I'd be fine if just the crude tools broke, but regular tools didn't as well as golden ones had unique individual traits like some used to have. Giving them more reason to use them than "It lasts longer!"
@@Vaguer_WeevilYes! I loved in New Leaf how one could get the silver tools with their own benefits. It was a massive letdown that New Horizons had the different tool styles you could buy in the Nook Store that had no special benefits or abilities.
I think cooking would be cute if it was more integrated as a social feature, like letting us invite villagers over for dinner 100% agree about the breakable tools and crafting though
The thing is, Animal Crossing was all about building a community and being a chill experience. I feel like when New Horizons came it kinda dropped the whole idea of building a community and just turned into the whole make your island however you want and design things the way you want too. This created an unbalanced issue where its like do you care about building the community or designing your island? Then when the 2.0 update came it brought back stuff that feels more like Animal Crossing, but then its like it did much more to increase the design aspect. The game went through some identity crisis. Does it want to be a game where you can just design what you want and not be limited, or is it about building a community with all these cute animal villagers?
That’s what really confused me when I tried to determine if I liked this game or not. As much as I liked being able to customize almost everything, I feel like it really detracted from what made this series great in the first place. I don’t really have the time to do all of the designing I’d like to, but I always have time to interact with my villager friends and improve the community by donating to the museum and planting trees and flowers. With this game I feel like they tried to do both at once, which made it a bit weird.
The whole terraforming took away what made animal crossing such a great franchise. People are more focused on decorating their island rather than just being and playing the game. The game went from vibing to decorate everything. Although it’s great I just would have loved that the game was less focused on that and we had set maps like in wild world or new leaf
Am I the only one who designed my island with public amenities like a park, and created a litany of spare characters so I could use their houses for a hospital, school, mall, etc.? I used (and am still using) the design features to make a better town for the animals.
agreed, somewhere the fantasy went from "i am carving out a home for myself within a community" to "i am the god of this island and i will shape it how i see fit". neither direction is *bad* per se, but they're kinda conflicting power fantasies, and new horizons never really resolved that for me. there are plenty of games out there where you can decorate and shape a place, and do so with better and more efficient tools. fewer games where the core of it is finding a place to belong amongst newfound friends
Pre-NL it was kind of like taking care of a terrarium or fish tank. Now it's like crafting a diorama. They wanted to focus a lot more on creativity, but I don't feel a sense of life from the town anymore. It feels like everything is just decoration including the characters.
Ngl I feel like I'd be the only person on earth who wouldn't mind terraforming getting the axe. To me, Animal Crossing plays best when you work around natural and pre-instated restriction instead of removing it yourself. Being able to completely shape the entire land to your liking kind of.... removes the magic for me. Idk, maybe I just like restriction in games
@morayfrye the thing is tho, it's not going anywhere. I'm in the minority with my opinion. Best I can do is just either not use it or hope it becomes severely limited in the next game, which I doubt
Same. I want it gone, but I’d settle for it being “animal crossing-ized”. Like so many of the new features were implemented in ways that are counter to the series. They turned a series about slow burns into instant gratification basically. But messed it up by trying to still slow burn it
I like AC games as a town simulator. Terraforming feels more like a decorator game, which is fine, it's just not what I love about AC games. I want a little virtual town that I visit and it grows slowly over time. Terraforming felt like switching genres halfway through the game.
Personal opinion: I feel like maybe they should bring back the ability of getting a premade face from the questions either rover or Kappin ask but you have the ability to change it by shampoodle and maybe when you use her services enough times you can unlock the ability to use mirrors and vanitys.
I feel like the whole "answer questions to determine your face" feature became obsolete once following an online guide became the norm. Why would you leave the face of your character-you know, the character you are going to be playing as for thousands of hours-up to chance when you can just look up which face you want and which answers to give to get it? At that point, you might as well just let people pick their features themselves.
