I'll be be pretty honest here: this is the content we should have received with the game when it was released. Period. (Not talking about the paid dlc, of course).
The base game was released as shallow and empty as possible on purpose, as they wanted to approach it the same way they did with splatoon 2 to keep people playing it (talk about dangling a carrot in front of the horse). Add the effects of the pandemic to that and what we had was an empty game and a promise that we would get the missing content "soon". After almost 2 years, were getting it. Which is a shame, imo, is that by being a success, Nintendo may think this Games as a Service approach was the reason behind the game's success (it wasn't), and that's not a pro-consumer model at all.
Why, would you ask? Well, physical copies of the game are now obsolete when it comes to preservation, and the best case scenario involves Nintendo releasing a full version of the game in physical media, containing all updates and dlc, meaning "double dipping" is a must for anyone who cares about having the complete game even after Nintendo shuts down their servers or simply cut access to ACNH content on the eshop (and before someone says it won't happen, oh boy, it happens... Just look at some Wii games that have been - legally - lost forever).
So, no, I'm not overwhelmed. In fact, I would say that I made a huge effort to squeeze as much fun as I could from base ACNH, which offers a very solid foundation for the game, sure, but was clearly released unfinished.
I mostly agree. I think, most of what they showed for the 2.0 update are the sorts of things that should have been in the game early on if not day one, especially since so much of it is series staples.
However, it’s very hard to separate the pandemic from this game. I remember reading a Nikkei article reporting that all Nintendo’s internal plans were pushed back by 6-10 months. If everything in this 2.0 update was rolled out by last January, I might have had a very different feeling about this game, as it’s kind of meant to be slow and played over a long time anyways. On top of all that, with quarantines many of us had
way more time to play this game than normal. By summer, many of us were already hundreds of hours into the game, when ordinarily we might have only had a fraction of the time put in by then.
I think Nintendo is smart enough to know that the games-as-service element did not account for the game’s success though. It sold
way to quickly for that to really be the case. In fact, I think this huge 2.0 update, after so long of so little, indicates an awareness that the ‘trickle’ of smaller features over time wasn’t working. We don’t have the numbers they do, but they probably saw that their periodic updates weren’t drawing people back to the game the way they were hoping, else they would have kept that strategy going. Instead, they stepped back and finished a large package of things to release all at once. In terms of online traffic at least, this strategy seems to have payed off.
I also think, prior to the pandemic, Nintendo’s thinking was that periodic updates were a way of getting the game out sooner, and since players unlock features slowly anyway, they could work on those things as people plod through the game. It’s pretty clear the main reason it took so long to get this Animal Crossing was the sheer work that had to be done on all-new HD assets. It’s the first entry in the series that could not recycle assets from prior games. The huge number of high-resolution fully 3D items in the game most certainly took a lot of time. Hopefully this also means the next entry will be a shorter wait, as they can reuse assets again for next entry, now that they’ve made so many high-res models.
I guess, I just wonder if Nintendo would themselves have done things differently if they could somehow have planned around the pandemic.
and I get distracted from my focus easily even when I manage to narrow it down.
