Update (Thu 30th Jul, 2020 09:45 BST): In a slightly surprising turn of events, today's Version 1.4.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons has added a workaround for the camera trick Nintendo originally patched out.
Previously, we reported on a glitch of sorts that allowed users to temporarily remove the game's UI, creating the opportunity for cinematic screenshots and videos to be taken. Nintendo removed that glitch, upsetting a number of creative fans, but you can now achieve the same results by using an approved in-game command.
Simply head to the NookPhone Camera app and press in the R Stick. Problem solved!
Original Article (Wed 8th Jul, 2020 13:00 BST): Last Friday, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was updated to Version 1.3.0, adding a number of new features including the ability to swim and dive. The new content has naturally served as a breath of fresh air for anyone starting to feel a little stuck in their daily routine, but players have noticed that the update has also added some unfavourable tweaks.
As spotted by Polygon, players have taken to social media to express their frustration and upset over the removal of a cool little camera trick. Before the patch, players had found a way to remove the game's HUD while taking videos - you'd have to hover over the camera app and press the + and A buttons in a certain way.
Essentially, this meant that players could create epic, cinematic videos in-game without all of the usual menu graphics layered on top. It's likely how amazing fan-made videos like the Animal Crossing horror movie trailer and the Parks and Recreation scene were created, and the short video below shows how the game looks after using the trick.
Beautifully clean-looking, isn't it?
But that's all gone now, and content creators are particularly upset. The video trick has enabled YouTubers and Twitch streamers to create all sorts of amazing footage over the past few months, and Polygon reports that some creators are actually making sure to avoid downloading the latest update to keep the glitch intact.
As it happens, this isn't the only part of the latest update which has left players feeling deflated. Earlier this week, fans highlighted the fact that the new diving mechanic has opened up new possibilities for online players to ruin your island when flying over to visit.
[source polygon.com]
Comments (59)
It's amazing how they don't see an opportunity to enhance the creative features of the game, and instead take way something of actual value to players.
It's understandable why the glitch was removed though, it had other undesirable effects on the gameplay.
29/07/2020 Edit: It's cool that Nintendo embraced this and added an update to improve the camera feature in v1.4.0!
Patches out cute glitches, refuses to implement QOL changes like multiple item crafting so they can justify a sequel.
@SalvorHardin : Animal Crossing: Multiple Item Crafting sounds great already!
So far, I've found the whole swimming/diving add-on highly underwhelming. I was expecting it to offer full, 3D view underwater, not just a top down view.
@ThanosReXXX
Why were you expecting that when the outside view and most indoor buildings don't offer full 3D views either?
@RupeeClock Yeah, full 3D was a bit of a misnomer on my part.
But having said that, at the very least, I did expect to have similar options of viewpoints underwater that you have when walking around on the island. I thought I was going to see underwater life, not just bubbles and black blobs from a top down view.
Who are these fans that NintendoLife says are upset? I am a fan and I am not upset and I am definitely sure that nobody asked me. Was there a global poll that concluded that "fans are upset" or this "fans are upset" comes from the author's imagination just to write an article so people can whine?
Why doesn't Nintendo make this an actual feature?
@Cosats there is lots of outcry in every AC group and board I post in currently.
@Cosats like what @Crockin says, a lot of outcry from AC groups like the subreddits and discord servers. Mainly people that screenshot and record a lot. The discord I’m in that’s not about AC or ACNH is pretty dissapointed too.
Maybe Nintendo could add a hide ui button to the capture screen. But other than that, this really is a non-issue from Animal Crossing "fans".
i dunno why theres no option to hide the UI to begin with, there shouldve been no point to remove this unless nintendo offered a practical way to do it
I prefer the new trick. Just not about camera. After find it, I am thinking maybe are some things added not perceipted yet.
@Cosats The fans that are linked to on social media and via the original Polygon article. You realise that 'Animal Crossing fans' doesn't have to mean 'every single Animal Crossing fan including you', right? 🙃
@Cosats : On that note, the media often makes sweeping editorial statements that are by no means indicative of the sensitivities of the general population, but their misinformation/disingenuous reporting is so far-reaching that the unassuming public then erroneously believe that what they have read or heard is indicative of widely-held sentiment/belief, thus consequently becoming the widely-held sentiment/belief.
