Nintendo\u2019s Animal Crossing: New Horizons neglect is the biggest missed opportunity in gaming NintendoAnimal Crossing: New Horizons couldn\u2019t have released at a better time. With everyone stuck at home looking for a way to escape reality, the Nintendo Switch game was a vacation from the real world for many. How did it go so wrong? March 2020. A month out of many that a lot of us will remember for being confined to our houses, only venturing outside for essential grocery shopping or a medical appointment. With so much spare time on our hands and a feeling of uncertainty and anxiousness hanging in the air like a black cloud about to burst with rain, we looked for something, anything, to take our minds off of reality. Right on cue, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released on the Nintendo Switch. An angel sent from above \u2013 finally, something to make the days a little brighter and whisk us away to a cheery island where thoughts of what was happening in real life were non-existent, replaced with terraforming ideas and feng shui plans. It seemed like a game that fans would be able to ride out the next few months with until life regained some normality. Nintendo promised greatness \u2013 but unfortunately, over a year on \u2013 hasn\u2019t delivered. Updates have been scarce, big features are still missing, and a huge chunk of the original player base hasn\u2019t visited their town in months, leaving weeds to grow and their villagers to fend for themselves. Just what is going on? Animal Crossing: Bleak Horizons When the game first launched, much-loved features from earlier entries in the series like Crazy Redd\u2019s black market were missing. Nintendo promised frequent updates which would slowly add extra content in, though, and for a while, they did. Leif made his return, followed by the shifty salesman, and more. Holiday events were also left out, with the developer adding them in just beforehand via patches, assumingly to stop \u2018time travelers\u2019 (people who adjust their in-game clock to skip ahead) from being able to access exclusive items before they\u2019re supposed to. All of this was understandable at the time; I mean, the world is falling apart, right? Things are going to take more time than they usually would. But as the months went on, updates became more scarce, with features being more underwhelming than the last. While the latest patch \u2013 1.10.0 \u2013 was added in May, the only new content it brought were items, with the rest being repeat events from 2020. The last time players got anything substantial was back in March with the Sanrio collaboration and the Custom Design Pro Editor+. Nintendo should have delayed it But that\u2019s not enough, though. Not for some fans. \u201cWhere is Brewster?\u201d echoes loudly throughout Animal Crossing Twitter. \u201cWhen is the cafe coming? What about Tortimer?\u201d And they\u2019re right to be upset, honestly. It isn\u2019t fair that a game many waited eight years in anticipation for and prayed excessively to see every E3 season was released half empty, with updates coming three times a year. It isn\u2019t good enough. The bottom line is, New Horizons should have been delayed. Yes, it would have sucked to wait even longer but at least the features that should have been there at launch would be. And if Nintendo wanted to add in extra content afterward via updates, great \u2013 it\u2019d feel like a bonus rather than a necessity required to enjoy the game. Even the collaborations feel weak in the sense that there\u2019s so much missed potential there. The Super Mario set was good, but the Sanrio crossover was locked behind amiibo cards that were scalped to high heavens and barely anyone could get their hands on. It\u2019s cheaper and easier to buy unofficial, handmade ones on Etsy. How is that fair? And are more collabs coming? It\u2019s easy to imagine that 2022 might be a better year for New Horizons as the world is slowly but surely gaining some of its normality back. But with the way Animal Crossing has been treated in 2021, I\u2019m not holding my breath. And even if, by some miracle, Nintendo does pull an amazing, mother-of-all update out of its hat, it\u2019s probably too late to ever get the game\u2019s popularity back to where it was at the beginning of last year. As a fan since the GameCube days, begging my great grandmother to gift me Population: Growing for Christmas when I was eight years old, it\u2019s tough. It\u2019s a series that is close to my heart and I was so obsessed with the Switch title, putting 400 hours into it within the first three months. But it\u2019s impossible to ignore that much of the excitement was because of the promise the following months would be filled with amazing updates that made the game better. It feels like I was fooled. Read More: Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword HD review – And I\u2019m not alone here. If you look in Animal Crossing Facebook groups and online forums, there are countless tales of people giving up after hundreds of hours because there is nothing else to do; they\u2019ve completed the museum, fully upgraded their house, and no update is adding anything substantial to further their playtime. If Nintendo had made New Horizons complete from the start, it would still be a big success.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Nintendo\u2019s Animal Crossing: New Horizons neglect is the biggest missed opportunity in gaming NintendoAnimal Crossing: New Horizons couldn\u2019t have released at a better time. With everyone stuck at home looking for a way to escape reality, the Nintendo Switch game was a vacation from the real world for many. How did it go so wrong? […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11008","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11008","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11008"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11008\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11008"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11008"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dejan.au\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11008"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}