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Nintendo recently released an update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, marking the first update to the game in several months. The version 2.0.6 update notes for Animal Crossing: New Horizons were also released by Nintendo for players and parents to review.Released on March 20, 2020, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a game that came out at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. As people went through quarantine, Nintendo's dose of the simple island life was one of the games that brought people together. From hosting graduations to throwing parties, and finding different and creative ways to turn their village and villagers into a Christmas display, Animal Crossing: New Horizons came out at the perfect time for new and returning players as a way to see their loved ones virtually.Yet, players that expected anything major from version 2.0.6 may be left disappointed. According to the Nintendo release notes, version 2.0.6 addressed several issues to improve the gameplay experience. Back in February 2022, version 2.0.5 fixed game-specific issues dealing with messages, the Room Sketch app, and the Happy Home Paradise expansion to name a few. Version 2.0.6 was released nine months to the day since version 2.0.5, which marked the longest stretch of time between updates to Animal Crossing: New Horizons so far. Despite the slowdown in updates, Animal Crossing: New Horizons remains as popular as ever, as it claimed the title of Japan's best-selling game earlier this year.
However, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was not the only first-party Nintendo game to receive a coincidentally timed update out of nowhere. Twitter user OatmealDome, known for datamining and covering Nintendo Switch system updates in greater detail than Nintendo's release notes, stated that four Nintendo first-party titles received updates on November 14. Updates were made to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Splatoon 2, ARMS, and Super Mario Maker 2, and OatmealDome stated that these sudden updates were likely due to major security bugs found in a common code component that these particular games may share.
OatmealDome later replied that the updates were likely not done to update those games' netcode to that found in Splatoon 3, and stated that doing so would require some time and heavy investment to pull off. However, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa stated during a recent Q&A session that they were looking into ways to improve the Nintendo Switch Online service via further enhancements. Whether this includes improvements to the netcode of older games or not remains to be seen.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available now for Nintendo Switch.
Source: Nintendo