In the next game I don't want to be the benevolent dictator of the town. I just want to be a normal villager like everyone else. They can keep the new abilities and still give us free reign of the town like always, just don't have everyone talk to us like we're the boss.
THE MAN HIMSELF HAS SPOKEN! Though I disagree regarding farming and cooking. We should just have the player's mom send us a cookbook with all the recipes (thus eliminating the DIY pollution) and then let people garden or not as they see fit. I agree with you in every other regard, though!
I actually agree with this. Like, I love lazy villagers (especially Sherb and Sasha), but I don’t like when I talk to them, and they say something about how if you give them something like a fish, it’ll be a playmate for their bugs
I’d like to see a mixture of PWPs and outdoor furniture in the future games, cause sharing a town with others got annoying when a family member said “I like that plant or chair, I’ll take it for my house”. Also Terraforming I want gone, or at least made in a way that’s like animal crossing where it’s assigned to a special character that works in bits and pieces at a time and can’t just flatten everything. I feel like us being the one in charge of EVERYTHING that happens is insane, we’re not some god that controls every facet of the town, we just live there and want to make it better.
The idea of starting on a deserted island was an interesting one for sure. However, for people like me who barely terraformed their island, whether an AC game would start in a more traditional way with an established town or a deserted island would make little to no difference.
i think if the reintroduce crafting and cooking they should change how you aquire recipes so you don't get so many dupes, like more purchasable sets. i also think they should add more buildings and NPCs so it actually feels like a community again instead of just shops, and different NPCs could teach you crafts. i also think there should be more of a focus on customization options instead of just having a lot of recipes.
I don't have a problem with breakable tools, but the only thing I don't like is that we don't have a meter or something to show how much use of a tool we have left before it breaks, plus they all use the same disappearing animation which is kind of boring & bland.
I wholeheartedly agree with this list, the ending bit about breakable tools had me in stitches!! (Not the bear c: ) However, I would love to see the cooking aspect stay and be more relevant. Ever since the first game, I always daydreamed of cooking with or for my favorite villagers in a meaningful way. I would love it if they definitely tied it into the social aspect, like maybe planning dinner parties, picnics, or even bringing foods to special events. 💖 Definitely agree that it would be awesome to see the series go back to its roots but keep all the great things that make the other releases special as well. And maybe, y'know, maybe bring back mini games? 😅
I think that being able to change your skin tone, eyes, nose shape and mouth shape at any time should stay, but being able to change your hairstyle at any time should go. I miss the charm of going to Shampoodle for a makeover; though as someone with brown skin, being restricted to white skin that can't be changed unless you tan + a default eye shape that you are unable to change ever feels really outdated. Also, flowers being watered by the rain and needing to use your shovel to pick up flowers should both go. I've seen too many people end up with islands completely covered with rare hybrid flowers and end up feeling demotivated to clean it up because it takes too long.
I never touched the farming stuff but I think crops are a nice addition, however I'd prefer if they grew in the wild as forage like mushrooms do, and certain foragables spawn in different seasons. Perhaps giving some certain criterias to grow, like rice might grow where there's lots of water, tomatoes can be found growing with their vines climbing up fence posts, ect.
I agree that crafting should go but i really love cooking. I would love to see a food encyclopedia or cook book in place of the diy recipes app. I think making thing the food for decorating is interesting, but i could see them expanding on food interactions with villagers. Maybe each villager can have a specific food that they like or dislike that can help with friendship points. Similar to tomodachi life, maybe the food preferences could be randomized, making it so everyone’s game is unique. They could also expand on how the food is prepared, making it a more involved process. It should also be possible for people to buy food if they don’t to make it or have the ingredients.
Honestly I don't want to lose farming, I love gardening so much irl. I honestly wish that they expanded it and made it more realistic. If you regularly water your crops you'd get better quality vegetables that sell for more 🥺
They would definitely have to expand it like you said, cuz in NH the crops were just glorified flowers that gave more yield when harvested after having been watered several times.
