The Animal Crossing: New Horizons Thread

[Wman1996]

Jumpin said:
The game is very good. One complaint reviewers had was the slow start. I am guessing this is mainly for review purposes because they haven’t been able to see the full game. But I have found the game in all its chore like tasks in a limited space is quite amusing. The main loop is completing quests, which gives the game a similar feel to casual mobile games. Animal Crossing is probably the most major non-freemium casual franchise in existence.

And by casual I mean a game that generally encourages limited play sessions over long periods of time. This doesn’t mean you can’t play for hours at a time, many casual games - including Nintendo’s first game marketed as casual (Brain Age) has stuff that you can binge play on, but the point of casual gaming is to keep players engaged for months or years, and not to emphasize necessity for binge gaming. Also, casual is not the opposite of a “hardcore gamers” since the “casual” element is about the necessary play session length, people can get fairly hardcore into casual games - Animal Crossing is one such example, but nearly every casual game has its hardcore base.

I've only played Animal Crossing: New Horizons for about two hours, but the slow start is nothing new. It's par for the course of the series. I agree that Animal Crossing actually makes menial tasks very fun and rewarding. Stardew Valley is like that in some ways too, as is Chibi-Robo for household cleaning. 

Animal Crossing is one of those games I want to play on a binge, but it's not really designed that way. At the very least, it's not designed that way at the start. New Leaf took 600 hours of my time, more than any game. New Horizons might end up in the same boat.