There’s a deep love for Nintendo’s Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but despite it having so many devoted fans, there’s something everyone is usually in agreement with. The UI/UX is bloody awful and the game is a chore. Thanks to this fan-made video, we can see what the game would look like if it were given a quality of life update.
Placing paths down one by one.
Knocking mountains down one by one.
Crafting items one by one.
Organizing your pockets, one item at a time.
Those are just some of the irritating ways that Animal Crossing: New Horizons kills the enjoyment of the game by forcing players to endure tedious ways of doing something that could have been achieved much quicker. Perhaps the game was designed this way to encourage calm and encourage players to take their time. But in this day and age, we want things quickly, we don’t have the time to press the A button over 80 times just to craft 20 fish bait.
That’s where Nick Ha comes in with a video that demonstrates the ways that Nintendo could massively improve the game’s ease-of-use. The video comes in the style of a Nintendo Direct to add to the fake authenticity. It’s brilliant.
The first feature we see is, of course, the ability to choose how many of specific item you wish to craft. In this case, the video shows fish bait being crafted with a pop-up bubble that allows the player to use the plus or minus button to change the quantity. There’s also a demonstration for how if a player uses the crafting bench, they should be able to pull anything they have stored in their storage instead of having to spend time organizing their pockets and storage.
There’s also a nifty idea surrounding the use of the ZR and ZL buttons while browsing your pockets to either instantly equip or use something, or drop the item. Players should also be able to check their pockets while browsing their storage, reducing the need to close the storage window, open the pockets, close the pockets, and open the storage. The video also imagines what it would be like to have a sort function for your pockets, simply pressing Y, in this case, would organize everything into categories.
Fed up of grabbing items one by one to split them into stacks? With these changes, you’d be able to split them into stacks depending on the quantity you determine.
There’s a “Nookpedia Item Details” tool that the video shows would be purchasable from the Nook Miles Redemption service, This tool would allow you to see more specific details of your items by hovering over them. Details would include how much an item is worth in bells, and how many of the same items you have in storage, enabling you to avoid duplicates. Shopping would also benefit from the quantity window, and the ability to select more than 1 item to purchase in a go is demonstrated.
For those who hate going through the usual scripted conversations, a feature to allow you to skip through the dialogue would be welcomed as shown in the video. As for the mobile, we get to see some new apps. One being the Dodo Airlines app which would allow players to open their gates remotely without having to travel to Orville at the airport desk. And of course, something I think should have been available from launch, a Settings app. This would allow players to adjust numerous settings and audio sliders.
There are other features such as using the tool ring while moving, a pocket counter to let you know how many spaces you have left, and a feature to introduce a placement indicator. There’s also bulk path creation.
The video is incredibly well made, and I hope Nintendo notice it and take inspiration, either that, I hope they have these features planned anyway. What do you think of the features shown? Would they make your life on the island much easier?
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