Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 Is Further Evidence The Franchise Has Lost What Made It Special

Megan the bear has just informed me that it has been five years and six months since I last booted up Animal Crossing: New Horizons. In the intervening days, the town has changed a lot. There’s a coffee shop in the museum now (added in New Horizons 2.0), run by a taciturn pigeon named Brewer. A hotel stands over one of the town’s two piers. The first time I visit the resort, Tom Nook immediately ropes me into crafting items to extoll my island’s virtues and helping design rooms in the new hotel.

These are substantive changes from the base game, ones that offer welcome expansions to the sometimes-slight feeling original release. Yet, these changes fundamentally enlarge, rather than change, New Horizon’s design. The game’s recent major update, 3.0, represents a further drift from the frictions and idiosyncrasies that made the Animal Crossing series so beloved in the first place.

Upon launch, New Horizons was somewhat barren, despite all the quality-of-life additions and feature overhauls it brought to the franchise. Standard features of prior games, such as Brewster’s café, gyroids, and Kapp’n’s boat tours, were totally absent. New Horizon’s first major update, released in November 2021, reintroduced most of those features. This 2.0 patch represented a substantial solidifying of the game’s basics, though it wasn’t enough to lure me back in. I’ve written before about my dissatisfaction with New Horizons, and by the time this update rolled around, I was fully put out. Nevertheless, a new update does represent an opportunity to rearrange the game’s pieces. After so long away, I was curious about what New Horizons would feel like in my hands.

Unfortunately, 3.0 mostly doubles down, expanding the breadth of New Horizon’s design even further, without giving those things meaningful texture and weight. In prior games, you were just another member of the town, albeit an outsider, with all the included frictions of moving to a new place. Your neighbors don’t always like you and you have to earn their trust over time. New Horizons sands these frictions down, maintaining a friendly, customer service tone. In 3.0, the hotel is the clearest manifestation of this trend. By decorating rooms and completing DIY projects, you earn another currency: hotel tickets, which you can spend on yet more trinkets. New Horizons already added the reward system of Nook Miles to the game’s original base currencies of bells. Hotel tickets are nothing more than a cheap and more limited rehash of Nook Miles.

In fact, New Horizons is awash in duplicate systems. You can use Amiibo figures to call a resident to the hotel, the cafe, or the campsite in town, offering three slightly different ways to chat with animals living outside your village. Crafting items for Tom Nook and Kapp’n’s DIY evangelism rotates new items to construct, much like ever-refreshing tasks of the Nook Miles rewards in the base game. Even the hotel decoration is a repeat of the New Horizon’s DLC, Happy Home Paradise, on a smaller scale. For the most part, these additions don’t give your island more texture, so much as they give you more busywork.

This overstuffing has been a feature of many Nintendo games of the last few years. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild punched through the fabric of open-world games because of its lean, exploratory design. When Nintendo updated it for the sequel, Tears of the Kingdom, it ignored most of BotW’s core lessons. Tears offers more things to collect; its systems are more extensive and less intuitive. Its world feels all the hollower for how busy it is.

New Horizons follows much the same track. It’s more expansive, and there are more things to do than ever before. Yet, the design is less prickly, and therefore, less fulfilling. Let’s examine one small example. In the first Animal Crossing, you arrive in town penniless. Tom Nook reprimands you for not even having a down payment for your house and immediately throws you into a part-time job at his shop. In New Horizons, Tom Nook crowns you head resident and tasks you with turning the deserted island into a paradise. On the surface, both these moments serve the exact same goal: They tutorialize the central mechanics of the game and establish the main objectives. However, one of these characterizes the town and makes the player into something of a buffoon. It’s notable, for example, that Tom Nook still sells you the house and offers you a mortgage with no interest rate. There’s a kind-heartedness to the way that he approaches you, even as he makes fun of you and makes you run his errands. In both games, Tom Nook has you doing chores. But it’s in the original Animal Crossing that these chores have character.

For all of the 3.0 update’s new bells and whistles, it does not overwrite that truth. Perhaps it is too engrained into New Horizon’s fundamental design. When I checked with Isabelle about how visitors liked our island, she informed me that it has a modest score of three stars. The biggest complaint is that the town is too rural. There are too many trees. She encouraged me, essentially, to pave paradise and put up a parking lot. Many systems in the game want me to change my island fully. I miss the ways that previous Animal Crossings would give me a home that I could change and a community that I could not, or at least, not quickly.

Imagining the future of Animal Crossing from here is not especially difficult. What else is in the bag of tricks for a video game sequel? Perhaps they’ll bring back the visitable urban environment from Animal Crossing: City Folk, let players customize and manage entire island chains, or otherwise expand the game’s canvas. I fear that most of the plausible possibilities will make Animal Crossing wider but not deeper, more of a time sink and less of a contained everyday. The kind of game that every Animal Crossing before New Horizons was might be gone for good.

Still, for all my complaints, the basics of Animal Crossing feel as joyful as they ever were. If there is anything the franchise still has a premium on, it is an effortless, almost chic, cuteness. I find cozy life sims can struggle with this, settling for a generic kitsch. New Horizon’s aesthetic is cleaner than that of prior games, but every new addition has compounded those small pleasures. I discovered the group stretching, a legacy feature added in 2.0, much to my delight. I adore that there is no real purpose to drinking coffee in the Roost; there is just the pleasure of watching Brewster work, watching your little avatar tip the cup into their month, seeing the ways Brewster begins to open up to you each day. The turtle family that runs the hotel is a cutie crew. Helping them is fulfilling because they are so fun to be around.

Additionally, the quality-of-life features of Update 3.0 are a legitimate boon. It feels as though they should have been in base game, making it far easier to design and work on your island. They too have their delights. Watching your villager hop about as they pave a road is a sublime pleasure that few of these games can seriously match.

All this is to say that I love the little rituals of Animal Crossing. I love saying hello to the little citizens of the town. I love shaking the trees for fruit and spending the afternoon fishing in the town’s stream. These things don’t feel like busywork, but like the texture of a life.

Each one of Animal Crossing New Horizon’s major updates have granted more to do, but they haven’t given more force to that life. For the franchise’s future, I want a leaner game, one more focused on mundane, textured community. I fear that I can no longer get such a game from Nintendo itself.

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