I know Nintendo is going to take out features from New Horizions and replace them with new features that are like before, but its differnet. Think of how Harriet was replaced by a Mirror and how the Post office was replaced by a Card Stand at the Airport.
If there’s one thing I would want to let go of in New Horizons, I would say that really long load time when someone enters the island. It goes from loading, saving, then we see then we have to watch a flight progress, loading again, then we see that player walking through the gates, loading and saving again and finally back to the game. Bottom line is that the flight information was a nice touch but watching that really costs time especially in treasure islands. Also if there’s anything I would say about the last part that’s nothing compared to another game, Cozy Grove. You have tools which break from many uses but the broken tools still remain in your pockets rather than vanishing. And you have to collect materials to fix them whereas in Animal Crossing, you have the option to buy a new one from the shop.
Honestly, I can see the case for island reshaping--certainly there's a sizable part of the playerbase for whom building a full-on immersive experience is kind of the point--but I miss the sense of character and uniqueness that old towns' features were generated with. Things that made them different from everyone else's home, and not because the player made them that way. The feeling of getting to know and appreciate a place, you know? Now it feels like a lot of the experience is based on the expectation of customizing your town into something unrecognizable from when you first arrived. It's not something I'd want to take away from the people who like it, but man. Sometimes I'd just like to be a villager instead of a mayor.
What should also go is timegating projects. It’s quite annoying when your bridge is off by 1 tile and it take a day to build, a day to move it out the way, and another to put it back in the correct way you want. Houses too - it really funnels players into making time travel mandatory for any progress to be made to island design. Time travel itself is ok, but it shouldn’t be something you end up using because you can’t get stuff done
Yeah, crafting as is just takes up TOO MUCH TIME. It replaces dialogue and items you're actually interested in way too often, and the actual crafting itself is painfully sluggish. The crafting needs to either go, or be replaced by a much faster, more intelligently designed version.
It also severely cut into the regular furniture sets, making the shops very empty. Not to mention how the system was very unintuitive. I got a recipe that required making a cutting board at the start, it took almost a year before I got the cutting board recipe and I didn’t care about making that one item by the time I got it
One thing I'd like to see return is the ability to reset your game back to the beginning. With the other games you could play for however long you wanted, stop playing and the erase everything and restart fresh.
Nah I think villagers moving out at random made the previous games more real and sad. I think if you stopped playing AC for a long while the game should punish the player by having one of the villagers leave.
@@warex5271I wouldn't mind if it was exclusively caused by not booting up your save file, but ive had many instances recently after playing New Leaf where I'd log on daily, and villagers would still be in boxes the next day despite talking to them constantly.
@@warex5271totally agree!! It’s super sad for us tho to come back to our village after not playing for a few months and finding a goodbye letter by that villager that you liked so much, with the place of his home empty and with a new villager you knew nothing about roaming around.
I definitely agree with the deserted island idea being scrapped. I liked how in New Leaf, you had more choices of first villagers that you love to the heart, whereas in NH you only have 2 that have a better chance of going off the island. Plus, why are the villagers just so... plain? It feels like the NL villagers were being written as you go but NH villagers were pre-written. I mean, I know they are, but why do their conversations keep repeating? I loved it when Ava would constantly greet me with "Your so stupid, how are you?" Nowadays its just Dom telling you to run.
Yeah I felt like they were trying to be like minecraft and it just was poorly executed. It should just be its own thing and not try to copy other games like Miencraft.
I mostly agree with your list, but I disagree with two of them. 1. I think land reshaping needs to go, or at the very least be extremely limited. I like it, but it's TOO powerful. Maybe add some sort of town blueprint feature that can be used to somewhat reshape a town, such easily moving buildings, bridges, and ramps. 2. Cooking should stay, but be changed a bit. Make it so recipes can be bought form the store or discovered just cooking various ingredients, or have villagers automatically teach you instead of giving you the recipe. Farming can go, and instead make it so ingredients can be bought form the store or found on excursions.