One small example of this in effect is the now widely used malapropism of "terraforming" as opposed to landscaping or (as referred to in-game) "island designing", likely as a result of one or two popular users whose articles/videos had incorrectly referred to the feature with such terminology.
@Silly_G FWIW I've called it terraforming from the start and never heard anyone else say it....reshaping the geography rather than just the surface is just "terraforming" to me. I think that one's a phrase that's out there in general with people coming up with it on their own all at the same time, and then it just kind of got picked up.
As someone who has been reading about game development lately. I would assume this bug might have been causing other problems behind the scenes enough to warrent patching
@NEStalgia : However it happened, the term was popularised and it seems to be how many now refer to the feature. I refer to it as "landscaping".
@Silly_G That's funny because I assumed everybody would think I'm nuts if I said it.
Then again I haven't even gotten that far in the game. Everything is so tedious in this version of AC I'm not having as much playing it as the last one. I don't pick it up for days and then only do the bare minimum.
@NEStalgia : Fair enough. It seems that they have omitted a lot of content from past games in order to patch them in incrementally, so it doesn't surprise me that many are already bored with it. A mate of mine and my brother have pretty much stopped playing it.
I was playing it every day for about 2 1/2 months before I stopped. Now I tend to play for a few days in a row and then rest it for a few days before picking it up again. My hours are also modest relative to some of the more hardcore fans out there (I have clocked in 200 hours so far) and I've become a tad bored by the repetitiveness of it all.
The fact that visitors such as Redd only seem to stop by once every 2-3 weeks while Wisp is around every other day (sometimes on consecutive days) doesn't help to break the monotony either. The whole bloody affair has felt like a paid beta test, which reinforces what I hate about modern gaming. I would much rather that they had waited until the holiday period and included all (if not most) of the content on the cartridge.
Who finds out about these types of glitches anyways? Like... how?
@Daniel36
1. People who have nothing better to do
2. People who don’t have a life
3. People who randomly found it out
4. People who need to get a hobby.
Missed any?
@NEStalgia I referred to it as terraforming by default too. Did the same for Harvest Moon: The Lost Valley and other games with similar features.
@Silly_G It does feel kind of.....sparse. But technically there's a lot of content there. The problem is pacing. Which is always an Animal crossing issue. But it's the tediousness of resource gathering I think that puts me off. The BOTW weapon system works in BOTW because it fosters a "procure on site" mentality.....ok, that's cool. Find it and use it. Got it. But shoehorning it into Animal Crossing means "oh no my shovel broke. That means I need more wood. Oh no my axe broke too. That means to get my shovel I need an axe and to get an axe I need more stone, and I'm all out of stone so I have to wait to play until tomorrow so I can hit the annoying rocks again and hold my breath with the bad 4-directional mechanics.
Then if I want the upgraded tools, I have to wait AGAIN because I've used up my iron. And iron is scarce in the rocks. And then I have to go into the crafting UI and build one axe, then build another axe, mashing A or B furiously to get through the dialogue and animations. Then I have to go out and hit trees and gather wood. Then I have to go back in and then build a shovel, and then another shovel. So I've now spent 2 days to get the darn shovel I needed 2 days ago to get a freaking fossil.
That's how the early game leads you along. Then you have to build ever more complicated items...starting with the bridge. Build a bridge (but you may only build one!) and to do that you need 4 log stakes. Which you have to go through the excruciatingly slow UI to make 4, separately, before you make the bridge.
It's not so much that it feels like a beta test, so much as it feels like it's explicitly designed to pad the game play time as much as possible to drag it out as slow as can be. And worse, with the cooldown timers on all this, it feels like a mobile design that expects you to feed it real money to play at a sane pace, except unlike mobile games you can't actually feed it real money...you have to just wait.
Stripping content to drip-feed it like a service is pretty painful though. It controls the pacing on a global clock. They did that with Splatoon weapons....it worked better in a squad shooter. This feels like the whole game is engineered to keep it trending in social media as long as possible so the players are actually the marketing.
