Warning in advance: This post WILL be VERY long. I'm gonna try my very best to keep my thoughts concise, while making a case for my point.
A few days ago, I came across an opinion thread. That person was basically saying that if someone had put X-amount of hours into playing NH, they shouldn't complain about the game having "no content" and should stop comparing it to New Leaf. I didn't respond to it, but my immediate reaction was that the opinion was unfair. I, for one, have well over 1k hours into NH, and yes, I enjoy the game. But at the same time, I also think the game needs more content and more for players to do. Still, even to me, my own opinion seemed so contradictory. Like, how could I have put that many hours into the game and still say there isn't much to do? That got me thinking...What exactly do I DO when I play New Horizons?
For the last few days I made myself hyperaware of how I played NH. I took notes of every action I made in the game, and for how long I did it. I fished, bug hunted, dived and shopped, but not for very long: on average I did these activities collectively for about 10-15 minutes. I dug fossils, and talked to and gave villagers gifts, but again, only for a few minutes(5-10). The vast majority of my time was spent either decorating, or doing activities related to decorating(for instance terraforming/landscaping so I could put down some new items). I timed myself spending close to 45 minutes-to over an hour doing this activity. This is what I do the most when I play NH.
It made me think for a while: did I play like this in New Leaf? I played New Leaf for years. Trying to think back on HOW I played and everything I did during that time, was almost a blur. Still, there was something I could use to get a glimpse of my New Leaf play style: my 3DS SD card. Like I said I played NL for years, I literally have thousands of pics of my activities in that game. I popped the card into my laptop, and immediately I saw that almost whenever I took a pic, it was with my character interacting with someone or something, whether one of my friends, talking to a villager, playing a mini-game on Tortimer isle, hide-and-seek, etc.
Going through my pics, it appeared that, for me, communication was what made NL so much fun. There were plenty of pics of me decorating my town, but whenever I saw an interaction, I could almost recall what it was about, esp. when it came to my friends. Case closed! Mystery solved! Communication was the key for me, and that's why I liked New Leaf more and why New Leaf was better! The End!...Right?
I was slowly going through the pics on the card, and again, I had thousands. As I'm looking at all of them, I notice that a great deal weren't even from New Leaf. They were Happy Home Designer pics that I was proud of and had posted all over the internet. These pics didn't show any communication or interaction at all. But I still remembered doing them, and I still got that same feeling of joy when I recalled them. And that's when it hit me: New Horizons immediate predecessor isn't New Leaf at all. It's Happy Home Designer.
The more I tried to compare New Horizons to New Leaf the more dissimilar they became. But when I stared comparing notes between NH and Happy Home Designer, it was like the two games lined up almost perfectly.
Happy Home Designer or HHD (for those unaware) is a sandbox Animal Crossing spin-off game released in 2015. The game didn't have much content, but it never pretended to. The sole purpose of the game was to design and decorate the homes of the villagers. There was almost no storyline involved and no scaling metric by which the game judged your design and decorating skills; you did have to use the minimum furniture assigned to each villager, but other than that, the game itself never judged you. Judgement of your skills came from other players. By uploading your rooms and designs, other HHD players would rate your creations from 1-5 on a few different metrics(cute, cool, unique and 'I'd live here'), with 5 stars being the best for each category. The game had very little dialog, a complete lack of any story, and streamlined the Animal Crossing world into a decorating and design focus. In HHD, you could choose the individual environment that you wanted to build your villager's homes in. And the environment of one villager's house had no effect on any other's, because while there was a town square filled with various buildings you could also design for, there was no central town/village like in mainline games. Each home existed in its own bubble unaware of any others.
If you wanted to build your villager's house in a desert you could. If you wanted a beach house, you could set a home in that environment too. If you wanted a home surrounded by waterfalls and cliffs you could build one there with no problem...sound familiar? Additionally, HHD introduced several features and functions that made its way into the updated Animal Crossing New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo game, and/or eventually into New Horizons. Going through New Horizons now, I can see HHD's influence very clearly:
- The interface for calling amiibos from the Nook machine into NH is exactly the same as it was in HHD. It was HHD that first used amiibos to call in npc's and villagers. This transferred later to ACNL:Welcome Amiibo, and was included from the beginning in New Horizons.
