List of ideas that could make Animal Crossing enjoyable for years and years

[oneinamelon91]

I wrote this post on reddit and I wanted to share my ideas with the forum too:

The ideas you are about to see are based on existing ideas from Animal Crossing games, but elaborated to make the new game cool and ful of things to do. Most of the functions I will take as an example are basic functions with not so many interactions at all, but I think that taking them as an example, could be a great idea to create new cool functions in a new game.
I will not talk about things like "quality of life improvements" (order things in the inventory, bulk crafting etc...), but about "bigger" things
I will use the term "village" to refer to the main village where you have your house. When I will talk about "city", I talk about a different part of the game outside your village.

- City: City Folk, New Leaf and HHD both have a street/plaza full of shops. I like the idea of City Folk more, tbh. You can take the bus to go to the city and there you find lots of shops and things to entertain yourself.It would be really cool to have something similar in the new game. The main game is set on a village/island where nature prevails the most, so having something completely different (in this case, a city) would be really really cool). The most important shops (to buy and sell basic things) would still be in the main village, but in the city you will be able to find different kind of shops and building to enojy the game more and have lots of different things to do during the day/week.You have a station in the village and you take the train (So Porter appears again like in New Leaf) to go to the city.

- Cinema/Club: We can learn new emotions trough Dr. Shrunk's shows again by visiting the cinema or the Club.

HHD has a main plaza with different buildings: school, hospital, hotel, shopping center, restaurant, cafè... In HHD you had to decorate the buildings yourself, but in the new games they should be ready to be enjoyed and every building should implement a new special character (as it is in the other games)

- School: you take the bus to go to school (the bus is driven by Kapp'n as in City Folk). The school is inside the City, so you can take the bus and go directly in front of the school, or take the train and walk/run to the school. In the school you learn all the new recipes to craft things.
The school teachers are Pelly and Polly. When they don't work at the post office (which appears again), they work as teachers in the school. Be prepared to spend your mornings with Polly's lessons :')Special teachers will come to teach you how to use different items from the basic ones: Blathers will teach you to use fossils to create diy recipes, Celeste will teach you how to use stars, Leif will teach you how to use flowers and so on...

- Hospital: In the hospital you buy medicines to heal when a bee stings you. And when you find a sick villager in their house? You bring them to the hospital, so they can be cured. Sometimes, when you are in the hospital, you can be asked by the doctor to bring or craft medicines to heal patients using fruits and vegetables...

- Hotel: This building is half already decorated and half empty. In the already decorated rooms, villagers will visit the hotel as they do in the campsite. So you can talk to them and convince them to come to your village or just play some minigames with them. Regarding the empty rooms, Lottie, Lyle and Digby will ask you to help them decorate the rooms in different styles to attract specific kind of villagers. And you will obviously be able to use amiibos to call your favourite villagers. Villagers visiting the hotel, will be seen visiting the city and the shops too.

- Cafè/Restaurant: Pretty self explainatory: you learn new cooking recipies and you can take orders from the villagers to raise your friendship with them and obtain bells in exchange.

- Shopping mall: In this building, you can find lots of shops: Gracie Grace shops, Able sisters (Label will now sell seasonal items from her new fashion line), Kicks and... Shampoodle!Yes, you can customize your character as you wish in New Horizons, but Harriet will offer special haircuts and exclusive hair colours in her shop!

- Empty Building: Other than the previously mentioned buildings, you will have an empty building that you will be able to customize as you wish! Other than decorate the building, you will be given display cases or stands where you can put items you want to sell! (Something similar to Re-Tail)


This is mostly focused on the City (so outside the village), but you will still have things to do in the village: you will basically have the same things you have in New Horizons, but Nookling store will be replaced by Re-Tail (Nookling store will be found in the city), you will have the Police station again, the Resetti center and even the post office!

