No crafting, or just limited to customizations.
Why no crafting? I think that would clearly be a massively off-putting omission for millions of players who loved that part of the game. Especially now that tens of millions first Animal Crossing game is
Animal Crossing: New Horizons.
I think crafting is now just something that will be an expected staple of the series. Now I think there’s plenty that could be done differently or better with crafting, but I just don’t see the value in removing the feature.
Full 360 view outside. This would be a game changer for Animal Crossing
Fully modeled outdoors with rotatable view! It'd really shake things up, but I think it'd be a good change.
I don’t think having a full 360º view and camera outside is a good idea. I have multiple people in my family, all older players, who can
only play the game because they
don’t have to manage the camera. Animal Crossing is not an adventure game or even a game about navigation, so it makes sense to keep the control scheme as simple as possible so that players who struggle with 3D spacial navigation don’t have to worry so much about it.
With that said, I think something Nintendo
could do is add the ability to rotate the camera 30º or 45º to either side, similar to tilting the camera up and down in
Animal Crossing: New Horizons. It would be completely optional so players don’t actually have to worry about it, but would give players like us the option to see the the game more three-dimensionally.
I could repeat everything I've ever said in every other "what's the next AC game gonna be like?" thread, but repeating myself is boring. So instead of repeating everything I've said, I'm gonna once again sum up my core belief in what the game should be: ultimately, it shouldn't treat NH as either an absolute success because of its commercial success and just go "eh, let's do lots of customisation on a basically blank playing field again, but with MORE" or a critical failure that demands that the devs just remake another game in the series, with at best some of NH's QOL features awkwardly shoehorned into it. It needs to be something new, something that keeps in mind what worked about NH while also improving where it failed.
However, I don't personally know what that is, so I'm gonna leave it there for now.
I agree. I think they should keep and expand on customizability, however what really needs some work I think just boils down to the villagers and ‘sim’ elements. Villagers need more personality and ways to interact with the world. And there needs to be a little more going on with town life too, like more events and community functions. These aspects are the thing that still feel like an actual step backward in some ways in
Animal Crossing: New Horizons, especially coming from
Animal Crossing: New Leaf.
what if rover asked you if you were headed to a forest, an island, or a city/jungle kind of terrain and you got to choose?
That is a really fun idea. I kind of wondered about that after seeing all the cool environments they did for Happy Home Paradise. I could see an interesting implementation being that every town is the same as past games, except there is one area of each town that is a unique biome—essentially everyone has a ‘normal’ town which is most of the map
plus a ‘desert area’ or ‘ice area’ or ‘tropical’ area, etc. That way Nintendo can retain the same balances as before and everyone would still get the same core experience, but with a unique new element.
bigger map (like GC size) or one that just "feels" as big as GC (and city folk).
Bigger map. Much much bigger. I don't want to blink and suddenly be on the other side of the map.
So this one is tricky for me. Ultimately, I do really want a much bigger map in a future game. However, there are two constraints that have to be considered.
One is that larger maps are harder and more time consuming to navigate. It takes my grandmother, an inexperience video game player, around 10 to 15 minutes just to get herself to the store on her island. If the size of towns was increased in such a way that the distance you
have to travel is significantly larger, this would be very punishing for some players. Even for perfectly skilled players, it could make just getting around the town very annoying, artificially lengthier the time it takes to get anywhere. One way to solve this is to add new traversal mechanics, such as fast travel or a way to move more quickly, such as a bicycle, but these options also add complexity adding further steps and rules a player must learn to get the most out of the game. However, perhaps this could be solved by making the town expandable, rather than one fixed large size, and making those expansions optional, that way beginners would not suffer any inconveniences, and those that don’t want more space don’t have to have it.
Another constraint here is the game would need to have enough content to make
meaningful use of the extra space. If towns become not just a bit bigger but
significantly larger, there needs to be more to do in one’s town or else all that space actually does is make things more spaced out with lots of dead space between and longer travel times to get from place to place. One way address this is to simply add more structures to the game. Many are requested returns by fans, such as the post office, an independent building for The Roost, etc. And new buildings could be added as well. But there would also need to be more villagers to occupy that space, so we’d probably be looking at bring the villager count up to 15 or even higher.
Now while more content would be more than welcome to me, this does introduce two new challenges. One is hardware. Now that placing furniture freely outside is a thing, the hardware constrains the size and scale that can be supported. As the game is, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is pushing the system to the max. Something would have to give to support a larger town, be it graphics, furniture placement; yet at the same time, as I said before, a larger town necessitates
more things in the world for it to be worth it. But if the next Animal Crossing is on the successor to the Switch, hardware limits would naturally be less of a problem.
I guess for me, while I definitely
want a much bigger town, like two to four times the size and 30 villagers big, I just wonder if it’s a reasonable expectation of Nintendo considering how hard it would be to do
well.
