Author Topic: Animal Crossing as a Service  (Read 1450 times)

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Offline AdmanAbou

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Animal Crossing as a Service
« on: April 14, 2020, 07:42:07 AM »

New Horizons’ modest launch content and promise of updates threatens the surprise.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/feature/53473/animal-crossing-as-a-service

So, I think I beat Animal Crossing. I paid off my house after my  windfall in the Twitter turnip market, decorated my town, and bought enough inclines and bridges to put San Francisco to shame. I still find myself spending hours wandering my town, bothering neighbors and rearranging trees, but a deep emptiness hides behind my villager's bee-stung eyes. What does it long for?

Perhaps quarantine and the new Dodo Code system broke Animal Crossing's slow pace. New Horizons already set sales records and is partly responsible for a global Switch shortage. Everyone is playing this game, and they're all posting new discoveries online. I can travel across the world in an instant to collect cool furniture and outfits, something my own town seems to be lacking.

My still tiny and unexpanded shop has gone three days without a single new item for sale. Instead, I find new color variations of stuff I already have. New Horizons leans heavily on a new crafting and customization mechanic to let creative folk decorate to their exact tastes, but a bit of excitement is lost when every island I visit has different colors of the same ironwood furniture set.

In past Animal Crossing games, I spent most of my time on the hunt for the modern furniture set. Its black and grey color scheme and sharp corners made me feel like an East-coast bachelor with a job in finance. Dozens of furniture sets gave players tons of options to mix and match. Sets are gone, including the highly coveted Nintendo series full of fun nods to other franchises.

New Horizons' crafting system slowly doles out recipes for new items. Players can find one on the beach each day, learn one from a crafting villager, and potentially find more floating in a balloon above the island. Just three weeks after launch, I have a handful of worthless duplicate recipes. Animal Crossing is a series about finding new things every day, but I feel I'm out of new discoveries.

Nintendo has promised ongoing updates for New Horizons, and its stellar sales all but guarantee years of steady content. I wonder if I'll still be playing. The Bunny Day event for Easter was best experienced through the deluge of memes on Twitter, and I’d seen most of the new content before I’d even booted my Switch for the day. While we don't know how substantial future updates may be, Animal Crossing demands near-daily attention to maintain interest. Will I just pop in to future events for a day or two to maintain my feeling of completion? Will I fall down the slippery slope of using the miss of one event to justify the skip of the next? Will I just see a data dump on Twitter and move on?

Animal Crossing may never recapture that element of surprise. Endless guides detail min-maxing daily routines from how many items hide in trees to how to optimize rock-farming techniques. These series mainstays felt like earned knowledge in earlier games, but I don't know that future updates can maintain their mystery for long.

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Offline Stratos

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Re: Animal Crossing as a Service
« Reply #1 on: April 14, 2020, 08:13:39 PM »
I thought this was going to be an editorial on the crazy turnip market community online. Its crazy how people are demanding payouts of up to 20% or more to let you sell turnips in their town and even hiring bouncers and other assistants to manage people.

I just hope that the virus doesn't impact the roll out of new content for the game, as it is obvious they are saving things for the future and it could potentially stall the longevity of the game if it takes too long for new content to come out.
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