- The room sizes of your house. In all other AC games all max room sizes of the maximum home was 8x8. The max home size in NH however, is one of the many max home layouts in HHD, 6x6, 8x8 and 8x10.
- The almost complete lack of engagement from your villagers. In NH, you can talk to your villagers and there is some in-depth dialog--if you care to dig it out. But unlike in the previous main games, its not a primary focus, and its not upfront. Deep dialog with villagers is there for players who care to find it. Otherwise most people will get surface level villager interaction and not much beyond that.
- HHD was the first AC game ever where players could choose their skin tone
- HHD was also the first AC game ever where you were allowed to put any type of furniture outside(except for wall items).
- Ordering items directly from your pocket. This is first introduced in HHD, where you didn't have a Nook store, and all of your previously cataloged furniture materialized from hammerspace. The more furniture you used to decorate, the more you had at your disposal. This mechanism never made it into NL: Welcome Amiibo. But a version of it returns in NH: Once you order 100 items from the nook machine in town hall, you're able to order cataloged furniture from your pocket, instead of having to talk to Tom Nook, the nooklings or the nook machine like in previous games.
- HHD removed Harriet from doing Hairstyles. Just like in NH, changing your skin, eye and hair style/color was done through an item interface: In HHD its by a modified Harriet's styling machine, and in NH its by a mirror. In fact, its through HHD that we see almost none of the npc's in their usual roles. Aside from Tom Nook, Isabelle, Lottie and Digby all of the npcs were removed from their normal roles that they usually play in Animal Crossing, because there was no need for that in HHD. Again, HHD's primary line of gameplay only had you designing homes for the villagers. So unless you had the npc amiibo cards, you would never see them in the game. Sound familiar?
- Being able to move furniture through a fourth-wall interface, and without physically pushing it around was introduced in HHD, and later made its way over to New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo. By default its included in NH.
- Flowers didn't die in HHD, and there was no need to water them. In fact HHD treated flowers, bushes, trees, etc. like furniture items, much like NH does. And like HHD, NH doesn't allow you to display flowers(trees and bushes too) inside, whereas you could dig up flowers and display them indoors in previous mainline games.
- Ceiling items. Coding for these were found from early datamining in NH. Ceiling items are readily available in HHD. If I'm not mistaken(and if someone can please check me on this) these were among the first things to be found from datamining NH code. Ceiling items are not available at all in New Leaf, nor New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo. And elements from New Leaf code(such as swimming, dream towns and villagers visiting) were added in much LATER updates than the coding for ceiling items. If NH were already built on New Leaf, there would have been no need to ADD New Leaf code for things like swimming, villager visiting(which we still don't have), and dreaming. It should have already been there from the start.
Most importantly, I think:
- The emphasis on decorating and world building. This one is the biggest one. Like I said above, communication for me was what made NL so much fun. Communication was the central focus of every Animal Crossing game, from Gamecube up to New Leaf. It's why each of those games focused so heavily on villager dialog, and focused so much on interacting with other players, because in those games, building relationships with those in your world was the primary theme. But this relationship-building seems optional at best in NH, whereas building your world and decorating is mandatory, like it is in HHD. After all, in NH you MUST have at least a 3-stars rating on your island to progress in the game. In the previous games of GC-NL, town ratings, while rewarding, were never required for anything beyond a token item like a gold axe or watering can. And you never NEEDED those, I mean unless you really liked chopping trees or liked having decorative and pretty items like gold roses.
The more I thought about it, the more I saw that HHD, like NH gave you almost absolute freedom to design wherever and however you chose. But in NH, it came at the cost of almost everything else that had been known to define Animal Crossing up to this point. This was fine for HHD because it was a spin-off game that few played. But when this is transposed on NH, it causes problems because people naturally expect that the next mainline successor in the series would have come from the previous mainline game, NL.
