Nintendo has finally revealed their upcoming Animal Crossing game for Nintendo Switch, subtitled New Horizons. While Nintendo didn’t show as much of the game as I had hoped, there’s still a lot to talk about.
This time, instead of moving into a town, you start out on a deserted island. By collecting raw materials, you can craft them into tools and furniture (by using Tom Nook’s workbench). The crafting aspect doesn’t really appeal to me much, but fortunately, you can also buy tools, furniture, and other things from Nook’s shop.
One of the most shocking parts of the trailer was when the player used a stick to pole-vault across the river! That will be a very helpful ability indeed! And it just looks cool.
That scene also reveals the return of cliffs in town! The island map seems to confirm an upper level as well.
Another great sight is the ability to place furniture outdoors! I guess this eliminates the need for public works projects, since you can just place anything outdoors anyway. This includes the placing of campfires, and tree stumps to sit on. Now you can decorate not just your house, but your yard (and more)!
The player is shown using some sort of tool to make a path. It’s not known if (or how) this would work with patterns, but at least there is a proper way to make dirt paths around town. It sure beats running back and forth to wear down the grass!
The end of the trailer showed eight players gathered, with various skin tones. Kotaku has confirmed that these skin tones will be selectable (somehow or another) and aren’t just tans from being on the island. And 8-player online games? Sounds fun, although I imagine it could be hard to keep up conversations with that many people at once! That could certainly be confusing.
The bad news is that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has officially been delayed. The good news is that it has a specific release date (March 20, 2020) and isn’t just a vague “2020” release window. It’s still over nine months away though, and that’s a hard pill to swallow. But hopefully, Nintendo will provide us with periodic updates along the way. I sure hope we don’t have to wait until early 2020 to see more of the game!
If you haven’t seen the trailer for yourself, here it is:
In addition to the trailer, Nintendo also showed about half an hour of gameplay at E3. It shows the character early on into their island life, though not the very beginning. That part remains a mystery, so we still don’t know how we’ll pick our character’s appearance, whether it’s from a menu or if it’s based on how we answer questions, like in earlier games.
I’ll now discuss a few things that were revealed in that Nintendo Treehouse session. For one thing, we can now move furniture items in half-square increments (as in Happy Home Designer), which is a welcome addition to the core series. I always hated not being able to properly center a one-square item in a room.
You can get a Nook-branded smartphone, which has features like a camera, crafting recipe lists, and the new Nook Miles program. It is said to work like airline miles, rewarding you for various tasks…including pulling weeds. Overall, it sounds like the CAT machine that was added to New Leaf in the Welcome Amiibo update.
The “miles” you earn can be exchanged for new items or activities, though they didn’t elaborate on exactly what the rewards would be.
You can also use the phone to call up another local player for some co-operative play. However, one of the players will be designated as the leader, or host, and the action will follow them. The leader can be changed during gameplay, though.
One other thing I want to discuss is the inventory window:
You can apparently hold 20 items in your inventory, and materials seem to stack automatically. It seems likely that fruit and bells will stack the same way. There isn’t a separate tool menu like I was hoping for, but the stacking should help keep our pockets from getting too cluttered (hopefully).
If there’s one small thing to complain about (aside from the delay), it’s the graphics. The game looks a bit plain, and I don’t think it looks any better (or sharper) than Pocket Camp, which is a mobile game! I was hoping to see graphics on par with the Animal Crossing course in Mario Kart 8.
Granted, the game is far from finished, and it could look much better by the time it’s released. And that’s just a minor complaint, from a series that hasn’t been known for its graphics anyway.
But overall, I like what I see of the game so far and I’m really looking forward to it. Very little has been shown though, and I imagine they’re saving most of the new features and juicy details for a future Nintendo Direct. But it’s good to finally get a taste of the game and to know it finally has a release date.
Once the game comes out, I will start a new blog that follows my adventures and provides near-daily updates. In the meantime, please subscribe to my Youtube channel, where I post other Animal Crossing content regularly.
And if you haven’t yet seen the Kotaku article about my Animal Crossing superfandom, please check it out!
Have any thoughts about the Animal Crossing: New Horizons reveal? Leave a comment below! Have a great day and I’ll see you next time. 🙂