The tedium of tool replacement and daily cooldown timer based resource gathering, coupled with limited crafting inventory space not designed for a crafting game (Take note: Elder Scrolls Online, a legit MMO does not have a monthly fee other than keep up with expansion packs annually.....but if you pay a monthly fee, you get unlimited storage for crafting resources....which crafting-heavy players consider essential. I.E. limited storage is used as encouragement for crafters to pay monthly to not be limited. Animal crossing limits you the same way, using a mechanic that's designed to cause frustration to the point of spending real money to bypass it....but AC does it for no monetary reason.....just because the designers think it's a good design. )
The sad thing is I still believe Fantasy Life is a better Animal Crossing in many ways. And I argued that AC needs a crafting system to really move into something bigger and better. So I love the idea of resource gathering and crafting in the game. But they way they implemented it is so woefully tedious and frustrating, it turns me off completely. Don't make me wait another day, or 2, or iron let alone gold and silver, if you're going to tell me I need 30 irons and 5 golds. Let me go out and find it now. If it's a resource gathering game you need to give the change to get the resources when you need them, not hold you hostage to playing when the game tells you
I feel bad saying it because I love AC overall....but this iteration is just........it feels like checklisting tedium as a game....and I feel like I'm waiting for it to become fun rather than a daily set of chores.
Unfortunately the game sold abnormally well due to the plauge, so they'll take all the wrong messages as to what works and what sells and run with it.
@Silly_G if you have put in 200 hours in to any game, I'd say you got your money's worth and then some. In fact, the fact that you played AC for over 2 months straight to me means the game was a good purchase for you.
I think people's expectations of what AC should be for them is a tad out of whack.
No offense to anyone though. I'm just saying you paid about $50 and got a game that you played (and likely enjoyed for the most part) for over two months. That's not a bad thing.
@ThanosReXXX I mean, expected if you've played previous animal crossing games. They are generally simple in nature. ACNH really does have far more content then ever before.
@HauntedbyWater Played and own them all, so I know.
@NEStalgia Yeah... that damn plauge...
Agreed with most of your points, though. My current loan payoff is moving at a snail's pace because of all the slower than slow resource gathering.
I've also found the island trips with Nook miles to become less and less worthwhile. It's probably only the first two flights that might add anything useful/worthwhile to your inventory, but after that, it's just more of the same, and then some.
For me, the most infuriating thing about AC is that you barely interact with anything. Bought that cool bicycle thinking you could ride it?--nope. You want to play that pinball machine?--forget about it. Sweet hot-tub, too bad no one will ever use it. Cool snow-cone machine, too bad your avatar can't make one and walk around with it for a minute. I hope future patches will enable more authentic interaction.
@ThanosReXXX Yeah, and the cost is pretty high in Miles for a one time trip....since we don't know what else we may be able to spend miles on and how finite miles become, it seems wasteful to spend them on those trips for unknown "free lootbox" results.
I swear DeNA must have been involved in this game. I really wanted a resource gathering and crafting aspect in AC, so this should have been a dream. But it uses every nasty mobile game trope there is while missing the point that those are all supposed to be unpleasant so you buy your way out of them...it's not because its fun.
And the diving is soooooooo slloooooowwwww. I don't care about my critterpedia or the hippie otter....I don't want to waste time on that.
@ThanosReXXX Well the great thing about AC in 2020 is we can expect lots of new, ongoing content.
@NEStalgia Hippie otter. Haha, good one. But yeah, completely agreed with that.
@HauntedByWater Well, that may very well the case, but the criticism that @NEStalgia has, as laid out in comment #26 will still be relevant, unless they'll patch it out. And I completely agree with him on crafting and tool durability.
No real world axe ever gives out after only having cut down a handful of trees, it's just ridiculous.
Can't STAND the fact that you can't just select a number of items you want to craft! Random example.. Build some 'hot items' to sell. Say you're building a wooden mini table to sell for double the bells, so you've literally got enough wood on you to make 20 pieces. Surely they could implement a menu that says...
'How many wooden mini tables would you like to build?'
Type in 20,and 'select...'
He then simply goes through the 10 second animation of him crafting it, then it's simply a case of heading over to the Nook slaves to sell your 20 hot items. Instead you have to build every single one of them individually! Terribly bad design there!
Also, they need to sort the frame rate out! when I've constructed complex areas then ran through them later on, the frametates practically groud to a halt.
As for why our tools haven't got a little grafts over them just so we know when to customise them, or prepare to build a new one completely.
