Topic: What’s next for Animal Crossing?

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 You can say that was charming for the first few iterations, but longer-term it's just outdated environmental game design.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.

My view on the series seems to be different than the direction it's actually heading in - don't do multiplayer, don't care for the social media-worthy designs.
I'd love it if the series went back to something more organic. Ditch the grid based areas or find a way to make it look more natural. Maybe it has hard, 90 degree angle cliffs but they erode and look better over time? We can get ramps back, etc. I thought the Main Street in New Leaf was a great concept and was sad to see it go.

Maybe we could have multiple options for Main Street layouts - one like New Leaf, one like the City from the Wii, and a few others to cover themes like cute, rustic, etc. That way we could develop that separately. If we don't want a hundred shops in town we could have it there, if not there's space for parks/gardens.

Visually I'm quite happy with the new horizons, if they want to keep this style and recycle furniture/clothes that would be fine. But they would need to make more and bring back all of the old furniture series.
I don't know! There's too many options, none will probably happen

The next entry in the series should take all the past games ideas and put them all together to make a big animal crossing world.

Be the mayor of a town! Live your tropical life out on an island! Move to the city and live in an apartment complex!

The player could live wherever they want to without restrictions (including an isolated home) , and with online play, the mayor of a city could see other player villagers roaming around the place in real time!

Jobs could also be a big focus in animal crossing with the player being a farmer, dog walker, or home decorator if they wanted (aka: happy home paradise).

Adding more real life elements like being able to always move out or have some villagers dislike you could be great for the series.

Yeah, if the game goes full 3D or fully open world, I’m done. The series is already on its last legs for me with New Horizons, and if they push it further away from the original identity, I don’t think I’ll like it anymore.

Animal Crossing is become better when going full 3D Open World / Free Roaming style + closer to The Sims style.
We don't need the antics from GameCube version anymore.
We don't need limitations, the villager moving out by themselves, forced to play everyday.
That's not a charm, that's a torture.
If you still want to torture yourself with that antics, play the GameCube version but I want the next Animal Crossing give me freedom to not play the game as long as I want and I still keep everything when I return.