I agreed with everything except being able to alter your islands terrain. The naturally generated islands in NH were the worst in the series and I think that was intentional to incentivise players to customize it to their liking. I'm not an artistically inclined person so I really felt the brunt of having a trash layout from the get go, and due to my lack of know how, when I "fixed" it, the atmosphere felt kinda generic and gross.
I like the farming feature because it's similar to planting flowers and there's really no harm in it. It only adds to the roleplaying experience. Other than that, I'm right there with you Jeff
Love that ending, VERY agreeable. If they do decide to bring back breakable tools, it definitely needs to be improvised. Like have the golden tools be unbreakable like with the axe in previous games. Why wasn't this a thing in New Horizons, even with all the updates??
I haven’t played the game yet, but I think in the future release if you had special series items - like sloppy etc, maybe crafting could be handy? I’m tired just thinking about crafting everything 😅 Cooking could be useful for special events like Valentine’s Day to increase friendship or aesthetics. Gardening could be if you feel like it? I agree with the path making, I thought they would’ve opened a window like HHD on 3DS and you could design that way? That would save so much time! I think if they did it right, having a shabby (falling apart) town in need of some hard work could be fun? Also, singing I love tat they sing! Would be lovely if you could all go karaoke and also like “Enchanted Folk and The School of Wizardry” form a band and play and sing KK songs or write your own!
Frankly I'm in the opposite boat regarding most of your GO-s, but a lot of it ultimately comes down to whether stuff like Nookazon continues to exist in a post-NH world. Like, as a casual fan who's been playing since the Gamecube? Animal Crossing's RNG is exhausting at best. Hell, it's why I think New Leaf isn't nearly as good of a game as people hype it up to be - for all the time I put into that game, I barely unlocked any town projects, and the stuff my villagers *did* suggest were mostly stuff I had zero interest in building. (I think a lot of hardcore AC fans tend to miss this extremely-glaring flaw because they've been playing NL long enough to unlock everything anyway, lmao) I dunno. There's a dude below who commented about how NH "dropped the community-building" thing in favor of "make your own island", but like... building the community from the ground up is literally the point of the game. Being able to craft, cook, farm, and create stuff to build up the community with was really engaging to me, and I'm waaay more attached to my island than to any other town I've had in any of the other games. Like, I put a lot of time into WW and NL when I was younger, but neither one of those even comes close to how much I enjoyed my time with New Horizons. If anything, seeing all this stuff go away would be disappointing. Hell, I even tried starting a new NL town earlier this month, to really try and see what longtime fans see in that game. Then I dropped it four days in, because it just made me want to play NH instead. And for me, that's extremely telling.
Autosave made Resetti useless, and felt kinda lazy for the gameplay. I haven't thought it your way, but I can quit my game anytime now, and eh... I miss my mole. As for outdoor furniture, I do agree I like to see that coming back, but only with a certain limit. When I use the Dream Suite, all kinds of Islands were full of furniture which made the game laggy and slow, which ruined it of me a lot. I do agree that it should return, but have a limit to it, just for that. Farming is something I do not mind tho, it's like the fruit trees, but lil different and smaller. All other topics I do agree on! Especially your take on the setting to be a town again, I miss the train so much, and the post office and just the overall setting of a small town to move in to.
Even though New Horizons added a lot off great features, like fencing, outdoor furniture, and path making, personally, I think the biggest problems with the game stem from how much focus it puts on customization. The DIY recipes and terraforming are neat features, but the also resulted in New Horizons essentially just being all about customizing your island as opposed to just living in it day to day, which just makes the game feel more boring over time.
Cooking was my most wanted feature for Animal Crossing. Now that's it's here... there's nothing to do with it- Perhaps a restaurant building is in order, like Brewster's cafe but with food. Oh hey, maybe Brewster can sell coffee AND food!
