I think it would be kinda cute if villagers who moved away from your town could write letters to you once in a while if you reached a certain friendship level with them. So if you were best friends and they moved, they could send you a letter telling you about their new town or things they've done, and maybe you could write back to them? Possibly there could be special dialogue that indicates you could do this, maybe when the villager is in boxes they could say something like "I'll make sure to write to you when I can, make sure you write back!" etc.
Something small but very important for online players: Speech bubbles need to remain on-screen even when we're going through doorways. Too many times I'm afraid to go through a doorway until someone responds, since a message would often be gone by the time I come out of the door and was able to see it. For that matter, they should stay on-screen longer than 5 seconds. Maybe 30 seconds (like in City Folk) is overkill, but 10-15 seconds would be a huge improvement.
I wish that letters you receive would contain the date which they were sent on. I like to save particularly good letters I receive, and it would be nice to know the exact date instead of having to guess.
I hate bees. The bee in the museum gives me the chills.
But I admit I use the open train station gate to avoid them... way too much.
If there were multiple players in a town when the beehive fell, just have them chase the closest player.
That leads me to something else... What if villagers could shake them out and get stung? Maybe it's not so small, since that'd make Nintendo have to make 100 or so new expressions for the villagers that'd get stung... But it'd be a nice touch, being able to bring them medicine and make them feel better right away. <3 Maybe Cranky and/or Uchi villagers would be all like "NO! I'm FINE! This doesn't hurt at ALL!" and you'd have to talk to them a few times to get them to admit they're hurt.
I also saw that cooking suggestion somewhere... That'd be SOOOO CUTE!!
I noticed that there were expressions that only NPCs had access to (like that cheering emote, or that extended sadness one, I know its based off a emote we have access to...)
I want all expressions to be obtainable (and I want that emotion system where you keep them in a book to stay, going back to WW/CF emotion set up was bad)
I haven't yet read all the messages so apologies if someone else has already mentioned it but I'd like QoL things like being able to know where others are if they're visiting my village hahaha
I'd really like to see activities you can do with your villagers like catching bugs with them or have them follow you around while you run errands or something
Ok but also what about having a little plot for gardening like growing little cherry tomatoes and selling them at a market, or growing your villagers favorite vegetable :') okay but also what about cooking or baking, but maybe it would be too much like the sims or a harvest moon game?
I'm sure they'll do amiibo compatibility with this new game (hopefully in the way the WA update did it...so nervous atm, why must you tease us so, nintendo...)
I want the town to be a little bigger! Or have a bigger island that you can put a little hut on or something. It could have like one main room and a basement. And you should be able to put like beach umbrellas and stuff around. Certain tropical public works projects
I'd like for tools to be separate from inventory. Harvest Moon games do it that way (at least the ones I've played), and I think Animal Crossing should do it that way too. The vast majority of the time, you're going to want to have your fishing rod, shovel, bug net, watering can, axe, and slingshot with you (and maybe some others as well). Those shouldn't take up nearly half of your pocket space. Stackable fruit was a great step in the right direction for freeing up pocket space, but having tools separate would improve the situation further.
Oh, and bells should automatically stack into your wallet by default. There may be times when we want bells in a bag (for online trading), but most of the time, it's a nuisance to have to manually combine bell bags after hitting the money rock or collecting bells from shaking trees, etc.
-More hairstyles and face types! I think we've had the same hair and face types since wild world? I would love to see more long hair styles that go to the shoulders on girls!
-Unnatural eye colors for characters, like having red or pink eye contacts.
-More flower, bushes, and tree types! I think it would be pretty to have naturally flowering trees and bushes, like rose bushes or magnolia or dogwood flowers! Peonies would be really pretty to have as a planting flower type. Possibly more golds too?
-More Gracie furniture sets, I personally really only like 1 of their furniture sets, so unlocking their store kind of didn't feel worth it cause the set I want only shows up in the spring. Make it so the main set is seasonal, but minor sets or mini-non full sets show up every week instead of in between sales?
-Some things from pocket camp would be amazing! There are so many clothing and furniture sets from that game that I would love to have in a game or town!
-If they go about the mayor route again, I would love to actually feel like you have more impact on how the town is structured, like having set plots were a villager could potentially move in, be able to move buildings you have set down already but make it so it's more expensive to do so, since the whole building has to be rebuilt.
-Copper and Booker in the same building again! I honestly love Booker's building, but I love Copper more as a character.
-I would kind of like more places to go to instead of just the island, your town, and main street. Not including other people's towns, obviously, but just places to go other than 3 things seem like it would make the game more fun to explore.
-I would love it if they made it so it's slightly harder to make a character change their mind when it came to moving to be honest, Wendy has asked 2 times to move and then cancelled moving, she hasn't asked about moving since then and it's slightly annoying now just because I genuinely did not want her to stay in my town.
This is kind of a lot as is, but it's just things I would personally like that I don't think I saw a lot of others mentioning?