The City is not the only place you can visit outside your village! You will be able to visit other locations that will unlock seasonally.
There will be two basic locations available all the year:
- A garden/orchard full of fruit trees (that you can't find in your village). Every season will offer different kind of fruits and players will have different kind of fruits in their garden.The place will host a building where Leif lives: you can buy trees, bushes and flowers from him and you will be given little quests to earn bells. You will even find villagers from your village walking and interacting with the stuff! Oh I forgot, you can eve harvest vegetables in the garden!

- A mine/cave/quarry: This is pretty self-explainatory. You will have to help Lloyd with the quests he will give and after completing some of them, you will be given your own shovel! In the mine you cane break rocks to find minerals and you can use minerals to craft special kind of furniture!

Regarding the seasonal places, you will be able to visit different little locations (like you do in pocket camp, but better):
- Summer: tortimer island with basically everything you had in New Leaf)
- Mountain (winter): Snow family lives there, but when you visit it for the first time, you only find Snowtyke: his family is lost and you must "build" them again to help him. Every snow family memeber will give have the same functions they had in New Leaf, but if you are lucky enough, you will find Snowbelle, the new family member!
- Woods (Autumn): In autumn you can visit the woods: there you can find different kind of mushrooms (there are even giant ones!) and even lots of bushes! But not only the bushes we already know... In the woods, you will be able to find berry bushes! Harvey lives there with Harriet. They will give you little quests to earn bells and materials to craft items.
- Spring: A garden full of flowers, where you can find new species of flowers and make new hybrids. There's a new character here that seems related to Leif, Petalius, but who knows who he is?! He will ask you to grow flowers to use them to make new furniture items! And that's not the end!There are two buildings in this place: in one you can find Petalius and in the other one, you will find Nat! He will give you a special camera for bugs! He works with Blathers now... We know that Blathers hate bugs, so he asked Nat to help him studying them without having anything to do with them!The different kind of flowers will attract lots of new insects, so you will need to use the camera to make photos of the bugs and send them to Blathers. For every new bug you discover, you will receive a piece from the bug furniture set!

Ok I'm stopping here xD... I could go on for hours (maybe I will write a "second part" one day). All these ideas may seem crazy or too big, but to be honest they are not. Even if in a basic form, they already exist in other games, so it would not be so difficult to put them in a new game. We don't need giant locations to explore. We just need something even small, but that keeps you entertained.New Horizons felt good for all the quality of life improvements, but felt completely empty and boring when talking about things to do outside of decorating or terraforming the isle. What made Animal Crossing special before New Horizons was that there was always something new to discover. It felt like and adventure where you couldn't wait for the next day to arrive to discover which exciting new thing was waiting for you. New building, new characters, new things to do... I think that with just new things like the ones I listed (to be honest I would even be ok with them reciclying models from past games -even hhd- and giving them new life, if this could mean having something more to do in the game) the game could be enjoyed for years and years.

I know that after what Nintendo did with New Horizons this is almost 90% impossible, but if Nintendo would still be the same company that released New Leaf, Happy Home Designer and Welcome Amiibo, this could be 90% POSSIBLE.

Thanks if you reached the end and read everything, I really appreciate it.
And sorry for my bad english, i tried to make my best to make everything as clear as possible.

 

[jadetine]

I love your ideas! Especially the orchard and more natural environments-- I really see them as meeting the theme of Animal Crossing for relaxation. I also loved City Folk, despite how many considered it a weaker entry in the series, and would love to see your ideas come true. Ahhh there's so much here.

My one true wish for the game improvement is to reduce the load times... but that isn't so much about content. This post is so inspiring!

 

[Flicky]

Great ideas, I especially love the idea of a cave. In fact, I wouldn't be opposed to having one on our island or forest (or whatever the next game includes). It would be great to have a little cave of our own to decorate, maybe with only certain types of items allowed, or have it carved to our liking.

 

[Introspective Onlooker]

Since it's transparent that you spent a lot of time thinking and typing all of this, it's only fair I dissect the sections I feel need to be looked at (I won't respond to points I neither dispute, nor I can add to):

- City: City Folk, New Leaf and HHD both have a street/plaza full of shops. I like the idea of City Folk more, tbh. You can take the bus to go to the city and there you find lots of shops and things to entertain yourself.It would be really cool to have something similar in the new game. The main game is set on a village/island where nature prevails the most, so having something completely different (in this case, a city) would be really really cool). The most important shops (to buy and sell basic things) would still be in the main village, but in the city you will be able to find different kind of shops and building to enojy the game more and have lots of different things to do during the day/week.You have a station in the village and you take the train (So Porter appears again like in New Leaf) to go to the city.

