Balladeer wrote:Every resident needs their own personality. Eight variants, with slang that becomes uniform after two weeks in town, doesn’t cut it any more.
You realise there are 300+ villagers right? That would be insanely difficult. Maybe keep the 8 variants but then have say 4 sub-variants under each variant. 32 variants, essentially. That would keep things fresh for a long time. I won't disagree that hearing one villager say literally the exact same thing as another villager isn't disappointing, but from a dev perspective I can see why they limited it. I feel like with New Leaf they focused more on the player and what the player can do rather than the villagers and their dialogue as they did in previous entries.
What I'd like to see from the new Animal Crossing is better accessibility and options in general. In New Leaf, certain tasks quickly became a chore, and scrolling through the same texts over and over again to fulfil those tasks became tiresome. Like, give me some kind of 'quick-sell' option, that kind of thing. At the end of the day, a lot of Animal Crossing's actual gameplay just comes down to your time-management skills. How much can you do in a certain amount of time with the space you're given? The mini-games were alright, so it'b be nice to see more of them, but perhaps instead of just for multiplayer, it was also incorporated into the main game somehow? As someone already mentioned, levelling up skills would be cool and these games could be a means to achieve this as well as visualise your new found abilities and levelled-up skills.
The badges were a great addition to New Leaf so I'd love to see them return, but tone them down a little. Some of them were ridiculous and weren't even challenging. If you were to consider them to be the true way to complete the game (as I sought out to do, that's what ended up giving me an incentive to keep returning), then a lot of badges literally just exist to waste time. Honourable mentions to this are catching 5000 bugs, catching 5000 fish, and pulling 5000 weeds. Bugs are pretty fun to catch, so no quarrels there. Catching fish is a doss though and often boils down to luck, having you pace back and forth water until one appears. So if they changed how fishing works, that'd be welcome. As for the weeds, bare in mind you get 3-4 weeds every day (with no beautiful town set). That's like 1250 days or about 3 and a half years of Animal Crossing. Yikes. Your best bet is to visit a friend's town who doesn't care about weeds and pull all of their's, but bruh... who doesn't care about keeping their town neat and pretty amirite? But for those who don't even know about the badge and just stick their town on beautiful, they're strawberry floated as you only get like 1 weed every few days or something on that setting.
As much as they tried to give the player more freedom and options in New Leaf, it still feels very limited in how much control and influence you really have. Like, you can build things in town to make your town more pretty but that's pretty much it. It'd be nice to build something new and have that thing you built
actually contribute to something, and substantially too. The café and police station were cool, but the police station doesn't really give you anything new. It can tell you who's visiting in town on any given day, but chances are you'll be exploring the town and stumble upon them anyway. It also gives you those dark pitfall seeds, which are fun, but serve no purpose in single player. Frequent visits to the café eventually unlock a neat little mini-game which can earn you unique café related furniture, so, good! More like that would be great. Like, imagine building a water well and instead of it just sitting there doing nothing, you could use it to get a capped amount of water every day, and this water could be like it's own form of commodity used for other things and may not be easy to come by otherwise?
I guess I just want to see more things in the new Animal Crossing that
do things. So while I want to see it announced in the direct, a part of me hopes they hold back until they create a proper sequel packed with actual content. Also this is an Animal Crossing thread now.