Animal Crossing Summer Update Fails to Fix the Game’s Real Problems

Animal Crossing is one of the most popular games in the year of a pandemic, but it isn't without its problems. | Source: Shutterstock.com

• Animal Crossing: New Horizons will be receiving several content updates over the next few months.
• The first update will add swimming, diving, and new characters to meet.
• As great as free content is, this doesn’t fix the underlying issues with the game.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is getting an update. Soon, you’ll be able to go swimming and diving, and will have a brand new set of characters and furniture to check out.

There will also be more characters, more museum donations, and even another content update later in the summer. It seems like Nintendo is going all out for Animal Crossing.

Or at least they would be if they’d also bother to fix some of the game’s underlying issues.

Animal Crossing Has Some Problems

I feel like a bit of a broken record. This isn’t the first time I’ve bought up the fact that Animal Crossing: New Horizons has its issues. This isn’t even the second time.

Things really do need to change. You should be able to select more than one resident representative. Or at the very least you should be able to swap who it is. What if that particular player gets bored and stops playing?

There are numerous other issues too. The inability to craft more that none item at a time stands out. There should probably also be an option to restrict repeated dialogue. I don’t enjoy having to listen to those awful jokes each time I get a fish. Let me turn it off, please.

New Content Isn’t the Answer

You’ll forgive me if this new wave of Animal Crossing content just doesn’t thrill me. I mean, diving was already a thing in New Leaf for a start. So was the mermaid furniture come to think of it.

Adding in content from the previous game doesn’t really feel like all that much of an update. Neither does adding more creatures to donate to the museum either. What we really need is some quality of life improvements.

They should be pretty easy to implement too. Allowing users to craft multiples of things is basically just like adding a repeat option surely? Also while we’re on the subject, if I’m crafting in my house, just let me use my storage items without having to get them out.

Animal Crossing Just Feels Like Busy Work

Now we come down to the crux of the issue. Animal Crossing just feels like busywork most of the time. The activities themselves are fun, but they’re padded out by needless excess.

When I go to assess a fossil, or when I catch a fish, I just want to do it. I don’t want to sit through 4 dialogue boxes of the same text I’ve read 500 times before.

I suppose that Nintendo might be concerned that Animal Crossing would feel shallow if they removed all of the annoying fluff. If that is the case, then maybe that’s because New Horizons is actually pretty shallow overall.

I mean, come on. There’s like one shop upgrade.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo

William Worrall

William Worrall is a professional writer based out of the UK who has been writing about video and tabletop games for over a decade and has covered industry events such as EGX and UKGE. Contact him at [email protected], see his LinkedIn profile here.

[email protected] @mizushinzui