A disappointing aspect of City Folk was the that namesake location was underwhelming and too small to be considered a full-fledged city. It needed more than four shops, a marquee, an auction house, and an HHA building. It's just another place to spend your bells, with not much else to do. I wouldn't mind another city, if it was more than what I just described. Make a larger to justify the trip; in addition, add some minigames to the mix, a la Tortimer Island — ones which would fit in an urban setting. Villagers who moved out of a player's town could make an appearance and have dialogue showcasing their time living with said player.

- Cinema/Club: We can learn new emotions trough Dr. Shrunk's shows again by visiting the cinema or the Club.

Have to give this a hard pass because we've spent the last four main games learning something which really should just be a natural mechanic your character has from the start. We play as humans, and humans are the most expressive animals alive, so there's no reason why they can't just be available from the start. Maybe Dr. Shrunk should serve a different role, due to how terrible his jokes are, in-universe. Perhaps a psychologist. His name is past tense for shrink, which is slang for psychologist, and I'm sure he mentioned being a real doctor at one point.

HHD has a main plaza with different buildings: school, hospital, hotel, shopping center, restaurant, cafè... In HHD you had to decorate the buildings yourself, but in the new games they should be ready to be enjoyed and every building should implement a new special character (as it is in the other games)

This is what I mean by having a bigger city. It would make sense to have all of these points of interest in one, and not in a small, rural village. An addition, we could have a fountain in which a statue of Serena is placed on atop. We could perform a certain action to call upon her, or directly speak to the statue at a certain time during the night. She's only appear in CF, so her return would be another good callback to largely-forgotten NPC.

- School: you take the bus to go to school (the bus is driven by Kapp'n as in City Folk). The school is inside the City, so you can take the bus and go directly in front of the school, or take the train and walk/run to the school. In the school you learn all the new recipes to craft things.
The school teachers are Pelly and Polly. When they don't work at the post office (which appears again), they work as teachers in the school. Be prepared to spend your mornings with Polly's lessons :')Special teachers will come to teach you how to use different items from the basic ones: Blathers will teach you to use fossils to create diy recipes, Celeste will teach you how to use stars, Leif will teach you how to use flowers and so on...

I don't know about the Pelican Sisters (Phyllis, especially) working as teachers. I can maybe understand Pelly because of her personality, but Phyllis, the contrast of her sister's kind and upbeat attitude... teaching students? Phyllis in the older games never held back the fact she hated working at night, given her irritated demeanor, and even in NL, she was still dissatisfied with the position she was in. Pelly knew Phyllis worked at night so she wouldn't be stressed out and drained, so having two jobs for both of them doesn't seem feasible, I'm sad to say. I don't mind Blathers joining on special occasions to teach students about fossils and giving the player recipes for crafting (though I'm unsure if Nintendo goes through with this crafting system in future games). His sister and Leif would also slot in well in this hypothetical school, I think.

- Cafè/Restaurant: Pretty self explainatory: you learn new cooking recipies and you can take orders from the villagers to raise your friendship with them and obtain bells in exchange.

I'd prefer this being in the city, rather than in a town. Villagers can come by to be served for extra friendship points, though a caveat would be you remember what villagers like without them telling you. I know this seems strange, as characters giving one or two hints on how they'd like their coffee made for an annoying guide game, but it would only apply to your villagers, who would have an opportunity outside of this minigame to tell you what their food/coffee preferences were, and have them recorded on your phone ahead of time. Unrecognizable characters should absolutely tell you what they want, though, so it's no excuse to do what NL did with The Roost.

