I think they meant “banked” in the sense that Nintendo definitely profited off releasing it during a pandemic. Not necessarily that they did it on purpose.
I think I’d agree with a lot of your points if Nintendo hadn’t had 7/8 years to make the game. I understand the DLC aspect for holidays and adding them as appropriate so people don’t time travel, but Nintendo is getting a bad habit of trying to force people to play a certain way rather than letting a person play the game they paid $60+ the way they want to. If they want to time travel to Christmas etc, let them.
It’s very much like in Pokémon where they keep removing options like turning off the EXP share. Giving a player LESS options on how they play their own game is never a good thing imo.
They removed so many options on how people can play to prevent time travellers spoiling stuff, which is fair I suppose. But they removed so many other things like shop upgrades that the game just felt slow imo. The stuff they added to fill the time like NMT islands and farming materials gets boring very fast
a) yeah, they definitely did profit off of releasing it in a pandemic. Not gonna deny that. I just feel as if Blue genuinely thinks what I said there.
b) generally don't think they were fully focussed on developing NH for those whole 7 years, tbh (unless it's a Nintendo Switch Sports-style deal where they ended getting really lost during development). Think that AC was generally going to skip the Wii U even before it turned out to be a flop because it's always done worse on consoles than it has on handhelds, think that you've also got to take into consideration that the development of HHD, amiibo Festival, the Welcome amiibo update and Pocket Camp also happened during this period. Admittedly, one purely exists to manufacture amiibo and fill a release slot for a console that is dying so bad that its successor has already been hinted at by the time this game was announced, one is a gacha mobile game developed purely because said dying console flopping got Nintendo into the nearly as unsuccessful Nintendo Mobile Games sideline (this game and a couple of others are its only successes!), one is a fairly decent home-designing game that also has the horrible "make a town" aspect included, and one is the Welcome amiibo update, which is at best very welcome, and at worst the closest mainline AC has ever come to free-to-play mechanics. Two and a half of them are clearly them prototyping and workshopping ideas for NH, the other one has a couple of nice ideas and is a cheap way to get Isabelle and Digby amiibo but should never have been made, but they take up a good 4 of those 7 years, and I don't think they started development on the game properly until around late 2016 - early 2017 at the earliest (so it ended up with roughly the same amount of dev time as NL, and NL at least had the benefit of reusing a lot of assets from LGTTC).
c) even as a former time-traveller myself, going "if they want to time travel, let them" is just
depressing. If even your core fanbase can't even engage with one of the core mechanics of your game properly because "waa, it's inconvenient!" (yes, that's the point), it reflects badly on it. The game's designed around the real-time clock. Time travelling isn't something you can pass off as an option, it's just being impatient. You're going to get everything done sooner, sure... but it sucks, because you run out of things to do, on top of being the opposite of what the game's designed around! "Oh, but Nintendo's getting into a bad habit of trying to force people to play a certain way rather than letting a person play the game they paid $60+ the way they want to" ...yeah, they're professional game developers, they designed the thing, they've got a vision in mind. I think it's ultimately more respectful to try and engage with it on its own terms instead of Karening all over the place because a game designed to be slow... is slow, and is discouraging you to go fast.
I
do think that the ways that they've tried getting around this phenomenon generally end up neither discouraging the player who's time-travelling to stop doing so
and end up detracting from the life-sim experience (being the mayor so you can enact ordinances, I'm talking about you in particular), tho, and to some extent makes me just want to go "Aya, look... ignore basically everything fans do, trying to do something based on what they do is just going to end up with people shouting at you". It's a horrible compromise!
d) I think the reasons for oversimplifying a lot of things can be boiled down to either "trying to do something different", "making things more approachable to newcomers, or people who've only played Pocket Camp" or "using the time and resources required to model stuff like other shop upgrades to model stuff like furniture, which is if we're being honest, the most needed thing here"
I really miss that!
