One of the most highly-criticized features of Animal Crossing: New Horizons is its multiplayer system. Strangely enough, though, multiplayer was also one of the reasons the game became such a runaway success. It released during the beginning of the pandemic in 2020, which played a big part in why New Horizons sold almost 50 million units. Players were able to use Animal Crossing as something of a communication medium during this time – where people couldn’t meet up and hang out in real life, they still could in Animal Crossing to an extent. That being said, once players actually visited each others’ islands, they found that there wasn’t all that much to do. You could take others on a quick tour of your island, but that wouldn’t take much time After that, all that’s left is to walk around and look at things. Animal Crossing’s multiplayer has always been like this, to an extent, but its shallowness kind of hit a peak with New Horizons.
So today, we’re looking at multiplayer in the Animal Crossing series and how Nintendo could improve it for the next game in the series. There’s real potential for something great here, and we have some ideas on how to make it much better.
Mini-games
This is the biggest improvement Nintendo could make. In Animal Crossing: New Leaf, you could round up a bunch of players and take them to Tortimer Island, where you could participate in simple mini-games together to earn exclusive medals. Unfortunately, Nintendo removed all the mini-games from New Horizons, which is part of why multiplayer feels so empty. Sure, you can play hide-and-seek on a well-designed island, but that’s about it! The next Animal Crossing would hugely benefit from some mini-games to play with others. These could come in the form of Tortimer Island mini-games, but why stop there? Introduce a card table item that lets players play simple card games together or against each other. New Leaf featured furniture items that activated mini-games, but these weren’t multiplayer. More of these in the next Animal Crossing would not only increase replay value for single player, but they could be made into multiplayer games to give groups of players more to do.
Decorate together
As soon as you invite even one player to your island, you lose the ability to decorate it entirely. You can’t place furniture, you can’t grab furniture, you can’t adjust fences, you can’t create cliffs, you can’t modify the river, and so on. “You can’t” is actually a great way to describe multiplayer in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. There’s an absolutely huge number of things you completely lose access to in multiplayer. Especially in the case of decorating, this significantly stifles creativity. Inviting over a friend to help decorate your island would be a great and productive use of time together. You could give individual friends permission to place and remove furniture items, and when you’re done decorating for the day and just want to hang out, you could remove the permission via the menu. This could also count for inside houses – invite a friend inside, and the two of you could brainstorm ideas for room decoration together. But you can’t do that, either. One other neat idea would be to allow other players to visit your Happy Home Paradise island so they can see all of the houses you’ve designed. It’s absolutely bizarre that the DLC focuses on creative designing, but offers no way to share your work other than posting pictures on social media. Of course, there’s no guarantee a mode like this will be in the next Animal Crossing, but it’s a bizarre decision nonetheless.
No cutscenes
Have you ever tried to get a group of eight players all together on your island? If you have, then you know exactly what we’re talking about: it takes forever to the point where it isn’t even worth it. Every time a player connects to your island, everyone else is stopped in their tracks and has to watch the incoming player fly over to the island. During that time, any other player who tries to join gets a communication error until the cutscene is over. You have to watch this minutes-long cutscene seven times over with a full party, and any time one of them leaves, you’re stopped in your tracks to watch them go home. To say this system is broken is an understatement: if you just want to hang out with a bunch of friends all at once, you’ll wind up wasting tons of times watching them come and go. The next Animal Crossing game absolutely needs to revamp the way you join other players in multiplayer. No cutscenes, no interruptions, and certainly no watching the same cutscene seven times over. It should also be possible to open and close your gates from your NookPhone, assuming that returns in the next game.
Lift pointless restrictions
As mentioned earlier, there are more features that get cut off when you open your island to multiplayer. For one, the museum stops accepting donations for as long as your gates are open. You would think that Nintendo would encourage online multiplayer so that players could help each other finish their museum’s collections. But other players can’t donate to your museum at all, and you yourself can’t even make donations when you have company over. You also can’t order items from the Nook Shopping app while other players are on the island – a completely baffling decision. Balloons don’t spawn when friends are over, either. New Horizons locks a lot of its seasonal DIY recipes behind randomly-spawning balloons, and because they stop appearing when you have company over, you’re essentially punished for playing the game with multiple people. Perhaps more frustrating is that you can’t use ABDs to get money on other players’ islands. If you involve yourself in multi-million Bell transactions, you have to fill up your inventory, go to a friend’s island, drop off the money, go home, and repeat the process. Likewise, you can’t access your storage on friends’ islands, even though both of these things were possible in Animal Crossing: New Leaf. New Horizons added so, so many pointless restrictions to multiplayer, and the next game in the series needs all of them lifted.
Admittedly, we’re still probably thinking inside the box here. These are mostly improvements that could be made to Animal Crossing: New Horizons. The next game in the series, whenever that may be, will no doubt bring with it many new gameplay innovations that we couldn’t possibly predict. There are plenty of other ways Nintendo could improve multiplayer in the next Animal Crossing game, and these are just a few of the important ones we noticed from our thousands of hours in New Horizons. How would you improve multiplayer in the next Animal Crossing game? Let us know in the comments down below.
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