- Shopping mall: In this building, you can find lots of shops: Gracie Grace shops, Able sisters (Label will now sell seasonal items from her new fashion line), Kicks and... Shampoodle!Yes, you can customize your character as you wish in New Horizons, but Harriet will offer special haircuts and exclusive hair colours in her shop!

I'd place that mall in the city, and keep the Abel Sisters strictly sticking to their rural roots. Other than that, I have no problem with this.

---

And this is where I end this response, as I only have a little bit of time before this dreadful wonderful year is finally over with, but I do appreciate long-form discussions such as this. Really wish there were more of these AC-related ones on this site. Happy New Year.

 

[corvonoir]

A retro arcade where you can play nintendo games of yesteryear similar to what yakuza does with their games.

 

[danmokun]

I would like a more mature approach to online interactions within Animal Crossing. I liked Tortimer Island from New Leaf: you just hop on a lobby with random players and you talk about whatever, because there's nothing to do there besides the same 5 mediocre mini games. After a while, you get along with someone and exchange contact info or friend codes and you would hang out at their place and continue the vibe you had going on the island. I made some great friends that way.

Hanging out with people by straight-up exchanging friend codes just doesn't work for me anymore. It feels too arranged. Too cordial. It felt fine when I was new to the scene or when your immediate peers all played Animal Crossing too, but someone introverted like me, I liked snooping on people on Tortimer Island and gauge the mood of the people there and determine who I could get along with and who I couldn't. And if you did something awkward or didn't like anyone, you could just quietly leave and nobody would care.

 

[Lanstar]

I have my own ideas for a long-lasting 'dream' Animal Crossing game as well:

-There is a loose story with a mission for the player. The town you start out with has a sense of longevity to it, as if it were withered down over time. It has an issue of trash coming from a neighboring town, and the tailors and shops are both design and color deaf. It is up to you to rebuild the town to how you see fit.

-There are elements of Happy Home Designer integrated in the game, where you can can design any building you wish. For instance, when you're able to upgrade Nook's Store, they'll ask if you can design it! Same for other buildings, like the Roost and the Tailor's shop. There are various decorative buildings you can add as well, which can attract tourists into your town that you can potentially move in.

-You can help design villager homes, but that will be a gradual process, day-by-day. Each home starts as very worn down, and every so often, when a villager pings you, they'll ask if you can replace one of their rough furnishings for something else - Even new flooring, rugs, and wallpapers! After a few weeks, their homes start transforming into your own glorious creations.

-Color palettes are the biggest customization feature, and you can apply them to any article of clothing, as well as certain kinds of house remodel options and furniture. Every villager has their own palette of colors that they like - But the tailor and shopkeepers tend to go for rather drab colors for their work - all so you can find the right colors for it all.

-Some buildings you can add have wonderful abilities: The observatory from wild world is back for you to draw constellations in the sky, and even house Katrina for fortunes. A greenhouse can help you store flowers, extract seeds from hybrids, and allow Lief to sell merchandise.

-There are reserving spots you can add outdoors for many great uses. You could reserve an area to do aerobic exercises, one for seasonal events, even one to play little games with villagers!

Last but not least... There are very special multiplayer towns. When 2 or more players agree to create a town, they each share an identical cloud-based save file, so they can seamlessly come and go in the same town, and enjoy developing and playing in the town together. Such towns are separate from your own single player town, however, ensuring that it's only an optional thing.

There's probably a ton of other features to add on top of this wild foundation I've created. After all, Animal Crossing is a giant void that can forever absorb features in its wake... But it's a wonderful start in my mind.

 

[danmokun]

When 2 or more players agree to create a town, they each share an identical cloud-based save file, so they can seamlessly come and go in the same town, and enjoy developing and playing in the town together.

Oh yeah, I'd love that. I suggested this idea at some point too somewhere on here. Only problem is that if you wanna share a town with me, you gotta be on the lookout for the pitfall seeds I bury behind trees and buildings...

 

[Lanstar]

Oh yeah, I'd love that. I suggested this idea at some point too somewhere on here. Only problem is that if you wanna share a town with me, you gotta be on the lookout for the pitfall seeds I bury behind trees and buildings...