After all, isn't HHD considered a 'bad game'? Why build off of a 'bad game' instead of the highly successful one? Why would they even think of using a spin-off to launch a new focus in the series? And also, didn't HHD have a ton of furniture, whereas NH barely has any compared to the previous games?
Well for starters, HHD isn't considered a 'bad game', unlike say, Amiibo Festival. In fact, if you look up the ratings for HHD, you'll see that the game has mostly positive reactions and okay reviews. The biggest complaint about HHD is that it's bare bones, with almost nothing to do outside of designing and decorating. But again, HHD never claimed to be anything else. Even from the ads that were shown promoting the game, you KNEW beforehand what you were getting. If decorating and designing wasn't your thing, it wasn't the game for you. If it was, you'd very likely enjoy it. The decorating and designing aspect of NH is it's strongest point, especially with terraforming and landscaping. But for those who don't enjoy that side of AC or are not used to giving it much thought or attention, the game has little to do.
As for why the devs would succeed HHD as opposed to having a traditional predecessor like New Leaf: I have no idea, and can only guess. But if I had to guess, I would say that maybe the developers wanted to breakaway from the mundane and try something new. Maybe they thought the series was getting stale and wanted to shake things up. Maybe they saw that HHD was good but didn't get enough love, and wanted to use NH to show that. I have no clue. There are still plenty of elements of the previous AC games in NH, since NH is considered a mainline game, after all. You can't throw it all completely out. But I think that just like Pokemon, the AC mainline series got a bit of a reboot, albeit a much quieter one, using HHD as a starting point. It would explain why so much of the previous furniture, well known in the series, is missing: because if you want a fresh start, you don't want to keep attaching old strings to new ideas.
As for the furniture catalog itself, it's well known by now that Nintendo plans to have at least two more years worth of updates for NH. I do think there will be more events added, but if NH really is predicated on HHD, then I think a significant portion of future downloads will be item based, and that by the time the downloads are totally finished, the New Horizons item catalog will rival HHDs, which actually had a bigger catalog than New Leaf.
I went back and checked my play time in HHD. I first started playing HHD on 12/4/2015. Since then I have logged a total of 334 hours and 38 minutes in that game, with my average play per session being just over 2 hours. For a game where you do almost nothing else but design homes, that's a lot! Clearly, I liked playing HHD! I enjoyed the designing aspect of the game, even though that was pretty much all there was to it.
Putting it all together, HHD perfectly explains why I'm able to hold a seemingly contradictory opinion on NH, about there being nothing to do, but still having done so much: because both HHD and NH are predicated on world building and designing, which I clearly enjoy, but NH has a smaller focus on the communication and relationship-building aspects of the Gamecube-New Leaf games, which I also very much enjoyed. It's still present, but it has a smaller focus. The lack of relationship-building is fine for HHD because it never billed itself as anything but a design game, but with NH, it comes off as a bit confusing, because naturally people expect NH to be the successor of NL. Before, I felt that NH gutted many of NL's features and didn't replace them. But now I'm understanding that NH does not lack what New Leaf had. Its that the core focus of New Leaf was never meant to be there in the first place.
In the Gamecube through New Leaf era you have villagers to warm up to, NES and other mini games to play, npc stories to discover, and cities to visit. You had a role to fill as mayor, public work projects to build, ordinances to enact and a town to lead. You had petitions to sign, and dance clubs to hang out and dance in. You had a family to interact with on a distant island and a plethora of games with which to interact with and play together with your friends and strangers if you chose. You had so many ways to communicate.
The earlier games from Gamecube to New Leaf had communication as a central focus with elements of world building baked in. New Horizons, isn't like that. Like HHD, it has a world building focus with elements of communication baked in. In this sense, its like AC is almost now like the Legend of Zelda series: it has two timelines, one where you focus on building your relationships and the other where you focus on building your world. From Gamecube to New Leaf is the one that everyone is most familiar, but because that central focus isn't shown in NH, many think it's an AC outlier, but it really isn't. Its just a growing branch of HHD.
Anyway, those are my thoughts as long as they are. I'd like to hear some counterpoints or comments, but for now this seems to make the most sense to me. I think I'm gonna go back to my NL town from time to time. Maybe that way I can get the best of both worlds.
