Improving the next Animal Crossing

[The Shoemaker]

I've recently gotten back into New Leaf. I've been enjoying my revisit to the game, but there is still one thing that pesters me whenever I play that I feel reduces this game, and other AC games, from being a truely enjoyable every day game. It's not a huge barrier, but for me, the wait times have prevented me from doing some activities that I wouldn't mind doing in Animal Crossing on a daily basis.

By wait times I mean any time where you're not in control. The two biggest offenders of this are the loading times and text you're forced to sit through.

For loading times, an example is your house. If you want to go into your house, or into any of the different rooms, you're forced to sit through several different loading screens. Again, not horrible, but it something that has prevented me from caring about going into my house much. Another is the stores on Main Street. If I want to go to the second floor at the department store, I have to cross the tracks and load, enter the store and load, and go up to the second floor and load. It makes shopping discouraging because of how much of a commitment you have to put into it.

As for text, the biggest offender is when you walk into a store. You have to pause for a couple seconds (after the couple seconds of loading already) to listen to the clerk give you the same greeting they've always given you, on your way in and out. Even worse in the department store when you're greeted on the second floor as well. The annoyance becomes apparent when you you're playing multiplayer and blessed by the clerks not talking to you. Another thing is looking at wallpaper and flooring and other generic looking items in store. If you want to know what it is, you need to go to each individual item and read about it.

Loading gets especially tedious for StreetPass houses as well, as you again cross the tracks and load, talk to Digby and load (and save!) choose which way to go in the StreetPass plaza and load, then finally reach a house you want to see and load, and then decide if it's worth checking out all 5 rooms, loading twice (going in and out) for each room. Never mind checking out multiple houses!

For the next game presumably for Wii U, I hope they're able to address these two issues. Hopefully with the power of the Wii U they can get rid of most loading times, at the very least the loading between rooms of your house. It would go a long way to have one big seamlessly connected house. As for the text, I think some would argue it adds some charm to characters you otherwise don't interact with. I suggest that they implement the store clerk text in the same way they do multiplayer chat. A text bubble appears with a message, but you don't have to stop to listen to it. This would make going in and out of stores much less tedious and it could even be used for animal villagers as well when they're just saying hi or having a conversation with another animal.

I should note that I don't think these two issues are major flaws, and is just pure nitpicking on my part. They only become tedious after many hours of playing. I think this is something the Wii U would be able to implement to make Animal Crossing a much more accessable day to day game.

[The Shoemaker]

While I'm still not sure if Animal Crossing Happy Home Designer will be worth a purchase on its own, I think it shows some improvements on the Animal Crossing formular that I hope gets brought over to the next main instalment of the series. Designing houses appears to be quick and neat, removing the chore that was moving around furniture in the old games. Adding in floor mats and allowing the grid to put down furniture more flexible makes designing houses to be much less of a hassel, and more appealing. Not to mention designing yards!

The idea of meaningful jobs is interesting as well. I like that in this game you can design a school for the town, or a hospital. And as you progress through the game you can make those buildings larger and expand them. Designing houses specifically for the residents of your town sounds really interesting as well. I'd love to see the next game put in more jobs like these. Not necessarily the standard RPG fishing and mining jobs, but jobs you can do in a small town with your villagers. Expanding the cafe job from New Leaf is a start, or being more involved in your museum.

The big question is which of these features will get moved to the next game. Personally I love the idea of everything in this game, being a part of the next big AC game but with all the extra standard Animal Crossing fare. I kind of think they won't bring over the designing homes aspect since they'll probably want this spin off to have some sort of unique features, but designing the town buildings is something I'd really like to see them continue with.

Here's a look at the game (love the initial music)

[Humphries90]

Whilst I loved New Leaf, it did have some flaws that stopped it being perfect. I can't say the load times bothered me much to be honest, but the slow text was fairly annoying, especially when it's reaped ones such as handing in a fossil or bug, or the fishing contest guy.

My major problems came from placement of items. Always felt way too restricted in the house and public works. If ANYTHING is within a mile radius of where you want to put it, the game doesn't like it. Happy Home designer looks to be fixing this although I haven't really kept up with that.

Also the randomness of getting public works. It would be nice if you could choose what is next available, at least from about 3 choices.

[SkyPikachu]

I wanna choose where my damn villagers move in so they don't ruin everything.

Being able to build a towns layout from scratch would be awesome. (Where the rivers and beaches are and tree placement so i dont have to go chopping down 1000 trees. Where the default store location is too.

More content than new leaf.

Also as someone who looked on the net for almost everything about new leaf I'm gonna make sure I learn everything as I go so I don't "Beat" the game so quickly.

[pdSlooper]

I want new attractions/modification stuff to unlock sooner. I played my game intensely for a handful of days. It was fun, but basically nothing unlocked. I was blown away when I started going to the Miiverse board and saw what other people had in their games.

Also, I agree, stuff should load faster and we should have control over where people move in. Kinda defeats the purpose of customizing your town if people come in and wreck it.

I'd like the aquarium to be its own building in town, with more sea life in it. It'd be cool if there'd be some way to get big sharks/dolphins/whales in it, maybe as an award for completing your collection.

