What do you think is the reason for missing features?

[Etown20]

Since the game's release, a lot of people have talked about the game missing features from New Leaf, but I'm curious what people's thoughts are as to why Nintendo removed these features.

Are they intentionally withholding features for future updates?

Did they deliberately remove features to take the game in a different direction?

Or is it possible they just ran out of time?

7 years between games seems like plenty of time, but I don't actually know which team Nintendo had working on the game and/or for how long. There's a popular modder who has said that villagers visiting your house was in the original code and then removed from the game. It seems odd to me that they would remove or hold back something like that, which makes me wonder if they just ran out of time. Of course, it could be a combination of all three as well.

I'm curious to hear what everyone thinks the reasons might be.

 

[Khaelis]

All of them, to be honest.

- They delayed it once to polish it, which they definitely did.
- They decided to take a different route with this game by release content updates to prolong the game's life. It also allowed them to release the game a bit earlier, despite the delay.
- They honestly could have delayed this game again to release the game with holidays present, but refer to the second point.

In the end, they released a great game. Even if some design choices are odd to many, because we're use to having things ready-to-go via time travelling, which probably soured a lot of opinions on the game.

 

[nightglow]

I think it is a mixture of things.
1. For updates. Keeps the audience playing the game longer potentially extending the use of Nintendo Online. I also over heard a little bit about people complaining of being bored of the last animal crossing game pretty quick. I don't know if that is true.
2. Ran out of development time. I don't know if that is fully true, but I do know this other method is a budge cost saver. If the game did poorly for whatever reason, they could just not do as large of updates for as long or stop it completely. Also there was alot of things I imagine they had to build from scratch since this is a Switch. I am not sure how that all works as I know nothing of game building and development but I think it is a good guess. Covid was another monkey wrench into the mix. I also heard there were delays in release too. A year delay?

 

[Red Cat]

I think a lot of it is intentional for updates. They added Leif, Redd, and diving early after release, and I don't think they just needed a few more weeks to finish those features. They likely had those ready to go when the game was launched. It wouldn't make sense for time to be an issue since it's a lot less time consuming to recycle old features than to develop new ones like terraforming. Maybe time explains the lack of furniture in NH, but none of the NPCs do anything that complicated compared to previous games. Redd and Leif are just Nook's Cranny with different items and skins. Gulivarrr is just a reskinned Gulliver and functions almost exactly the same way. Diving is basically the same as in NL.

They could be saving gyroids / Brewster for an update or just decided to remove them since most people don't like gyroids and Brewster never had much of a functional role in previous games. It would be a shame if gyroids don't return because they would actually be more usable if they can be placed outside. Other features/NPCs are more likely to be gone for good. Pelly, Phyllis, and Pete have basically been replaced by the airport and Resident Services, so I don't see them coming back. Katrina/luck was more of an annoying mechanic than a fun one, so I think they just added the King Tut mask and balloons for tripping and that will be the end of that. Tortimer and island tours may or may not be back. Keeping Tortimer out and effectively making him "deceased" would be the strongest signal that they are intentionally moving in a different direction. Island tours were only in NL, so it may just be a one game gimmick like the city in City Folk that makes the game distinct from the others.

More furniture and features could be coming once the seasonal/holiday cycle is complete and there will need to be other types of new content to keep the game fresh. I'm convinced that there will be paid DLC at some point. I wouldn't be surprised if it came shortly after the one-year anniversary. At that point, it would look less like "withholding" features as part of a blatant cash grab and more like they actually spent the past year after launch working on it.

 

[John Wick]

IMO, NH isn't a high priority for them.

Pocket Camp is their cash cow.

They said Pocket Camp was made to ease new players in to AC, but it's powered by greed.
They couldn't care less if Pocket Camp players played NH.
They have them where they want them.
On their mobiles, forking over real money for fortune cookies with better items than we will ever get in NH.

They left out hundreds of fantastic items from NL, and I doubt we will get them in any update.

I feel NH was made the way it is, to try and ease long time AC players in to the Pocket Camp style of play, with the crafting, etc.

They got lazy.

NH could have been the perfect AC game.

I won't be buying another AC game after this.

