Everyone's favorite small-town life simulator is getting a new entry in March 2020, with Animal Crossing: New Horizons. As with any sequel in a beloved franchise, there are tons of speculation and excitement about what new features are going to be introduced, what features are leaving and what features are getting improved.
While some new systems, like the crafting system, have already been talked about there are still many aspects of the game that are still unknown. Here are 5 new features that should be in Animal Crossing: New Horizons and 5 features that need improvement.
10 Another Bell Avenue (New)
Animal Crossing has had a consistent set of ways to make the bells necessary to buy furniture and keep Tom Nook from breaking your knee caps. While the game has made changes, it has yet to add a full new avenue for revenue to go along with fruit, fish, bugs, and fossils. While based on the information released, crafting could be this new avenue, but we won't know until March. While many other simulation games include gardening/farming that doesn't really work with the island setting, but something like diving for treasure would work with the island setting.
9 Bag Size (Fix)
Upgradeable backpacks. Something that is incredibly common in games and has managed to evade Animal Crossing for nearly 20 years. While the excuse of not being able to just deepen the pockets is present, it really shouldn't be holding this series back. There is absolutely no reason why this can't be implemented. While the limited pockets do force some resourcefulness when it comes to gathering items but this game is more about tranquility gathering than inventory management. Pockets should be bottomless, but cargo pants should be available.
8 Deepening of Current Systems (New)
This rides the line between fix and new but since the current systems of fishing, bug catching, fruit collecting, and fruit foraging aren't broken, deepening them would count as new. By deepening these systems, I mean taking them further down their natural path.
For example, fishing could have ocean fishing, with a small boat that travels out to deeper waters. Fruit foraging could be advanced into having a small vegetable farm. Animal Crossing has the space to advance in the simulation space while maintaining the charm that makes it so special.
7 Item Set Tracking (Fix)
Tracking the different "sets" of furniture needs to be improved. Some type of catalog that has blank spots for missing furniture pieces would allow for easier tracking of how many pieces of a set you have and how many you have left. The catalog at Nook's tracks items that have been owned at least once, but doesn't sort them by set and have blanks for missing pieces. Furniture collection and house design is one of the most popular aspects of the game and could use some quality of life improvements.
6 New Events (New)
If you ever look at a calendar or a list of holidays online, you probably noticed that there is some type of holiday nearly every single day. Now Animal Crossing does not need to include every national pizza day in its holiday inclusion, but there are many missed opportunities to include. Some less popular holidays could be included, especially some not necessarily well known in the mainstream in the U.S. and Japan.
5 Town Simulation (Fix)
After New Leaf, the series begs to have a more in-depth system of town, or now island, simulation. Having more agency over the layout and facilities in the town would be great.
The trailer has shown the ability to pick the location of your tent and the villagers' tents but it did not show if the town facilities could have their location picked. The game taking place on a desert island will probably change the form of the buildings but it remains to be seen.
4 Saveable Outfits (New)
As the outfits of your villager in Animal Crossing get continually more and more customizable, it makes sense that you could save several sets of clothing combinations, that could be equipped as a whole, instead of the individual pieces. This is a pretty small feature but, something that many fans of the series would enjoy. So much of the series is about customizing and expressing your own creativity, that having an easy way to save outfits would be a great quality of life feature to add to the game.
3 Time Travel (Fix)
While it has been a staple "feature" of every game so far, its time for time travel to get taken out of the game. The Switch has an internal clock that the game can lock itself to. There would probably still be workarounds by changing the settings of the Switch itself, but the ability to just change the clock in the game menu should probably be removed. While it came with consequences to use, the ability to abuse holidays and other in-game events shouldn't be built-in.
2 Environmental Variety (New)
It's time to add some new biomes into Animal Crossing. The deserted island adds mild limitations on the "realism" for certain environments, but that could very much be ignored. Being able to have a desert town or a jungle town would be really cool and could spice the series up.
It would have new fruit, bugs, and fish, as well as different buildings and different house styles. While the trailers for Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks like they're sticking to the usual formula for environments, it could always come as a content update or DLC down the road.
1 Better Tracking For Villager Favors (Fix)
Somebody needs to gift the villager in Animal Crossing: New Horizons a note pad, to write down the favors and item requests given to them by the animals in the town. Most people can't remember most things people ask them to do in real life, let alone remember everything their virtual animal neighbors want. Just be a responsible adult and write stuff down. Nobody cares if you can remember everything off the top of your head. Just make a notepad and write down tasks, like most modern games.