The Worst Mistake Animal Crossing’s Next Game Could Make Is Giving Players More Control

Its no secret that Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a smashing success for Nintendo, bringing in millions of new fans into the franchise practically overnight. Bringing the iconic characters and style from the beloved franchise onto modern hardware with the Switch was an easy recipe for success, although despite its positives, New Horizons was far from the perfect sequel. While New Horizon seemed to add even more customization than before with community content and terraforming, it fundamentally changed the gameplay focus of the series.

Despite New Horizons expanding on the scope of the franchise with even more ways to customize players' islands to their hearts' content, New Horizons wasn't able to make up for its shortcomings in the long run. Even with its complaints from long-time fans, New Horizons still had plenty to love for years, but that doesn't mean there isn't plenty of room for improvement. While mechanics like crafting and expanded world customization are likely to be improved in the next exciting Animal Crossing game, the series might need to make some drastic changes to avoid the failings of New Horizons.

Animal Crossing Wasn't Always About Control

Regardless of how players feel about the changes made to the newest installment in the Animal Crossing franchise, New Horizon's focus on control took it far from the roots of the series. Where Animal Crossing shined the most in the past was letting players become part of a virtual community, featuring fleshed-out villagers brought to life alongside plenty of fun-filled activities to pass the time. While some of this is still present in New Horizons, they drastically suffered in favor of giving players more control over their game world.

Rather than a casual life-sim, New Horizons often feels more akin to a management game like The Sims, offering a more detached perspective to the world without the advantage of easier or more expanded customization options. Many of the best aspects from previous Animal Crossing games weren't able to make the cut into New Horizons either, with the house customization sorely lacking in depth and flexibility of quirkier designs that better showcase each player's personality.

While players could still customize their homes, foliage, and trees in previous Animal Crossing titles, they didn't feel the need to give players total control of the overall village or its environment. Even if the level of sheer customization to create the perfect island was novel at first, it took away from the core aspects of Animal Crossing that fans came to love, alongside being an intimidating prospect.

Given the number of hours it takes to design an island and unlock tools, it's easy to feel discouraged or entirely regret restarting the game, which greatly aided replayability in the past, as players could start over with completely fresh faces and a new town to explore for the first time.

Casual Life Simulation Has Fallen By The Wayside

Taking Away From The Best Part Of The Series

Rather than simply enjoying day-to-day activities like visiting virtual friends or gathering, New Horizons encourages players to strive towards creating the perfect dream island with its greater customization. While some players may argue the ability to completely customize their New Horizons island doesn't take away from the experience as it's an entirely optional feature, its clear it was a massive priority for the game's development resources. While terraforming and the like would have been fine as a standalone addition, island customization likely caused the most important aspect of the Animal Crossing experience to be reduced to a disappointingly simple state.

Where this simplification hits the hardest is with villager interactions, as one of New Horizon's biggest complaints is the repetitive and often generic dialogue delivered by its colorful cast of characters. Watering down the cruder elements of the villagers also took away from their uniqueness and personality, while the lack of meaningful interactions and favors gives little reason to talk to villagers as a whole. Players can still unlock more unique dialogue by interacting with specific villagers, but the reduction of activities and options to interact with them like scheduling house visits was sorely missed.

While there was hope that New Horizons would receive updates to add more depth to the island's villagers, these updates were underwhelming and became more scarce as time went on. Given that Animal Crossing has seen more competition with similar games fans would enjoy being all the more common, Nintendo has a greater incentive to deliver a marginal return to form with the next Animal Crossing game.

Animal Crossing's Next Game Should Balance Both Playstyles

Providing Players With The Best Of Both Worlds

Given that the adorable life-sim elements of Animal Crossing were toned down in New Horizons, the series is at risk of watering down its core identity as a whole. With recent entries leaning much more heavily into the management side of life simulators, the beloved Animal Crossing series seems to be at a strange crossroads with an unclear future. Despite complaints over New Horizons' direction, there's plenty of room for its improved aspects or new mechanics in the recently rumored next Animal Crossing.

The next Animal Crossing game has the perfect chance to build upon the foundation of New Horizons while putting a greater focus on the aspects that fans missed so much from previous entries, combining greater customization with a more homely game world. Even if the next entry in the Animal Crossing franchise does follow suit with New Horizon's focus on terraforming mechanics, it desperately needs some quality-of-life improvements to make it a more enjoyable experience.

A simple way to combine both aspects could be to separate the experience into separate modes, much like how the Happy Home Paradise DLC added drastically more freedom of decorating but in a limited context. It's clear there's still a great demand for Animal Crossing to this day, with fans already imagining what a sequel could look like on the Switch 2.

Given that New Horizon was the second best-selling Switch game of all time, its unlikely Nintendo will abandon the iconic franchise anytime soon, with the next Animal Crossing being a perfect way to showcase the Switch 2. Rather than pushing forward on Animal Crossing: New Horizons' departure from the series, finding a balance between both control and life-sim aspects could make each playstyle equally satisfying to experience, while encouraging greater replayability.