 

[Mayor Todd]

I think they're getting more mileage out of Pocket Camp than they thought they would, and they adjusted New Horizons features (left things out) to make sure that New Horizons wouldn't give devoted fans of Pocket Camp enough good reasons to jump ship.

 

[mermaidshelf]

Nintendo said they delayed the game to give their workers a better work life balance so that leads me to believe they had a lot of features they wanted to include but couldn't due to an already pushed back released date. I do think they want to keep us playing longer by parsing out the updates but we're coming up on the anniversary and there are a lot of things that we haven't seen. I'd be happy if this year they started releasing more features and QoL updates/changes rather than events and holiday stuff.

 

[Xara]

hm. i honestly haven’t thought much about this but i definitely feel like it’s a little bit of #1 and #3. like already mentioned, pocket camp was probably a big source of inspiration in regards to locking features behind updates but also, i remember that prior to new horizon’s release, there was a pretty big discussion on how nintendo doesn’t really like the concept of time traveling and so that’s likely another reason that they went the updates route + why events are apparently going to be time locked from now on. the fact that the game was already delayed once (if i remember correctly, the initial release date was sometime in late 2019) probably aided in that decision a bit, too, since they obviously didn’t want to delay again even if the game wasn’t done; and honestly, i don’t think it was. my theory is they focused on the bigger, more important elements of the game first (the main buildings, the graphics, crafting, etc), leaving them with probably not much time to cram anything else in before the big release, which might explain why some smaller features are currently missing (villagers visiting your home/you being invited to theirs, tropical fruits, etc). all in all, i think that while some of these decisions were intentional, the fact that the game wasn’t finished by march probably played a huge role in how features are being introduced now.

 

[JellyBeans]

I've also never thought about it too much, but I do think there definitely is an element of things being withheld so that they could be introduced in updates. this obviously drags out the lifespan of the game (or at least was intended to), as it keeps people coming back for more every time something new is introduced. it hasn't exactly worked as a lot of people are upset about the lack of certain aspects of gameplay and have run out of things to do, but that's down to personal gameplay. and also the time travelling aspect xara mentioned probably has a role in it - time locking events prevents them from being 'spoiled' to other players who don't time travel. I'm hoping certain things weren't removed entirely because while it's totally valid to want to take the game in a different direction and branch out into new things, there are some parts of the game that just feel so essentially part of the franchise that it feels empty without them.
and I'm sure they did just partially run out of development time, and after delaying the game once they didn't want to delay it again so just released it as it was and continued to roll out updates when the time comes. they could've delayed it and released it as a more 'finished' product, but that means people won't keep coming back to the game over time as new things are released.

 

[DrewAC]

I personally believe we don’t have certain features from New Leaf in this game due to a combination of the developers choosing to take the game in another direction and the allocation of resources into other areas of the game.

To suggest something like Pocket Camp having any bearing on the game’s quality is almost pure cynicism, IMHO. Pocket Camp has a completely separate development team from the main series, and the primary reason it was created, just as well as the other mobile Nintendo games, was to increase exposure to their franchises. New Horizons has quickly become the fastest and best selling Animal Crossing game to date, and I think ACPC had some bearing on its success. With that said though, I’m almost certain the player base of ACPC has dropped significantly since the release of ACNH. I went on solely to check my friends list, and it’s primarily dead with the exception of around 4 players (out of a number far greater than that). Nintendo knows customer retention and satisfaction as well as profits are all found within selling their own hardware and complete games rather than freemium games using their existing IPs, even though they pull in some profit, too.

And aside from all of that, I do not believe the developers literally sat back thinking what they could omit to put in an update later. What benefit would they have for going that route? Putting all of the features they’ve released later in updates such as diving, bushes, etc. in the game upon release would have only made the game more appealing to purchase. Instead, I think it’s pretty obvious they chose to omit features such as those to focus on what was in the game already and polish the game to the best of their ability.

 

[Tindre]

- They decided to take a different route with this game by release content updates to prolong the game's life. It also allowed them to release the game a bit earlier, despite the delay.

