The Animal Crossing series has always put an emphasis on taking time to relax and enjoy a cozy village life at the player's own pace, and Animal Crossing: New Horizons really embodies this idea with its focus on island life. While taking a leisurely pace in a low-risk game like Animal Crossing: New Horizons can be enjoyable for many fans, some of the more hardcore players see this pacing as a hindrance in their ability to progress to the meat of the game. As such, the next Animal Crossing title should focus on bringing the best of both worlds and give players the option for faster-paced gameplay.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons' customization options added a lot to the series by giving players the ability to build their islands exactly how they want through mechanics like terraforming, choosing where to place villager houses, and the ability to place furniture outside. However, these features are largely locked behind a slow tutorial section where the player must clean up their island and start making space for buildings before unlocking the tools necessary to begin customization. While this tutorial helped players feel like they were building their very own island from scratch, it set the slow pace of the rest of the game right from the start.

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Animal Crossing Could Greatly Benefit from Better Pacing Options

Even once players finish the tutorial section of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, there are still a lot of pacing issues that slow the game down and keep players from building their dream island in a timely manner. Navigating menus to access things like Nook Stop and Island Designer grind progress to a halt while trying to complete daily tasks. On top of that, text and dialogue speed are another pitfall that make navigating through Animal Crossing: New Horizons' various menus even more of a hassle, and even the ability to hold a button to speed the dialogue up could be improved by an option to skip it all together.

Crafting, while an important new addition to the gameplay loop of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, is held back by how slow and tedious the process can be. Many players have faced a situation where they need to craft multiples of an item for a given project only to realize they have to craft each one separately, one by one. If this process wasn't tedious enough, they have to sit through the prolonged crafting animation each time they want to craft an item, though at least this animation can be sped up by button mashing.

While not directly related to island building, trying to play Animal Crossing: New Horizons with friends can also be tedious due to the steps involved with making the player's island accessible to them. Having to navigate through a series of menus at Dodo Airlines in order to open the island's gate for players and then send a Dodo Code can get tiresome. Even giving players the option to open their island's gates from anywhere and cut out the need to talk to Orville at Dodo Airlines would make this process more streamlined.

Given how slow a lot the game can be, and it's nature as a game that advances in real time, it's no surprise that many players engage in the controversial practice of time traveling in Animal Crossing: New Horizons to advance the game forward faster. A simple way a future Animal Crossing game could reduce this need for time traveling would be to give players more optional ways to increase the pace of the game, such as text speed options and override permissions for certain features like opening town gates and terraforming to decrease the number of menus to navigate. If the series is intent on having players build their towns from scratch, these features are a must.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is available for Nintendo Switch.

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