing when you decorate, thus the camera got improvements later down the road for indoor spaces. Outdoor spaces don't really require a free-roam camera given that there's no wall objects having to be hung up. Not to mention as well, the rendering technique outdoors is far different from the one indoors. You could say "Well, the games just can get rid of that rendering technique," but the graphics would be a bit lesser as a result.

I would expect a Animal Crossing Open World game that would be the next phase it goes.

How would that work given the entire premise of animal cross is centered on islands? I suppose you could row a boat directly to a resource island but I don't think anyone wants to row for 30 minutes in-game. 😆

@SwitchForce Open World animal crossing cannot work. It would kill the series’ idetity.

If you don't give the character a boat you could make it open world by letting people swim for miles and miles in any direction until they finally drown or get eaten by a shark. 😝

@FishyS First M-Rated Switch 2 game!

You know what I want again? DJ K.K. and his NES style music.

I really hope they bring back amiibo for the next entry, including the features/functionalities of the amiibo figures and Welcome amiibo cards from the New Leaf Welcome amiibo update. I loved being able to summon all the different RVs and get so many cool items as well as the special amiibo villagers like Wolf Link, Inkwell, Felyne, etc. I really miss the Panel de Pon/Puzzle League and Desert Island Escape mini games, too, and the tropical island mini games!

I started the series with New Leaf and have gone back and played the earlier entries as well. But New Horizons was the one that really hooked me for some reason. I've played every day since launch except for maybe 3-4 days. It's the game I've continued playing the longest by far, and I absolutely love it. Having said that, in some ways, I think New Horizons is a bit of a "throwaway" game. It seems like Nintendo really struggled with development and had to cut a lot of content especially at launch. I know Nintendo struggled with HD development during the Wii U era. Here's hoping they have a solid base with New Horizons and can build on it for the next game so we don't have a repeat. I'd love to see the shops and facilities from past games return including the shop upgrades for Timmy and Tommy's shop, the Happy Home Showcase, the Post Office, the Police Station, etc. I wouldn't mind periodic updates as long as we get all of the facilities, shop/facility upgrades, etc. included at launch.

Make it The Sims + Dragon Quest Builders style.

For what it's worth I agree with what @VoidofLight is saying RE: camera perspective. But at the same time there have been plenty of times where I've believed something was a "core" part of a series' identity only for the developer to upend the tea-table, do something dramatically different and nail it

For example I remember before Pokemon moved away from sprites arguing that removing the sprites would ruin the charm. In hindsight maybe it did to a degree but it was a change for the better. Or before the Mario Kart 8 DLC arguing that Mario Kart was Mario Kart when people asked for tracks/characters from other franchises. Then they made F-Zero, Zelda, Animal Crossing tracks and.... it was great

So we could well be wrong about the fixed camera angle

Oh, and we will most definitely get an "ssd"

The graphics being a bit lesser as a result of expanded rendering is pretty much what my original point was - a more powerful hardware platform grants the extra resources to do that. You explaining about the resource implications was just telling me what I was already well aware of.

It's exactly why the camera is much freer inside buildings now - Switch is more powerful than GameCube, and notice how New Horizons still manages to be better looking than OG despite the increased rendering demands...? Somehow they managed to increase the rendering requirements and improve the visuals... at the same time... 🤯

How much prettier does Animal Crossing need to get? It doesn't really. So the balance of expenditure of the new performance power on Switch 2 should shift more towards expanding the rendering requirements at the expense of graphical refinement.

The slow pacing and chilled vibe means dramatic, sophisticated vfx and lighting are not required.

But it is such a basic limitation of the Animal Crossing games that you can't see what you're doing behind a tree or building. You can say that was charming for the first few iterations, but longer-term it's just outdated environmental game design. It is time to give players a backdoor, a backyard, and an optional first-person camera for roaming.

Any teensy loss in what you sweetly perceive as charm will be more than made up for in the expansion of access to areas behind objects and 360 vistas of your island/town/village.

And on the subject of open-world Animal Crossing... it pretty much already is. It's just a small world, and if you're playing offline you don't get to choose which town/island you visit.

But imagine they do expand the open world nature of it. They could give us a minivan, RV, boat, that you can actually move about on and customise during your journey to the next stop. I'm not eclectic this sort of change any time soon, but the resistance to change I'm seeing in this thread blows my mind.