billowillo
Member
When explaining Animal Crossing to someone who has never heard of it I often times explain it as "Collecting - the Game". Nearly any goal set in Animal Crossing has to do with collecting something - whether it be furniture for your house or art pieces for the museum its always about gathering things. People who have played animal crossing for a long time have very good collections; large amount of critters in the museum, furniture displayed in the house, flowers are fruit trees scattered across the town, etc. None of these things are given to the player, they must play the game to earn them.
Since the game is about collecting many people set up goals based around collecting. These goals range from small goals which are seen as short term goal; something the player will be able to accomplish in a few hours of gametime such as collecting enough sea shells on the shore to get to the next house upgrade. On the other hand, when a player has completed many small goals they start to think of slightly bigger ones, they may think to themselves "over the course of this week I want to fill this room with furniture from a specific set.". To accomplish this goal they will check the store on a daily basis and also attempt to find people to trade with to achieve this goal. These goals are all fine and they are doable, something to work towards in the game. A lot of the people still playing New Leaf since release are attempting to move onto much larger goals, ones that could take months to complete. The player has come up with a much larger goal - possibly collecting all of the gyroids or DJ KK albums, possibly even completing the catalog, this is where the design flaws start to shine.
The player starts pondering how they will go about achieving these goals. They may do some calculations on room areas and how much space it will take up to store all these items. Once these calculations are complete the experienced player realizes there is no possible way to accomplish these goals due to lack of space. There is over 90 DJ Albums in the game, the largest room possible is 8X8 which gives an area of 64, meaning even if you put one album per space there is not enough room. Including spots to hang the album on the wall adds an extra 32 spots which means you can nearly put them all in a room but there would be no way to navigate the room. The game also has a cap item limit per room which I'm unsure of the actual value.
The way the game is designed makes it seem they do not want you to achieve these "long term" goals. There's simply not enough space to store things, even on multiple characters. The way it is designed implies the developers intended people to choose specific parts of these larger collections they enjoy - possibly only getting a certain family of a gyroid or genre of KK albums. The issue with this reasoning is the badge system shows they expect you to accomplish these goals if you would like to "100%" the game. For example, theres a badge for saving 1,000,000,000 bells. This badge is extremely difficult to get, brinking on the impossible. Turnips are the most effective way to earn bells if you have a fairly large community to share stalk prices with. The bell tree community did an amazing job at this and it made it possible to get a lot of bells very quickly. Even with these extremely fast way of making bells most people were looking at maybe 1-2m a week with the space they were provided to save turnips. Assuming you earn 2m profit a week and don't spend any bells on other parts of the game it would take 500 (9.6 years) weeks to get the last bell saving achievement.
Why are all these things in the game if it is not possible to get them all in a "collecting" game? It's quite possible I've entirely misinterpreted the design intentions of the game but these short, medium, and long term goals seem like the natural leap to make when first booting up the game.
I'm genuinely curious to the intentions of the developers and how they imagined people enjoying the game. What are your thoughts on this issue and how do you personally play the game, are you one to attempt the "long" term goals? I feel many of the players that have continued to play since release would be the ones who attempt those long term goals; has anyone ran into design issues in the game not giving you the freedom to do what you wish?
Since the game is about collecting many people set up goals based around collecting. These goals range from small goals which are seen as short term goal; something the player will be able to accomplish in a few hours of gametime such as collecting enough sea shells on the shore to get to the next house upgrade. On the other hand, when a player has completed many small goals they start to think of slightly bigger ones, they may think to themselves "over the course of this week I want to fill this room with furniture from a specific set.". To accomplish this goal they will check the store on a daily basis and also attempt to find people to trade with to achieve this goal. These goals are all fine and they are doable, something to work towards in the game. A lot of the people still playing New Leaf since release are attempting to move onto much larger goals, ones that could take months to complete. The player has come up with a much larger goal - possibly collecting all of the gyroids or DJ KK albums, possibly even completing the catalog, this is where the design flaws start to shine.
The player starts pondering how they will go about achieving these goals. They may do some calculations on room areas and how much space it will take up to store all these items. Once these calculations are complete the experienced player realizes there is no possible way to accomplish these goals due to lack of space. There is over 90 DJ Albums in the game, the largest room possible is 8X8 which gives an area of 64, meaning even if you put one album per space there is not enough room. Including spots to hang the album on the wall adds an extra 32 spots which means you can nearly put them all in a room but there would be no way to navigate the room. The game also has a cap item limit per room which I'm unsure of the actual value.
The way the game is designed makes it seem they do not want you to achieve these "long term" goals. There's simply not enough space to store things, even on multiple characters. The way it is designed implies the developers intended people to choose specific parts of these larger collections they enjoy - possibly only getting a certain family of a gyroid or genre of KK albums. The issue with this reasoning is the badge system shows they expect you to accomplish these goals if you would like to "100%" the game. For example, theres a badge for saving 1,000,000,000 bells. This badge is extremely difficult to get, brinking on the impossible. Turnips are the most effective way to earn bells if you have a fairly large community to share stalk prices with. The bell tree community did an amazing job at this and it made it possible to get a lot of bells very quickly. Even with these extremely fast way of making bells most people were looking at maybe 1-2m a week with the space they were provided to save turnips. Assuming you earn 2m profit a week and don't spend any bells on other parts of the game it would take 500 (9.6 years) weeks to get the last bell saving achievement.
Why are all these things in the game if it is not possible to get them all in a "collecting" game? It's quite possible I've entirely misinterpreted the design intentions of the game but these short, medium, and long term goals seem like the natural leap to make when first booting up the game.
I'm genuinely curious to the intentions of the developers and how they imagined people enjoying the game. What are your thoughts on this issue and how do you personally play the game, are you one to attempt the "long" term goals? I feel many of the players that have continued to play since release would be the ones who attempt those long term goals; has anyone ran into design issues in the game not giving you the freedom to do what you wish?