I agree with most of these. Especially the appearance customizing, terraforming, putting items outside, path making and warp pipe ones. Autosaving and the desert island theme ones surprised me though. Crafting, cooking and farming shouldn't be removed altogether, but they should be less emphasized. Autosaving can be quite useful, but there should be an option to disable it. The breakable tools is an EASY go though, not to mention a typical place for a timeless Jeff joke. Tools breaking constantly is probably THE one thing I really hate about New Horizons.
Resetti needs to come back i dont give 2 shits if some 6 year old cries because resetti is being mean i hate those parents they got rid of a great character
I don't know if crafting should go completely. Cause the Alternative for getting most of the items would just be buying them again, which adds time to the everlasting grind for money, even with time travelling. It definitely should be implemented in a different way tho. If they keep it around and some focus on it, Mass crafting is a must. For recipes you already have, some kind of ingame cloud or catalogue feature/ the abilit to change them for ones you dont have would be neat.
Honestly, I love the crafting in NH for the most part. I think the only real problem is not being able to craft in bulk, also the recipe collection I think really adds to the community feeling of AC, as trading recipes with friends is super fun. I do think that when crafted once we should be able to buy some items straight from nook though. Additionally, I like the breaking tools, but do think we should be able to unlock unbreakable tools at some point.
Crafting should stay because otherwise you would have to buy fences and the furniture that was created for outside ie the iron garden chairs and tables. Crafting did have issues like not being able to craft in bulk and obtaining them could be difficult. But these issues could be addressed in the next game. Why get rid of something entirely when you can improve upon it?
all i’m begging for rn is a proper options screen somewhere easily accessible instead of having to sprint to the town hall or the airport just to change one thing
i can't lie. i honestly hate terraforming and wish it'd never been made a feature. the creativity that would spawn from 'working with what you've got' in the previous games was so much more appealing to me.
Ngl the terraforming part imo has to go too with the DIYs and the island. For me the best aspect about animal crossing GameCube and wild world was coming to this forest in the middle of nowhere and kinda trying to fit in just by vibing with the villagers, fishing, and chasing bugs. Sometimes, just doing that is enough like planting some trees and flowers without completely reshaping the whole landscape. Sometimes we would find a bottle letter washed by the sea that actually had a cool story not the 27th DIY that we already know and let’s be real probably no one reads those bottles in NH anymore because we just want to know if we know that DIY or not. The island idea was cool but they should have kept it for the home designer dlc. I miss the forest, looking at upper land and always wondering what lays there, and THE TRAIN I miss it so much
I also want the villagers to be like the older version ones, personality wise. I like having beef with some of my villagers, in acnh the villagers have no personality, which is a shame.
1: Customizing your face at any time: stay 2: Tool Ring: stay 3: Autosave: stay 4: Outdoor Furniture: stay 5: Crafting/Cooking: go 6: Breakable Tools: Go!!!!!!!!! 7: Buying in Bulk: stay 8: Singing Villagers: stay because it's so cute
1-4. agree 5. maybe if they werent on the beach and we had more pocket space, it would be great for AC6. 6-8. agree 9. we can have a toggle autosave feature 10 - 12. agree 13. same reason as DIY, and they can give you more food points 14. it was the introduction of veggies to the game 15 - 16. agree 17. kina agree, maybe a bigger durability?
The point of cooking and farming isn't to have food to eat, it's to roleplay being a little guy in a little town growing my little tomatoes and baking my little bread! Before we had those features, people wanted them SO BAD that they would do anything to pretend. Remember those tilled soil patterns and fake turnip farms?
What about the ability to find and invite villagers from mystery islands and the way a villager cant move out without talking to you first. Do you think those are features that should stay or not?
