Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a defining title for the Nintendo Switch, topping the charts month after month by becoming a viral sensation like no other game in the series.
Released just as the world was locking down in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, it couldn’t have arrived at a better time. New Horizons gave us a routine and something to look forward to each day. We had progression in our lives again, cutting through the unending monotony of quarantine that had made time feel utterly meaningless.
The next game won’t have that context. It won’t be launching in the middle of a pandemic, bringing the entire world together under one roof. Instead, it will have an enormous hurdle to overcome—keeping those new fans who were ushered in during the perfect storm engaged.
Piling new features on top and expanding the map isn’t the answer. The simplicity was the hook to New Horizons, and bloating that experience will only detract from the limitations that so many cleverly worked within to create islands that themselves went viral for their creativity. The path forward is refinement, and a huge part of that is quality-of-life changes. New Horizons is by far the most approachable game in the series, but it lacks one fundamental feature that could take it even further—save files.
New Horizons gives you one island to make your own. If you want to try a new style, you must upend your hard work and start over. It’s deflating, especially in a game that brought freedom back to so many who felt trapped by circumstance. Deleting your island also meant ending every single relationship you had carefully fostered with your villagers, wiping clean an entire community on top of your progress.
If you wanted a second island in the same household, you need a second Switch, and not everyone can afford that sort of expense.
Hitting that delete button always felt like the meme where Wesley Snipes is pointing a gun, tears flowing down his eyes. I can’t do it! But eventually, you hit a point in Animal Crossing where the progression grinds to a halt and each day becomes about fine-tuning and smaller details, the grandiose, sweeping leaps you made before dwindling. It’s a logarithmic game that slows down over time until eventually you’re left decorating with small baubles.
It’s at these moments where I would level the world and start over. But now I’m filled with regret about the myriad times I did that because I have no way to dip my toes into those old memories first-hand. I still boot up Minecraft worlds from ten years ago to soak in that moment, unravelling a time capsule of my own youth (well, younger youth). Animal Crossing for the sake of purism doesn’t allow that space, and so if you want to feel that rush of starting over, you have to sacrifice those memories.
The answer is as simple as save files. They don’t have to be unlimited like in Minecraft, even just having the option to make three islands would be a breath of fresh air. Growing bored of the minute details of the later game, I’d start another island to reignite that spark and perhaps eventually even revisit my original world to inject more of my personality into its design, no longer uninspired because of my burnout.
There’s a laundry list of quality-of-life additions that would benefit the next Animal Crossing—I even wrote about how integrated time travel is long overdue—but something as basic as having multiple save files would completely change the flow of the game for the better.