A few days ago, I came across an opinion thread. That person was basically saying that if someone had put X-amount of hours into playing NH, they shouldn't complain about the game having "no content" and should stop comparing it to New Leaf. I didn't respond to it, but my immediate reaction was that the opinion was unfair. I, for one, have well over 1k hours into NH, and yes, I enjoy the game. But at the same time, I also think the game needs more content and more for players to do. Still, even to me, my own opinion seemed so contradictory. Like, how could I have put that many hours into the game and still say there isn't much to do? That got me thinking...What exactly do I DO when I play New Horizons?
For the last few days I made myself hyperaware of how I played NH. I took notes of every action I made in the game, and for how long I did it. I fished, bug hunted, dived and shopped, but not for very long: on average I did these activities collectively for about 10-15 minutes. I dug fossils, and talked to and gave villagers gifts, but again, only for a few minutes(5-10). The vast majority of my time was spent either decorating, or doing activities related to decorating(for instance terraforming/landscaping so I could put down some new items). I timed myself spending close to 45 minutes-to over an hour doing this activity. This is what I do the most when I play NH.
It made me think for a while: did I play like this in New Leaf? I played New Leaf for years. Trying to think back on HOW I played and everything I did during that time, was almost a blur. Still, there was something I could use to get a glimpse of my New Leaf play style: my 3DS SD card. Like I said I played NL for years, I literally have thousands of pics of my activities in that game. I popped the card into my laptop, and immediately I saw that almost whenever I took a pic, it was with my character interacting with someone or something, whether one of my friends, talking to a villager, playing a mini-game on Tortimer isle, hide-and-seek, etc.
Going through my pics, it appeared that, for me, communication was what made NL so much fun. There were plenty of pics of me decorating my town, but whenever I saw an interaction, I could almost recall what it was about, esp. when it came to my friends. Case closed! Mystery solved! Communication was the key for me, and that's why I liked New Leaf more and why New Leaf was better! The End!...Right?
I was slowly going through the pics on the card, and again, I had thousands. As I'm looking at all of them, I notice that a great deal weren't even from New Leaf. They were Happy Home Designer pics that I was proud of and had posted all over the internet. These pics didn't show any communication or interaction at all. But I still remembered doing them, and I still got that same feeling of joy when I recalled them. And that's when it hit me: New Horizons immediate predecessor isn't New Leaf at all. It's Happy Home Designer.
The more I tried to compare New Horizons to New Leaf the more dissimilar they became. But when I stared comparing notes between NH and Happy Home Designer, it was like the two games lined up almost perfectly.
Happy Home Designer or HHD (for those unaware) is a sandbox Animal Crossing spin-off game released in 2015. The game didn't have much content, but it never pretended to. The sole purpose of the game was to design and decorate the homes of the villagers. There was almost no storyline involved and no scaling metric by which the game judged your design and decorating skills; you did have to use the minimum furniture assigned to each villager, but other than that, the game itself never judged you. Judgement of your skills came from other players. By uploading your rooms and designs, other HHD players would rate your creations from 1-5 on a few different metrics(cute, cool, unique and 'I'd live here'), with 5 stars being the best for each category. The game had very little dialog, a complete lack of any story, and streamlined the Animal Crossing world into a decorating and design focus. In HHD, you could choose the individual environment that you wanted to build your villager's homes in. And the environment of one villager's house had no effect on any other's, because while there was a town square filled with various buildings you could also design for, there was no central town/village like in mainline games. Each home existed in its own bubble unaware of any others.
If you wanted to build your villager's house in a desert you could. If you wanted a beach house, you could set a home in that environment too. If you wanted a home surrounded by waterfalls and cliffs you could build one there with no problem...sound familiar? Additionally, HHD introduced several features and functions that made its way into the updated Animal Crossing New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo game, and/or eventually into New Horizons. Going through New Horizons now, I can see HHD's influence very clearly:
- The interface for calling amiibos from the Nook machine into NH is exactly the same as it was in HHD. It was HHD that first used amiibos to call in npc's and villagers. This transferred later to ACNL:Welcome Amiibo, and was included from the beginning in New Horizons.
