So, the Nintendo Direct aired and while I already gave some of my thoughts on Twitter, I still had a bit more I wanted to say along with extending my New Horizon plans from last month.
That said, this will include spoilers for the Direct so if you haven’t yet, be sure to watch it!:
I’m going to do my best to go in order (despite how much I want to yell about certain things) and this won’t be a super specific detailed post so much as me just talking about stuff I’m excited for and hope to use for shaping my own town. That said, while I am going to try and go in order, I may bring up things from later parts of the Direct.
To start off, I was happy to see we could choose our hemisphere at the start (If you plan to play in the Southern Hemisphere, let me know!) and also really glad we get four maps to choose at the start again. I was still a bit worried, but seeing that we can eventually unlock an option to do waterscaping and cliffscaping, that really isn’t so much of an issue. The fact that I can make my own waterfalls is amazing and I’m really excited to have ACTUAL water around the Island like I had hoped would happen and it’s even more impressive than the waterway items from Pocket Camp (not that I’d say no to those too).
I can make little waterfalls! Small water paths! Tiny ponds! Can I even do multiple layered waterfalls? POSSIBLY.
I was so worried about how I’d place my house to have a nice waterfall and room for things, but now I may be able to expand things how I’d want to anyway. I can set up my own Waterfall area. That said, with so many new things (fountains, items, waterfalls, three new types of flowers) and options, I still feel a bit overwhelmed just envisioning how much space I may need. Not to mention, we don’t know exactly when this unlocks. All we’re given is once our “island is fully decked out”, but nothing on what that means. After making a certain amount of bridges and/or ramps? After upgrading our house fully and/or recruiting all the shops?
Either way, it’s probably a bit far off and I shouldn’t consider it in my immediate plans, but I can’t help it. Heck, I’m already trying to figure out which fountain I like best and I know there will probably be more to choose from just looking at Pocket Camp and Happy Home Designer.
Regardless, it at least makes the map choosing a bit less of a turmoil and my hopes are more on getting a fruit I really like (though, again, not the end of the world) and hoping for a color I like for the Dodo Airlines. Though, maybe the color thing won’t be the end of the world either as it could maybe be able to be refurbished similar to how the Train Station and Town Hall could be in New Leaf. Considering how we can practically redesign the island ourselves, it doesn’t feel too out there to think maybe we can adjust the appearances of facilities as well.
One thing I’m still a bit unsure of is WHERE I want to place things. While they mention you can relocate “your home and facilities”, that doesn’t include Villager Houses and I’m not sure if they meant to or if Villagers are done permanently once placed unless they move. Also considering the whole “set a plot” thing, it makes me wonder if we can limit just how many villagers are in our town.
I wouldn’t mind having less villagers especially with so much more to decorate with, but I really want more information on most things with villagers especially some kind of toggle to prevent a specific villager from moving away or not.
Moving back to landscaping a bit, I’m really excited for the stairs and hoping to do a combination of stairs and ramps depending on what I think would fit best.
We also got to see more of the Path menu and while we had seen Brick Paths in a promo image before, clearly there are going to be many other kinds.
The Pencil also makes me think custom paths could be a thing and in that case, I may do a version of my New Leaf Path after all.
As QRs will carry over, I already set up everything I would need that I plan to use patterns for. For the most part, I’m still hoping to cut back overall. There’s a lot of really nice outfits and we know there are multiple colors so I’d like to at least try and see if I find something I love officially before trying to make my own design (not to mention I’d want to see what dress options there would be for custom designs anyway). I figure I’ll just use the same flag as I used in New Leaf as I’m proud of it and planning to use the same Town Name anyway and that just makes things easier.
Finally, while less of a plan and more me just gushing, I love the new museum so much. Some of these areas are so beautiful and I hope my town can look as close to how beautiful some areas of the museum look. I mean, just, it’s absolutely gorgeous:
I really hope we unlock the museum fairly quickly, or my house’s storage is essentially going to be filled with fish and bugs (here’s hoping I can store them anyway since you technically can put them in your house…). I’m so happy we have an unlimited storage though. Animal Crossing has so many items and it’s hard to balance otherwise. That said, it does look like there are inventory increments as well (though, when and how are still unknown no matter what guesses we can make):
So at least a lot of space to carry things around too.
Amiibo Cards and Amiibo are pretty much all confirmed which I kind of expected so I am happy to be right about that. It’ll at least make getting my favorite villagers from New Leaf a lot easier and then I just have to worry about Cotton Candy Bear who sadly still hasn’t gotten a name yet anywhere, but at least we have a HQ Render of them now:
I’m also really curious about these Posters we can apparently collect through scanning the Amiibo too (so many cards to scan then though…):
I’m also more set on Nook Miles than ever seeing how you can use the points from it to also unlock new features. I had planned to try and do them all anyway, but now I think they are kind of up there in priority along with trying to pay off everything immediately.
With plans mostly out of the way now, I do want to talk about some of my new concerns. We got to show a close-up of some of the house decorating which genuinely looks amazing, but one thing I noticed is they didn’t show any ceiling items.
I don’t want to take this as a full out “oh look no ceiling items” thing because there is a chance that isn’t the case and it just didn’t fit with the room they decided to go for, but just for what felt like part of the point of decorating, the lack of it struck me. Even in other images on the official site, I don’t see any ceiling items.
Next, I want to bring up this from the start which shows some of the options… but looks like it could be the only starting options for hair:
What really hits me with it is it doesn’t even feature all the options at the start of Happy Home Designer and Pocket Camp and we know those options are in the game so why limit it like this at the start?? If these are the only hairstyles to start, I’ll probably be using one of the last two on the first row (depending on if I want longer hair or wavy hair– it’s a harder decision for me than it sounds) and one of the first two colors.
I’d like to think this isn’t the case when we literally saw one of the Devs have a ponytail near the start during E3, but maybe it’s just fast to earn or something changed. I don’t know. At the very least, we know there’s more options:
So I’m still hoping for a ponytail I really like.
Finally, my last and biggest concern is this:
I don’t time travel, but I know people who do because their schedules don’t work for real time games. Similarly, even though I have never time traveled for events, there was a nice safety net incase something DID come up and I couldn’t play.
Now? It’s at the hands of when Nintendo schedules these events and I just… do not like that. Pocket Camp patching in events and removing them sucks. New Horizons doing that for events– ones that have always just been part of the game no less is actually really discouraging and I’m sad to see them doing this as it just feels like it could end up punishing more people than anything.
Animal Crossing is supposed to be this simple relaxing game, but for whatever reason, it seems they want to add these weird restrictions to stop people from playing certain ways and like, I get wanting to lessen people who cheat in awful ways, but people who do play like that won’t be stopped from something like this and it’s something that absolutely just hurts more honest players than anything.
It’s the same problem with the reasoning for no Cloud Saves (and while I know they are working on stuff for people to get their file back in case of an issue, they do not know when it’ll be ready and if you do lose progress before it IS ready, then what?).
Over all, I’m still really excited, but I also find myself with a lot more questions and a few new concerns I didn’t expect to have. I just hope maybe whenever the free patches happen, that they become permanent parts of your game from then on and not just… events that only happen when Nintendo sets them up.
If anything though, it just makes me even more glad that an official guide for the game is coming out after all. I preordered it immediately and the only thing I’m sad about is that it’ll be 2 weeks after the game releases before it’s available.
I’m hoping once I actually start playing, the anxiety of it all will lessen and maybe things will get permanently added to the calendar after each free update.