Inviting villagers from mystery islands should stay. As for villagers not being able to leave without permission... Not many people are going to agree with this one, but I actually think that should go. It can be hard to let good villagers go, and towns become stagnant (and a bit dull) when nobody ever moves in or out. I wouldn't mind a feature where you can mark a villager (or 3) as a "best friend," and THEY can't leave without permission, but the others could.
flimsy tools breaking? i can gel with it. normal tools shouldn't break. and golden tools should provide strong bonuses and ALSO not break. the only reason they break is to keep you crafting but i really don't want to constantly craft shit! crafting can maybe stick around but it's gotta be stripped down to creating consumables like fish bait! also, axes shouldn't break either! seriously, why did they even break to begin with? just so the golden axe could be unbreakable? how lazy is that? they can absolutely come up with something better for a golden axe than that. special stump patterns, faster swing speed, able to break rocks too, maybe even one-hit treecutting (although that could be risky with online play, just don't let randoms in and don't allow axe use).
Not going to lie, I kind of hope singing villagers gets left behind in New Horizons so we don't have another Raymond situation happen again when the next game releases. Like I know there are other reasons behind what happened with Raymond but I feel that letting villagers sing definitely played a role in it.
I like a lot of the new features in Animal Crossing New Horizons but there are some that I do not like, the worst one was the breakable tools. I agree with you on just about everything. The crafting and cooking are features that I am okay with but if they were to return in another game I would like for them to have less of a role as they did in New Horizons. Growing crops is something I am okay with as long as it is a minor part of the game. This is Animal Crossing, not Harvest Moon. The autosave is a feature that I am not a fan of either but I do not think it is ever going to go away.
I will never not hate, that they make the golden tools breakable. It. Doesn't. Make. Sense. And its quite sad. Also not a big fan of crafting. It was nice at first but it got tiring really quick. I'd like for them to keep vegetables and cooking forever tho. And I am also on the fence of reshaping your town. I like your proposal. Limiting it to certain areas would be amazing. But I don't really like how you can shape everything. Which is weird and kinda surprising, because I always wished it was possible in NL. But now that we got it, I realized that it is not as amazing as I once thought hahaha.
I don't even have all the DIY recipes yet, I keep getting darn duplicates though. Should be a system in place that you only receive new ones until you've got them all. 😕
I agree with most of these, but although I think crafting should go, cooking and farming should stay. I really like this, just make it so that you get recipes from like a recipe book or something. But crafting is just really annoying.
I really dislike the crafting. Its a time and resource sink. I prefer to just be able to order everything form the shop. Having to make a good portion of the furniture with crafting splits up where and how you get furniture. I don't like keeping track of that. I do like cooking though. Mostly because I like our furniture items to have real uses. Before that, only music players did anything other that just look nice. I'd like to see more meaningful interaction with furniture in the next game.
I don't like crafting, but I wouldn't mind it's return aslong as there aren't any craft exclusive series and themes. It wasn't good in NH because you really couldn't ignore it, if you can in the next game I'm down
What would be cool is an item that unlocks the ability to change the hourly music to ones from previous games, it would at least make playing daily less tedious hearing the same songs on the same hours.
I'm honestly not a big fan of the whole deserted landscape idea this game goes for, made it feel kinda like Happy Home lite in a way. I'd honestly hope to move to a new town and get to have less of a God complex with stuff imo. That way every town has equal chances of looking good. I play Animal Crossing to have a good town but not having that interrupt being a citizen. New Horizons feels like you're just this egomaniacal God who shapes the world to their perfect vision. Life ain't like that and that's what Animal Crossing is, a life sim.
It's a good game, but it introduced and changed too much to the point that it almost feels separate from the others. Too much emphasis on crafting and decorating (also farming), less on the core focus (building relationships with characters, events, and the underlying feeling of bittersweet loneliness). New Horizons really destroyed the feeling of personalisation, but thankfully New Leaf attempted to recapture what the original did, alongside other welcome features that had been added since (e.g. The Roost and events such as the bug-off).
I just don't like how they watered down the personalities. In older games there was so much more villager diversity because you wouldn't mind keeping an uglier character around because they were funny/grouchy and what have you, now that ever villager is the same person with pretty much the same dialogue, I understand why you would want the best looking ones