Im so tired of this mindset today in gaming, games as a service/lifestyle. Artificially "prolonging" a games life by making a game start out barebones as and then to add free content for years for a high "retention rate" of players. Everything turned into mobile games basically, using dirty psychological tricks to keep you hooked. FOMO is one of them, frustration another, jealousy of other players a third.. there are presentations you can watch on this. My problem of introducing this kind of "business model" (in quotation marks since theres no paid dlc or in game store, yet) in AC is that it already was a game I played everyday for years, it wasn't needed imo. It just makes the people who get it first have a lesses experience and withholding things we know will come like swimming, art, gyroids, Brewster, makes me feel bored of the game now, like why is it that important to have monthly updates to a game that has no other income than that first purchase? Are they planning on selling things? It makes me uneasy. The gacha system of going to islands, maybe they will sell us "instant tickets" to "search for villagers on islands" and then we just get to pick, maybe thats why they made it so tedious to use nook mile tickets... maybe they will sell us unbreakable tool packs.. idk. I suspect the worst I guess. Call me paranoid. But personally I would rather have waited for a full release than the drip feed we are getting now, because I am already tired of what little we have now and I went back to New Leaf and I feel so much more satisfied after a shorter time playing. Everything is faster (the dialouge is soooo fast) and smoother and more calming to me and it feels more like my little escape world rather than something I am building to show other people, which is what I feel when I play New Horizons.
Kinda scattered post but I hope I could make some sense to what I am thinking..

 

[Rosch]

I believe this game was developed by the same team that did Splatoon, the reason why the we got the same periodic update treatment... or so people say (haven't played Splatoon).

This approach is great because the game keeps updated and you can keep coming back to it with something new. But it sucks greatly because the game is practically missing content when it's not supposed to be.

I'd rather have a complete base game, then a completely new DLC (think NL with welcome amiibo update). NH right now is basically an incomplete game being patched up with content that was supposedly available right from the start, that somehow we are led to think that they are new.

 

[Jam86]

tbh i didn't care about acnh until february so i didn't know it was delayed but either way, i'm thinking they ran out of time
so nintendo rushed what is pretty much an incomplete game and released it while it was still full of glitches
then they probably thought they could just release anything else they missed as updates

i think the lack of furniture/clothes/npc's was because there wasn't enough space on the game
but there's a lot of stuff in NH that they didn't actually have to put in, i was recently talking to my sister about this, like why is there so many different coloured bunk beds or floor lamps
it's just basic stuff like that they had no reason to add

to be fair the game's still good and the updates keep people playing but yeah, it could be way better

 

[Imbri]

Because it's New Horizons and not New Leaf 2.

Honestly, I think they have taken things in a different direction. The whole concept of moving to a (mostly) barren island and building it from scratch goes along with the idea of not having everything at your fingertips from day one. The updates and things that have come into the game are at a good pace and allow island development to progress nicely. I wouldn't have wanted to be able to plunk everything down in the first week. What's the point of continuing to play and develop my island into something unique that reflects me?

 

[JKDOS]

The first 3.

* They purposely withheld features to give us them when they fit. (e.g. Holidays, Nature Day, Diving, etc.)

* They purposely withheld features because of the direction (e.g. Harriet. Replaced by mirrors)

* They purposely withheld features as to not delayed the game further. The game was already delayed for about 4 months. I don't think they wanted to delay it any longer. (e.g. Dreaming)


Last but not least, COVID-19 more than likely disrupted things, which delayed their progress on the game's development further pushing them behind schedule.

 

[McRibbie]

I don't think it's being intentionally withheld, or that they're planning to introduce mechanics you'd get in a ftp game (because, y'know, it's a £50 game)... that's going WAY too far. I also wouldn't describe Nook Miles as a gacha system, because it doesn't involve IRL money at all.