- The room sizes of your house. In all other AC games all max room sizes of the maximum home was 8x8. The max home size in NH however, is one of the many max home layouts in HHD, 6x6, 8x8 and 8x10.
- The almost complete lack of engagement from your villagers. In NH, you can talk to your villagers and there is some in-depth dialog--if you care to dig it out. But unlike in the previous main games, its not a primary focus, and its not upfront. Deep dialog with villagers is there for players who care to find it. Otherwise most people will get surface level villager interaction and not much beyond that.
- HHD was the first AC game ever where players could choose their skin tone
- HHD was also the first AC game ever where you were allowed to put any type of furniture outside(except for wall items).
- Ordering items directly from your pocket. This is first introduced in HHD, where you didn't have a Nook store, and all of your previously cataloged furniture materialized from hammerspace. The more furniture you used to decorate, the more you had at your disposal. This mechanism never made it into NL: Welcome Amiibo. But a version of it returns in NH: Once you order 100 items from the nook machine in town hall, you're able to order cataloged furniture from your pocket, instead of having to talk to Tom Nook, the nooklings or the nook machine like in previous games.
- HHD removed Harriet from doing Hairstyles. Just like in NH, changing your skin, eye and hair style/color was done through an item interface: In HHD its by a modified Harriet's styling machine, and in NH its by a mirror. In fact, its through HHD that we see almost none of the npc's in their usual roles. Aside from Tom Nook, Isabelle, Lottie and Digby all of the npcs were removed from their normal roles that they usually play in Animal Crossing, because there was no need for that in HHD. Again, HHD's primary line of gameplay only had you designing homes for the villagers. So unless you had the npc amiibo cards, you would never see them in the game. Sound familiar?
- Being able to move furniture through a fourth-wall interface, and without physically pushing it around was introduced in HHD, and later made its way over to New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo. By default its included in NH.
- Flowers didn't die in HHD, and there was no need to water them. In fact HHD treated flowers, bushes, trees, etc. like furniture items, much like NH does. And like HHD, NH doesn't allow you to display flowers(trees and bushes too) inside, whereas you could dig up flowers and display them indoors in previous mainline games.
- Ceiling items. Coding for these were found from early datamining in NH. Ceiling items are readily available in HHD. If I'm not mistaken(and if someone can please check me on this) these were among the first things to be found from datamining NH code. Ceiling items are not available at all in New Leaf, nor New Leaf: Welcome Amiibo. And elements from New Leaf code(such as swimming, dream towns and villagers visiting) were added in much LATER updates than the coding for ceiling items. If NH were already built on New Leaf, there would have been no need to ADD New Leaf code for things like swimming, villager visiting(which we still don't have), and dreaming. It should have already been there from the start.
Most importantly, I think:
- The emphasis on decorating and world building. This one is the biggest one. Like I said above, communication for me was what made NL so much fun. Communication was the central focus of every Animal Crossing game, from Gamecube up to New Leaf. It's why each of those games focused so heavily on villager dialog, and focused so much on interacting with other players, because in those games, building relationships with those in your world was the primary theme. But this relationship-building seems optional at best in NH, whereas building your world and decorating is mandatory, like it is in HHD. After all, in NH you MUST have at least a 3-stars rating on your island to progress in the game. In the previous games of GC-NL, town ratings, while rewarding, were never required for anything beyond a token item like a gold axe or watering can. And you never NEEDED those, I mean unless you really liked chopping trees or liked having decorative and pretty items like gold roses.
The more I thought about it, the more I saw that HHD, like NH gave you almost absolute freedom to design wherever and however you chose. But in NH, it came at the cost of almost everything else that had been known to define Animal Crossing up to this point. This was fine for HHD because it was a spin-off game that few played. But when this is transposed on NH, it causes problems because people naturally expect that the next mainline successor in the series would have come from the previous mainline game, NL.
After all, isn't HHD considered a 'bad game'? Why build off of a 'bad game' instead of the highly successful one? Why would they even think of using a spin-off to launch a new focus in the series? And also, didn't HHD have a ton of furniture, whereas NH barely has any compared to the previous games?
