Of course I picked up that new Animal Crossing game as soon as it was available digitally, binge played it for the first few days, still played quite a bit for the following days, and now I’m at the point where it’s generally the niche that the series falls into, a couple hours about daily just to do whatever and try to unfocus from whatever I was focused on, such as work. That’s about what the game does. I don’t exactly have set goals but it would be nice to find all the fossils or figure out how many toilets and walls I need to throw down to get whatever it is for a 5 star rating.
Of course I see what others do, too, on whatever source it is I find user images because I’m not using Twitter right now. Incredibly ambitious projects, but I don’t really have the drive to do those. Maybe I just touch up a few key spots and put the most effort into those, but not looking to spend hundreds of hours overhauling the whole town, so it’ll still generally resemble the shape it started as. I’m also not picky about villagers, but also fortunately didn’t end up with any horrendous ones either for whatever I’d care about that. In fact there were several very cute ones purely by chance, but I feel the majority are some kind of cute. Given my stack of Amiibo cards, I could replace anyone easily, but haven’t felt up to it, only having moved in one by Amiibo into an empty lot.
The way the game updates now is different, but not unusual in the scope of modern games. Adapting a live model approach seems to be normal now, and means that a game will launch with less but gets much more content later, at least by the typical plan. The other typical plan would insist that all the updates are paid, but fortunately seems that it’s not going to be a bunch of minor paid DLC as the Sims does. This isn’t the phone game after all. Hopefully there’s quite a lot to do over the span of the game when the updates are delivered, and that it doesn’t leave out those who chose a Southern Hemisphere island such as myself. Fortunately for that it seems that the seasonal events just happen already, but unfortunately for the Northern Hemisphere it overlapped a spring seasonal event with the Egg Plague as some would call it. I wonder if by the time I get to that one if there will be another overlap that makes this spring stuff incredibly rare by strange design choice.
Most complaints at this stage are directed at quality of life updates. After the game has been out over a month, there’s a long list to the point where fans invented a fictional Direct to list out dozens of them. Implementing these changes will probably take more than a month under current conditions, but there’s the doubt that they would be implemented at all. The question is if these updates do end up on the roadmap, as they seem to be actively paying attention to fixing bugs at least by how quickly patches are rolling out, so perhaps they could end up in down the line. Given general fan behavior, it seems it could just become another scenario like with Pokémon Sword and Shield, where it starts with spamming hashtags, then aggressively spamming hashtags, then excessive death threats, then some indie developer making their own copy but is also an MMO for no real reason and therefore is balanced around being an MMO so expect incredibly inflated and microtransaction-insisting costs even if microtransactions aren’t present. Then that MMO falls to the wayside after all the newly-turned ex-fans hype it up as being the thing that kills the thing they grew up with, even though that would take a combination of factors.
It would be great to have positive adjustments that aren’t just fixing bugs, such as batch crafting and advanced outdoor editing with features from the indoor editing, and maybe manually getting the highest camera angle. Ideally everything wouldn’t be heavily nerfed continuously because of a subset of power users making excessive money over turnip manipulation and charging exorbitant fees. It is reasons like that I would attempt to install socialism on my island as sort of an experiment/counter-approach, but the villagers don’t seem to accept cash handouts, even though they bring up their loans occasionally, which are additionally zero-interest with no late periods, so it’s not like it’s a pressing manner, allegedly. I would refinance through Nook Inc. given the opportunity. My terms and conditions are generally “don’t wreck everything, also please take these dozens of duplicate cards”.
It would also be nice to have Amiibo cards again. As the game got closer, cards went from being about a couple bucks each for moderately popular ones to quite out there prices especially for anything even remotely popular, so good luck finding very particular villagers. Plus, the fateful eight that were added for this game don’t have Amiibo officially, so they would go for high prices on effectively black market trading posts. I lucked out and got two of them by chance, and they’re nice ones. Not the hipster OC cat, but an adorable sheep and grumpy elephant. I did have trouble believing that the hipster OC cat was an actual character until I saw enough screenshots. I figured it was just someone’s fursona done really well in the art style initially. But then it turned out that Everybody Loves Raymond. They’re an okay cat I feel but I’m not going to the black market for them or anyone. The weird thing is I’m fine with the buying, selling, and trading of the cards, but not the villagers themselves. Maybe since at least the card is a physical thing that summons the villager. Online listings for non-physical objects that aren’t downloads or games I still find weird. I know that eBay cracked down on spells at some point.