The sheer amount of content that's been added to Animal Crossing: New Horizons with the 2.0 updated is pretty astounding. When it was first revealed last month, fans were impressed with the many new activities that were coming to the game and it seemed like, with the addition of the Happy Home Paradise DLC, New Horizons was having something of a renaissance. There's no denying that the update is bringing a lot of great things to the game, however, it feels like a lot of its content should have been included with Animal Crossing: New Horizons when it launched in March 2020.
To be clear: the base version of Animal Crossing: New Horizons isn't a bad game by any stretch, but it seems like the title would have majorly benefited from a lot of the content that's coming with the 2.0 update. At the end of the day, it's all well and good that new content is coming at all, but it seems like New Horizons might have missed a major opportunity to have been the undeniable best game in the series at launch by simply including most of its content all at once instead of waiting 18 months to be finished after the fact.
The Repetitive Grind of Animal Crossing
The Animal Crossing series has often been critiqued for having players do the same tasks every single day with little in terms of reward. For that measure, it's been called a "chore simulator" by some critics which isn't unfair, but there's more to the series than just that as well. Animal Crossing: New Horizons offered a lot for players to do right when it launched especially because it gives players the option to decorate their islands however they see fit in the same way that they'd decorate their house interiors.
The progression that players felt when first starting the game and going from a small village to a bustling island town was extremely satisfying because players could see the visual transformation of their island as a reward for their efforts. Unfortunately, however, after the initial discoveries of what New Horizons had in store for its players were made, there wasn't much else to do. The repetitive grind of the game started becoming a lot more clear to players as there wasn't anything new to focus on. If all the content in the 2.0 update was included in the base game, it would have taken far longer for the shine to wear off as players would have multiple different activities to be doing to distract them from the widely criticized "chore simulator" elements of the franchise.
Losing Players to their Busy Schedules
There couldn't have been a better time for Animal Crossing: New Horizons to release. March 2020 was when a lot of the world was beginning to shut down due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and people were stuck in their homes for weeks meaning that they had a lot of time on their hands and what better way to spend that time than to play New Horizons with its relaxed island getaway vibes. Obviously, there was no way for Nintendo to have been able to know that players' free time was going to be exponentially bigger when the game was released compared to other times in the year, but as time went on and people had to start going back to their jobs and lives, time for Animal Crossing quickly faded.
Luckily, this was around the time that the game began to lose its shine as mentioned above, but due to the busy nature of the gaming world and the rest of people's lives, there just isn't much time right now for more Animal Crossing for most people. It's far more difficult for a game to get a player's attention twice than to get it once which means that there likely won't be as many people engaging with the 2.0 update's content now than if it were included in the base version of New Horizons. Essentially, a lot of the people who would have appreciated the additions likely won't see them because they won't have time to come back to it.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons' New Content
While the content that's been added to Animal Crossing is definitely welcome, it's a little bit frustrating that some things weren't in the game to begin with. Requested features from Animal Crossing: New Leaf like the island-wide ordinances seemed like they would have been shoo-in inclusions for New Horizons, but there weren't anywhere to be found until now. It just feels like New Horizons' content release was a little bit backward with what Nintendo decided to bring to the game initially and what came later.
The other frustrating thing about the new content is looking back at what it could have meant to New Horizons when it launched. There were so many things going for the game and the additions of things like farming and cooking make it the most innovative game in the series by a longshot, it's just a shame that it took so long for New Horizons to add all of those things.
At the end of the day, everything that's been added to Animal Crossing: New Horizons following its release has been welcome, but a lot of the content feels like it would have been better suited to release alongside the game. If it did, players could have spent even more time engaging with it and enjoying every small detail together, however, given the game's release schedule, it seems like far fewer players will be returning to see everything that Animal Crossing has to offer.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now for Nintendo Switch.