[edit] And there should be a greenhouse for displaying the plants you breed, where you have a permanent gardner on staff so the plants don't die.

[The Shoemaker]

Whilst I loved New Leaf, it did have some flaws that stopped it being perfect. I can't say the load times bothered me much to be honest, but the slow text was fairly annoying, especially when it's reaped ones such as handing in a fossil or bug, or the fishing contest guy.

My major problems came from placement of items. Always felt way too restricted in the house and public works. If ANYTHING is within a mile radius of where you want to put it, the game doesn't like it. Happy Home designer looks to be fixing this although I haven't really kept up with that.

Also the randomness of getting public works. It would be nice if you could choose what is next available, at least from about 3 choices.

Yeah slow text is another thing that goes along with loading times. It's a game you're meant to play everyday so they should be reducing the amount of content you're going to see over and over. There's no reason to listen to the clerk everytime you walk in a store! And totally, I'd often spend 20 minutes arguing with Isabelle on where my public works projects would go. I would say "no one will care if there's a rock close by", and she would say "I'm the real mayor here, you're just a figurehead!"

I wanna choose where my damn villagers move in so they don't ruin everything.

Being able to build a towns layout from scratch would be awesome. (Where the rivers and beaches are and tree placement so i dont have to go chopping down 1000 trees. Where the default store location is too.

I think that's something they're going to have to give us eventually. I mean in the video above you can see them individually placing trees ect, so maybe it's coming. But really, I can work around a river, but when you put a rock right in the middle of my path I can't do anything with it. Randomly placed villagers sucked too.

I want new attractions/modification stuff to unlock sooner. I played my game intensely for a handful of days. It was fun, but basically nothing unlocked. I was blown away when I started going to the Miiverse board and saw what other people had in their games.

Also, I agree, stuff should load faster and we should have control over where people move in. Kinda defeats the purpose of customizing your town if people come in and wreck it.

I'd like the aquarium to be its own building in town, with more sea life in it. It'd be cool if there'd be some way to get big sharks/dolphins/whales in it, maybe as an award for completing your collection.

[edit] And there should be a greenhouse for displaying the plants you breed, where you have a permanent gardner on staff so the plants don't die.

I think I can agree about that. I noticed my friend playing the game and they had played it for a month and were still waiting on the hairdressers. I think that can discourage people from playing. I like the idea of having more unique buildings. Or even if you could arrange the museum to however you wanted it to look, that would making the aquarium more interesting. Would actually give people a reason to go see other peoples museums. Greenhouse is a good diea.

[Kong Wen]

The last one I really played was the Wii version. I don't like the looks of the home design thing coming out--it looks more like a platform to sell other stuff like amoeba and cards and junk. I also don't really like the idea of being in charge of things, so being the mayor kind of turned me off New Leaf. To be honest, part of the appeal to me of this kind of game was being a normal villager and seeing what life threw at you, so the randomly-generated town layout and villagers moving in didn't really bother me. It was all part of the game.

I like Sloop's suggestions about new buildings/collections.

I also think you should be able to visit any of your friends' towns at any time, whether they're online or have an invitation out or not. You wouldn't be able to wreck their town or anything because it's implicit that you're a polite visitor, but if the host is online with you they could invite you to do other stuff ("let's cut down trees!") that would kind of be implemented like a permissions checklist.

[The Shoemaker]

The last one I really played was the Wii version. I don't like the looks of the home design thing coming out--it looks more like a platform to sell other stuff like amoeba and cards and junk. I also don't really like the idea of being in charge of things, so being the mayor kind of turned me off New Leaf. To be honest, part of the appeal to me of this kind of game was being a normal villager and seeing what life threw at you, so the randomly-generated town layout and villagers moving in didn't really bother me. It was all part of the game.

I like Sloop's suggestions about new buildings/collections.

I also think you should be able to visit any of your friends' towns at any time, whether they're online or have an invitation out or not. You wouldn't be able to wreck their town or anything because it's implicit that you're a polite visitor, but if the host is online with you they could invite you to do other stuff ("let's cut down trees!") that would kind of be implemented like a permissions checklist.

The main problem was that in the Wii version, villagers moved into specific locations every time. In New Leaf, they can move in where ever. So often times you'll decorate a spot of land with flowers or trees or a nice path, only to have a new villagers house plop right down in the middle of what you were doing ruining it all. I like the laid back nature of Animal Crossing, which is why I don't want traditional RPG jobs put it, but more optional activities for you to do each day to make your town a little more unique.

The visiting whenever part is actully something I've wanted for a long time, but I forgot about. They sort of put this in New Leaf, you could enter a dream if your friend gave you the code to their town you could go visit their town risk free. But, the town was stuck in the state your friend made it when they made their code. So it would be the same everytime you went there, rather than checking in each day and seeing what's new. With that said I also think there should be an option to always have your gate open to friends. I don't mind people visiting, but it's kind of a pain for me to run and open the gate for friends to come in every time. I also think you should be able to send letters to friends in their towns. It would make letters actually useful, and would be a good way of sharing items.