Instead of fixing the glitch by removing it, they should have fixed it by making it an official feature... also i really want an option in the game's settings to turn off in-game music so i can play my own background music without needing to mute the game, i like hearing the sound effects and animals talking.
(With the exception of leaving K.K. Slider's live concerts unmuted ofcourse)
Man people get angry over everything these days. :/
Guarantee they will reintroduce such a feature in the future and act like they are giving the player something.
@Heavyarms55 I guess it's time to cancel AC because ALL of the fans are mad and I mean ALL of them.
I don't care about the camera. I want to able to use my wand to change into my scuba gear.
@N8tiveT3ch Why stop there? Gotta shut down Nintendo too. The Nintendoomed crowd finally gets their wish!
@darkswabber So besides people who just live and breathe the internet, nobody? Got it.
Not a big deal then.
@Cosats
You are dead right, they have allowed the voice of the noisy online people to dictate was is a general consensus, when clearly by far the vast majority of 'animal crossing fans' didn't even know it was there.
@NEStalgia I've had the game since May and I spend a lot of miles. I only have 100 hours and currently I have 60k miles. They're not hard to get
@SalvorHardin Lack of multiple item crafting is not an oversight, it's a deliberate design decision. The Animal Crossing series has never been about efficient power gaming.
@Silly_G I agree. Oh the time I could save just crafting multiples of the same item. They could let you choose how many you'd want to make or have something like max amount.
@SalvorHardin Like with the majority of major Nintendo franchises, Animal Crossing has one title per console, each with it's own gimmicks. It has been that way since the original Japanese N64 release. There is zero chance of a sequel to New Horizons
This is something I could've never imagined Nintendo doing - good on them!
@PorllM @SalvorHardin and after making the glitch an official feature now, Nintendo shows that they CAN do QoL changes
This is like a new Nintendo. When have they sourced fan feedback so quickly and implemented it? I can’t think of any other time. Granted they’re probably all hands on deck for what is becoming just an absolutely massive success for them.
@dew12333 @Cosats You Nintendo armchair Knights are the reason Nintendo lay lig a pig in ***** for years.
Fan requests no matter how small should be listened to, particularly QoL like this - while you are happy with everything Nintendon't it doesn't mean a whole host of fans who like to create and share should be ignored.
If it wasn't for social media outrage Mario Kart 3DS wouldn't have recieved its update to stop the glitchers and cheaters, like online was becoming a joke due to players skipping whole sections of track.
The outspoken are the reason games like Animal Crossing are moving from good to must have purchase.
So this is to give us camera control while in camera mode and take away the HUD while in camera mode? So it's mostly for videos since the camera removes the HUD when you take a picture?
I imagine it would be a cool way to get some cool vids, much more control that way, but can someone explain the use for photos?
I think I woke up in a strange alternate reality where Nintendo actually ... listens to what fans want?
@rjejr As a photographer myself, I think the benefit would be that if you're trying to set up an aesthetically pleasing photo, it's hard to get the exact measurements you want (rule of thirds, golden ratio, etc.) if you have bulky UI obscuring much of the image.
That's my best guess, as I was wondering the same thing at first.
@liveswired
You'll get no argument from me about the type of fan that I am, actually quite proud of it in truth.
Anyway my comment was from prior to them patching this back into the game for those fans that were 'vocal' online, so congrats to Nintendo. It's always nice when people shout about what they want and then get it!
Also Nintendo have not improved as a company in my mind, especially since Iwata, so they maybe towing the line for fans more than before but that's only because that is what business does nowadays.
Wow! They actually did fix it by making it an official feature! Nice! 😃
Now if we could get an option to turn off the in-game music, that would be great too! (also bring back Mii Mask)
Are screenshots now in 1080? If you don't use the take photo button.
@RidzPlays I'm not 100% sure but I think screenshots are always in 720p and all the take photo button does is remove the UI and then trigger the normal screenshit function.
imagine people getting annoyed about Nintendo fixing something that wasn’t supposed to be there 🙄
@Chlocean That makes sense. I suppose people do want that fine measurement control. I've been known to take the same picture 6 different times w/ different filters and frames - I prefer pop w/ white border and date - to get it how I like. Fireworks were picky last night, everything was a blur. And the camera really does not like depth at all. At all.
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