By dead I'm not refering to sales or the end of the games altogether. I mean innovation and gameplay. After Wild World I noticed that Animal Crossing failed to really add enough to the gameplay or innovate enough to make City Folk a worthy purchase. After buying City Folk I was upset the game didn't offer me anything new.

With Animal Crossing 3DS coming soon I am stuck wondering is Nintendo going to add anything new? With 3DS features like being able to connect consoles while in sleep mode just by passing someone I see the potential for many new features in gameplay.

But do you think 3D is enough to warrant a purchase of Animal Crossing 3DS? Or do you think Nintendo will offer new experiances in the game? Or sadly do you think Animal Crossing is dead, it will just continue to deliver the exact same experiance over and over until gamer eventually stop buying them?

Does this gen CoD franchise answer your questions?

People just love to buy the same shit countless times. If it is cool and addictive, it will sell.

Talking about innovations, a BIGGER town would be awesome.

Online could be better too. All players need to be online to visit each others towns. It shouldn't be like that.

You know that the 3DS version is changing the formula, right? You become the mayor of the town ^^

Apart from that, I think it's fair to call it a mega-franchise - why fix what isn't broken?

Yes but just because you become mayor doesn't nescessarily mean new content and gameplay per say. What will we be able to do as Mayor that we couldn't due in all the other games?

Quite a lot of things, I imagine. If you were the ruler of a town, wouldn't you have different powers to the people that merely live in it? I imagine that the town would be customisable. As far as a game like Animal Crossing is concerned, you can't change it much more than that. 

This difference between CoD and AC is that the latest Call of Duty is a sequel, while Animal crossing is mostly rehashing everything, and selling it on a different console.  Oh sure, there's some new stuff like the city (which is just one street corner, and is mostly just the weekly visitors setting up a permanent shop), and they changed a few holidays, and added a few new fish and bug; but it's almost a copy of the DS game.

Sounds like a good idea for a sequel to me from Wikipedia:

Details are scarce at the moment but it is confirmed that the character plays as the mayor of the town. It also appears that now the lower torso of the humanoid character is visible, unlike other entries into the series. With the help of the townsfolk and 'one eager secretary' it will be the character's job to make the town a better place to live.^[2]

[edit]Reception

G4TV Patrick Klepek praised Animal Crossing's use of the Nintendo 3DS's stereoscopic 3D effects, commenting that the 3D didn't come out at the players, but rather, gave the game's world "real, tangible depth".^[3] IGN editor Craig Harris agreed, describing the 3D effects as "subtle, but helpful". He added that the detail of the environment and objects exceeds that of the Wii game Animal Crossing: City Folk.^[4] GameSpoteditor Tom McShea echoed this sentiment, calling it the best looking game in the Animal Crossing series.^[5]

from that point of view, Animal Crossing has huge possibilities for improvement but Nintendo just sticks to the same tiny town

Well from the short video/screen shots, it looks like the artstyle is changed up a little bit, there is outdoor furniture (a bench and street light, might be related to being mayor), and for clothes you can design pant/skirts instead of just the shirt and hat. Those are all minor changes but is seems like a decent amount of changes to know about from a 10 second video and a few screenshots. I do hope there are some major changes as well, maybe being mayor can add some interesting new gameplay elements. I hope they add a new thing to collect besides fish, fossils, bugs, and paintings. I agree that there should also be some cool new connectivity features. But I feel pretty certain that the game will feel more fresh than City Folk did after Wild World.

I'd like to see them put an arcade machine in the coffee house - it could be linked to the Virtual Console and allow you to play a demo version of a classic game, with the demo changing each month.  Collecting NES games was part of the fun on the GC version.

It would also be good to be able to interact a bit more with the items.  I've never understood why you couldn't play pool on the pool table, for example.