IIRC I also saw someone say that NH's not been in constant development for 7 years, more that they came up with the concept after NL released but the devs have also been working on other things during this time, including the Welcome Amiibo update and HHD, and then started developing it properly in 2017 (but please don't quote me on this, no idea where it's from)

What I do think is that the game's still in active development, and they're planning to introduce more things over the course of the next couple of years, some of which they've been working on since before launch (like the other museum parts and the cooking mechanic), and some of which have been started on since the game's release (such as the ton of items that are apparently coming into the game according to one dataminer), as well as re-doing holidays based on feedback from the AC community (which I think's the one advantage of having NH as a GAAS)

 

[Monokuma73]

I do believe, when NH was released they may be worried a bit about any connections to New Leaf and they failed twice, releasing AC:HHD and AC amiibo Festival which was a complete failure. I want to notice amiibo Festival looked more or less like New Leaf, but game went in wrong direction. If I would take a risk and release new AC, most probably I would to make something not similar to this failure.
But this is my opinion, and have no proof to back up this.
However, looking at "amiibo Festival engine", they could release New Leaf in HD... but maybe it wouldn't be a good call? In my opinion Wii U was "killed" too quick and Switch introduced too soon.
Except significant changes, like terraforming, crafting - many things from NL was implemented... more or less copy/pasted. This would be acceptable in my opinion, as many of us really missing specific features / buildings / characters and I'm not alone.
Significant changes we noticed in Summer Update, where we got diving (delayed!), but I'm not sure if diving was implemented well, or maybe just been simplified too much. Do you remember jellyfish interfering with diving (in NL) and creatures escaping and fence never stopped them? Maybe they realised it was too hard... or maybe someone decided it's completely unnecessary.
"Pumpkins update" was related to Halloween, I agree... but it was like something what has been started without proper preparation, not finished and maybe withheld giving a space for future updates... not so sure. Farming aspects of this game could be something really interesting... but became just some "money making machine", it's convenient... but I feel like something is missing... maybe variety of crops, maybe something else.
I think, it's worth to wait not only for following (January) update, but for next one, see what they may promise.

 

[jefflomacy]

The project was mismanaged and patches were the only way to salvage the product without another year or two of delays. Gamers have shown that they are O.K. with receiving incomplete products and Nintendo is just the latest studio to join the club with this type of release. Oh, yes, the gamers complain on Internet forums, but they line up to buy early access anyway. Remember, companies only look at sales and your purchase is seen as compliance. I mean, I bought it. I love Animal Crossing. You either buy it or have no Animal Crossing and they know that.

There is no financial incentive to delay features and cause online strife about the game being "boring" because it lacks features of prior titles. The game would have sold the same, if not more, if the whole game was available for purchase in March 2020. I've worked in corporate software for about five years now, and this kind of release is common. We call it releasing a "minimally viable product."

 

[meggiewes]

I marked other because I think the overall design philosophy was based on the same games as a service model that was a smash hit with Splatoon. The games as a service model has become more popular with developers in the last few years because it means that they can release incomplete games and finish them later. I also think that the surprise Welcome Amiibo Update for New Leaf was testing the waters to see how updates would be received with Animal Crossing because that was the first time an Animal Crossing game had been updated like that. It was a big success and they probably used the data from that to justify making New Horizons with the games as a service model.

The next year will most likely be the year to determine if Animal Crossing is viable to be developed like this in the future or not. Only time will tell on that one.

 

[Elias_]

I marked other because I think the overall design philosophy was based on the same games as a service model that was a smash hit with Splatoon. The games as a service model has become more popular with developers in the last few years because it means that they can release incomplete games and finish them later. I also think that the surprise Welcome Amiibo Update for New Leaf was testing the waters to see how updates would be received with Animal Crossing because that was the first time an Animal Crossing game had been updated like that. It was a big success and they probably used the data from that to justify making New Horizons with the games as a service model.

The next year will most likely be the year to determine if Animal Crossing is viable to be developed like this in the future or not. Only time will tell on that one.

Agreed, I also think they wanted Animal Crossing to be a "games as a service" - experience. I guess it would make sense for them to withhold certain features like the festivals just to keep the game fresh over a longer period of time. I'm not sure, though, whether that was the right approach. I know a lot of people that quit the game because they didn't feel there was much to do after a while. Shop upgrades for example could have been kept and would have motivated players to keep playing. That's a shame because in maybe one or two years, NH could catch up to New Leaf in terms of features and a lot of players will never experience that. I hope there will be some larger updates this year that can get players to return to the game.