Animal Crossing Wishes and Pet Peeves – Part 1
With Nintendo participating in E3 this year, I am hoping that we will get some news (although unlikely) about Animal Crossing Wii U. I think a new AC game would sell even more consoles than the new Smash Brothers; and how awesome would it be if they came out with an Animal Crossing branded Wii U? I think we would have to buy another Wii U.
As Wolf and I am still playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf, we regularly think and talk about the things we would like to see or dislike about the series. Below are some of the suggestions and pet peeves that we’ve discussed:
- The number one item on almost any hardcore AC player’s list is to totally eliminate grass wear. I don’t see implementing this as much of a stretch – it can even been done through town ordinances, like removing the need to water.
Also related: get rid of the permanent dead spots of grass. City Folk had them, but those could be grown back in. In New Leaf, they stay dead no matter what you do. - Ordinances were such a great addition to New Leaf that it’s silly to be limited to a single active one. It would be nice if you could unlock them all, but maybe with a catch of some-sort. For example, each new ordinance would cost more to unlock: the first is currently 20,000 Bells and fee could double each time, i.e., 40K, then 80K, followed by 160K, and so on.
- When I first saw Isabelle in the earliest trailers for New Leaf, I wasn’t sure how I felt about her. She ended up being one of the most endearing NPCs in the game. When you first start a new town you interact with her a lot, but over time you have less and less reason to go see her. This could be fixed while addressing the following issue.
- If you cycle to get villagers that you like, you will eventually get to a point where you have mostly villagers that you don’t want to move out. Then, every single day, you end up trying to figure out who is planning on moving with no easy way to trigger the “moving” conversation. A simple solution to this would be for Isabelle to tell you who is on their way out, much like Booker and Cooper tell you of the going on’s in your town. We would imagine an Isabelle conversation to go something like this: “Good morning, Lady Mayor. Today Genjii put in a notice that he is moving on the 5th. Lobo would like your help with something. Lolly has lost her favorite mitten. And don’t forget that the rainy season is coming up so don’t forget your umbrella.”
- Villagers spend most of their time meandering around the village aimlessly. Sometimes you will see them water flowers, or pretending to fish, and really rarely sneaking up on a bug only to scare it off. We would like to see much more activities for them. Imagine that when they shake the trees, occasionally a bee’s nest would fall out and the bees would chase them around for bit before they got stung. Then they could ask you for medicine. When they fish or sneak up on bugs, they could sometimes actually catch something. They could dig up things or walk around drinking coffee. It would be cool if you would see villagers pulling pranks on one another. Like walking behind another one and scaring them. And how freaking awesome would it be if the villagers went swimming?
- A really big issue that Nintendo needs to address is problems that cause people to cycle.
- The first issue is “WiFi disease.” When you visit a friend with the game’s built-in WiFi, a villager that recently moved out of your town can, and usually does, move into your friends’ village. This “feature” needs to be completely removed. If you really wanted a villager that was moving out from your friend’s town, you would have gone over and asked them to move in when they were in boxes.
- When you know someone is moving in, normally you would cycle so that you can place their house somewhere desirable. People want control over where villagers place their homes. Going along with the mayor theme of the game, you could zone an area as residential. This would still allow for some randomness but avoid bad house placement. Other fixes could be that houses cannot be placed on paths-textures or hybrid flowers. That would allow you to kind of force locations for possible house placement. Villagers should also not be allowed to place houses in front of or too near any player’s houses or other buildings.
- Finally, and probably the reason people cycle the most, is to get a favorite villager in the town’s public work campsite. There are currently 333 of them, so the odds of you actually getting a villager you want is extremely slim. Players need some way to queue up villagers and there are many ways to do this while still keeping a random element as to who shows up in your campsite. One way I thought of would be to have a pen pal system in the game. You could be a pen pal to any villager not in your town. And once you reach certain amount of pen pals, they will start showing up in your campsite, saying that they wanted to actually meet you face to face.
Continued in Part 2…
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