In just a little over a month, “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” the latest entry in Nintendo’s extremely charming and characteristic video game series, is set to sail over to the Nintendo Switch console. Despite the game launching on March 20, longtime fans of the “Animal Crossing” franchise are beginning to worry about the state of the game due to lack of information about new content while advertisements proficiently build up hype for the game.
Originally announced in a Nintendo Direct presentation in September 2018 and planned to launch the following year, “New Horizons” was delayed until early 2020 to give the development team more time to work on the newest outing. While minor snippets of gameplay released within recent weeks seem to showcase some noticeably enhanced graphics, Nintendo has not announced any new major gameplay features since June of last year at E3 2019.
Although some fans of the series enjoy going into new entries completely “blind,” many members of the Nintendo community are beginning to criticize the company for failing to release new information about the game since it is dropping in less than a month. Compared to other Nintendo Switch titles like “Super Smash Bros. Ultimate” and “Super Mario Maker 2,” which garnered a considerable amount of advertisement months before their releases, most “Animal Crossing” fans feel like they are being left behind in the dust.
While the company has slowly started to tease minor snippets of information the past few weeks in the forms of new high-resolution character models and a new tropical-themed “Animal Crossing” Nintendo Switch console, “New Horizons” is a game still shrouded in mystery. Having waited nearly eight years since the last main series entry (“Animal Crossing: New Leaf”) and over eleven years for a new home console entry (“Animal Crossing: City Folk”), fans are becoming restless for new “Animal Crossing” content.
A lot of new information about the game has also come in the form of leaks rather than through officials at Nintendo themselves. Many fans were displeased to hear from a leaker that “New Horizons” will not support cloud saves and will only allow players to create one island per console (despite multiple user accounts). The leak (based on information from a German download card) also confirmed that players cannot move save data between different Nintendo Switch consoles.
The deadly coronavirus has also posed potential troubles for the new game in Japan as it has caused delays for the production of many Nintendo Switch console units and related hardware. With the disease continuing to affect thousands of people in China and other areas around the world, the video game industry is likely to face many setbacks in the near future.
Despite frustration from fans and the more serious threat of the coronavirus, players around the world are eagerly awaiting to play “New Horizons” in late March. Fans unanimously seem to agree that what has been shown of “New Horizons” so far is cute, charming and lives up to the “Animal Crossing” name. Within the final weeks leading up to the release of the game, players are patiently waiting for new gameplay trailers and are hopeful that the final product will not disappoint.
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