I remember thinking up the multiplayer town idea quite a while ago, even before New Horizons came out. It is forever my dream feature... Of course, choosing who you play with is key to how well it would work.

(I wouldn't choose you, I'm afraid )

 

[Snek]

A mine/cave/quarry: This is pretty self-explainatory. You will have to help Lloyd with the quests he will give and after completing some of them, you will be given your own shovel! In the mine you cane break rocks to find minerals and you can use minerals to craft special kind of furniture!

I was very disappointed when they didn't bring back silver nuggets and the other gemstones (sapphire, emerald, amethyst, ruby). I really liked customising my furniture with the gemstones to give them a nice shine. Perhaps a mine/cave in the future would be the place to mine iron nuggets and gold nuggets in addition to silver and the gems. Maybe they could even introduce new gems such as diamonds and new ores such as copper so we can customise even more furniture!

 

[oath2order]

I would love the concepts provided here.

Revamping the HHP Island to be more like an island resort would allow it to include more than just the shops it has.

I would love to design the Nooklings shop just like we can with HHP Apparel Shop.

 

[Shawna]

Could’ve sworn when I posted here… Oh well.

* I think we need more in-depth friendships and interactions. And rewards for high friends. Not to mention, a lot more dialogue. in fact, I think we should have certain dialogue locked behind what friendship we have with our villagers. some dialogue can be regular and exist regardless of friendship. But I’m definitely vibing with the idea of discovering better and better dialogue as we get closer with the villager. Conversely, it would be entertaining to discover ruder dialogue the more poorly we treat the villager. it would also be awesome if there were more ways to increase friendship. Hell, maybe even decrease. I also think it would be awesome. If we had friendship gauges to tell us how good or poor our friendship is with a villager.

* A lot more bugs to catch and ways to catch them. It would also be awesome if we had different biomes and areas to explore, some of which would have special bugs. We especially need more critters in the Winter. Winter has always gotten the very short end of the stick. Similar goes for fish. There are critters in Pocket Camp that still isn’t in any of the mainline games.

* More furniture sets, like in New Leaf, and of variety of ways to customize them.

* Nook’s Cranny/Nooklings could have more upgrades. Maybe it’s not the only thing that gets upgraded

* More loan payments, so we’ll have more room to decorate.

* A good variety of exterior customization

* Somethng similar to the whole Nook Miles achievement thing to give us a sense of completion.

* Public works projects should make a return, but in ways that are better executed. The same goes for bridges and building customization, that way there are ones that will go with our theme.

* Terraforming should make a return, but less tedious.

* Tortimer Island, or something similar. Also have mini games so it’ll give us something to do with online play with friends.

* More in depth holidays, events, birthdays, etc. Maybe the villagers can get involved if you have a high enough friendship with them. I remember in Wild World and in City Folk, you would get New Year’s cards if you have a high enough friendship. Even simple things like that made me really happy. I don’t know why this never carried over to New Leaf and New Horizons.
Also, I’m apologize if this is materialistic, but in early (GC and WW) games you would get birthday cards…with PRESENTS in the mail from the villagers who didn’t give you the NES (GC) game and cake (WW). WHY DOES THIS NOT CARRY OVER TO THE THREE NEWER GAMES?! In City Folk, you do get cards but without presents. I guess it is still something… so it is understandable why the villager who delivered the NES (GC) and cake (WW and CF) don’t write you a letter.
I would love to get birthday cards with presents like in GC and WW. Don’t get me wrong, I do play both of these games, but I want them for the other three games as well as future installments. It’s exciting getting presents from villagers, wondering what they are, especially on your birthday. Maybe one/some of my villagers will give me something lovely-related (that I won’t already have)…?
also, it would be awesome if you could also host the villager surprise party, like they do a newer games.

* Maybe the sickness feature can be more in depth someone talked about how it would be cute if you could also make soup for them and such. That would be extremely heartwarming. Maybe you could get a cold washcloth to cool down their fever? Heck, even offering some comforting words can be nice. This goes for a lot of things, but even some simple touches like this would make a huge difference in my opinion.