Well for starters, HHD isn't considered a 'bad game', unlike say, Amiibo Festival. In fact, if you look up the ratings for HHD, you'll see that the game has mostly positive reactions and okay reviews. The biggest complaint about HHD is that it's bare bones, with almost nothing to do outside of designing and decorating. But again, HHD never claimed to be anything else. Even from the ads that were shown promoting the game, you KNEW beforehand what you were getting. If decorating and designing wasn't your thing, it wasn't the game for you. If it was, you'd very likely enjoy it. The decorating and designing aspect of NH is it's strongest point, especially with terraforming and landscaping. But for those who don't enjoy that side of AC or are not used to giving it much thought or attention, the game has little to do.
As for why the devs would succeed HHD as opposed to having a traditional predecessor like New Leaf: I have no idea, and can only guess. But if I had to guess, I would say that maybe the developers wanted to breakaway from the mundane and try something new. Maybe they thought the series was getting stale and wanted to shake things up. Maybe they saw that HHD was good but didn't get enough love, and wanted to use NH to show that. I have no clue. There are still plenty of elements of the previous AC games in NH, since NH is considered a mainline game, after all. You can't throw it all completely out. But I think that just like Pokemon, the AC mainline series got a bit of a reboot, albeit a much quieter one, using HHD as a starting point. It would explain why so much of the previous furniture, well known in the series, is missing: because if you want a fresh start, you don't want to keep attaching old strings to new ideas.
As for the furniture catalog itself, it's well known by now that Nintendo plans to have at least two more years worth of updates for NH. I do think there will be more events added, but if NH really is predicated on HHD, then I think a significant portion of future downloads will be item based, and that by the time the downloads are totally finished, the New Horizons item catalog will rival HHDs, which actually had a bigger catalog than New Leaf.
I went back and checked my play time in HHD. I first started playing HHD on 12/4/2015. Since then I have logged a total of 334 hours and 38 minutes in that game, with my average play per session being just over 2 hours. For a game where you do almost nothing else but design homes, that's a lot! Clearly, I liked playing HHD! I enjoyed the designing aspect of the game, even though that was pretty much all there was to it.
Putting it all together, HHD perfectly explains why I'm able to hold a seemingly contradictory opinion on NH, about there being nothing to do, but still having done so much: because both HHD and NH are predicated on world building and designing, which I clearly enjoy, but NH has a smaller focus on the communication and relationship-building aspects of the Gamecube-New Leaf games, which I also very much enjoyed. It's still present, but it has a smaller focus. The lack of relationship-building is fine for HHD because it never billed itself as anything but a design game, but with NH, it comes off as a bit confusing, because naturally people expect NH to be the successor of NL. Before, I felt that NH gutted many of NL's features and didn't replace them. But now I'm understanding that NH does not lack what New Leaf had. Its that the core focus of New Leaf was never meant to be there in the first place.
In the Gamecube through New Leaf era you have villagers to warm up to, NES and other mini games to play, npc stories to discover, and cities to visit. You had a role to fill as mayor, public work projects to build, ordinances to enact and a town to lead. You had petitions to sign, and dance clubs to hang out and dance in. You had a family to interact with on a distant island and a plethora of games with which to interact with and play together with your friends and strangers if you chose. You had so many ways to communicate.
The earlier games from Gamecube to New Leaf had communication as a central focus with elements of world building baked in. New Horizons, isn't like that. Like HHD, it has a world building focus with elements of communication baked in. In this sense, its like AC is almost now like the Legend of Zelda series: it has two timelines, one where you focus on building your relationships and the other where you focus on building your world. From Gamecube to New Leaf is the one that everyone is most familiar, but because that central focus isn't shown in NH, many think it's an AC outlier, but it really isn't. Its just a growing branch of HHD.
Anyway, those are my thoughts as long as they are. I'd like to hear some counterpoints or comments, but for now this seems to make the most sense to me. I think I'm gonna go back to my NL town from time to time. Maybe that way I can get the best of both worlds.
