Megan the bear has simply knowledgeable me that it has been 5 years and 6 months since I final booted up Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Within the intervening days, the city has modified so much. There is a espresso store within the museum now (added in New Horizons 2.0), run by a taciturn pigeon named Brewer. A lodge stands over one of many city’s two piers. The primary time I go to the resort, Tom Nook instantly ropes me into crafting objects to extoll my island’s virtues and serving to design rooms within the new lodge.
These are substantive adjustments from the bottom recreation, ones that provide welcome expansions to the sometimes-slight feeling authentic launch. But, these adjustments basically enlarge, fairly than change, New Horizon’s design. The sport’s latest main replace, 3.0, represents an additional drift from the frictions and idiosyncrasies that made the Animal Crossing collection so beloved within the first place.
Upon launch, New Horizons was considerably barren, regardless of all of the quality-of-life additions and have overhauls it delivered to the franchise. Commonplace options of prior video games, similar to Brewster’s café, gyroids, and Kapp’n’s boat excursions, have been completely absent. New Horizon’s first main replace, launched in November 2021, reintroduced most of these options. This 2.0 patch represented a considerable solidifying of the sport’s fundamentals, although it wasn’t sufficient to lure me again in. I’ve written earlier than about my dissatisfaction with New Horizons, and by the point this replace rolled round, I used to be absolutely put out. Nonetheless, a brand new replace does characterize a possibility to rearrange the sport’s items. After so lengthy away, I used to be inquisitive about what New Horizons would really feel like in my arms.
