Animal Crossing: New Horizonsis one of the best-selling video games of all time with one of the most annoying features ever to plague anAnimal Crossingtitle. A game which encourages making things by hand, with materials sourced from the surrounding environment, simultaneouslymakes players wait through an annoying animation every time they make something. This feature is, of course, theNew HorizonsDIY crafting system.
While most other games with collectible resources have a crafting system,New Horizonshas one of the most aggravating. Instead of allowing players to make batches of consumable items that they’ll use every day,New Horizonsforces players to go through the same motions to craft anything, no matter how many times. It may be too late forNew Horizonsto resolve these issues, but the nextAnimal Crossinggame should make sure that these key quality-of-life features aren’t overlooked.
Crafting Is The Worst Aspect Of The Game
Repetitive To The Point Of Hatred
DIY recipes are one of the core functions ofAnimal Crossing: New Horizons. The game encourages players to make the most of their island life by collecting resources daily, by cutting down trees, hitting rocks, or by speaking to their villagers to get new DIY recipes. These recipes range from furniture and food to accessories and clothing. Not only do DIY recipes come up every day, through villagers and from the balloon packages that float through the sky, but they’re incredibly important for decorating an island.
To achieve an islandevaluation rating of five stars,players need a certain number of decorations on their island to be DIY furniture.Crafting lots of new items, sometimes in multiples, is essential for some core aspects ofNew Horizons.Since crafting these recipes is so important for the function of the game, it would make sense that the crafting system was easy to use, fast, and not incredibly tedious.
The issue withAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsis thatthe crafting system is slow, boring, and tedious. Every item must be selected repeatedly every time it’s crafted. To craft one chair, players must go into their crafting menu, click craft, watch an animation, and then receive a chair with a line of dialogue. Any player that needs to craft multiple items must go through this process ad nauseam. For example, crafting any sort of consumable item like fish bait takes a very long time, since players have to go through the entire animation for any small number of consumables.
Small Changes Could Really Improve New Horizons
Annoyances Can Add Up Quickly
Adding a batch crafting system is one of the features thatNew Horizonsneeded from the beginning, or at least in the first major update after the game came out. Unfortunately,this type of quality-of-life feature isn’t the only one of its kind missing from the game.Small annoyances inACNHadd up, like the limit of how many bridges and inclines players can build, when players pour hundreds of hours into perfecting their island. What these details, or the lack of them, point to is a slightly rushed game.
The last official update forAnimal Crossing: New Horizonswas November 2021.
WhenNew Horizonswas set to come out, it received a significant delay until March 2020. At the time, Nintendo assured fans waiting for the newest title that the wait would be worth it for a more polished product. Unfortunately, the lack of detail to some core details like crafting, which is utilized constantly throughout gameplay, shows thatNew Horizonsmay not have had enough time to come to complete fruition.
The Next Animal Crossing Games Need More Quality-Of-Life Features
Avoid Too Much Dialogue And Wasted Time
While it’s likely too late forNew Horizonsto be fixed for some of the core functions of the game,it can at least be used as an example of what the nextAnimal Crossinggame needs to do right. If crafting will once again be such an important feature in the next title, then the game needs to add a batch crafting system for items that players use in bulk. Being forced to watch the same animation 20 times for a stack of items that will be used in minutes is not an enjoyable feature in any game.
Most quality-of-life issues come from therepetitiveness that players encounterwhen interacting with certain features too often. Doing things like flying to a friend’s island, hunting for new villagers on islands, and crafting consumable items all take too long or have too many dialogue screens to skip through. The series' nexttitle afterAnimal Crossing: New Horizonsshould make sure to avoid these repetitive annoyances for long-term players.
