Last week, Nintendo surprised everybody with an announcement: Over four years after its “last major free content update,” Animal Crossing: New Horizons is getting a Switch 2 upgrade and a free update for all players. It’s not often that an incredibly popular game goes years between updates, but since when has anyone been able to predict what Nintendo will do?
In 2021, the company was very clear that the 2.0 update would be the game’s last. Slowly but surely, most of us stopped playing, accepting that support for New Horizons had ended. Well, sike, I guess! In preparation for the 3.0 update and Switch 2 Edition this January, we at The Verge decided to check in on our islands and see what we’ll be coming back to in a few months.
Image: Nintendo
I’ll admit, I was expecting a much bigger mess. While I haven’t played New Horizons in ages — the villagers tell me it’s been 11 months, though it feels much longer — my kids have jumped into the island periodically during that time. And, just like in real life, they’re slobs in Animal Crossing. Yet our island appears mostly intact. There were a few items strewn about, and a shockingly small number of weeds, but not much else to complain about. Mostly, without me to do the gardening, the entire island is now one gigantic field of flowers. It’s beautiful and not at all what I was anticipating. Even more shocking: Both of their houses were tidy. Now if only I could get them to do that in real life. —Andrew Webster
Image: Nintendo
Returning to Isla Ashtra has been a neat exercise in forensically investigating my own brain. After being away for many years — one villager told me it was five years and four months, to be exact — there are some parts of my island where I can clearly see my thought process and other places where I have no idea what the hell I was thinking. I was pleased to see my little pizza shop and fondly remembered the process of remixing mundane items like a hat into a clever pizza display. But, as I continued to explore, I found items discarded randomly about — a crystal ball here, a mirror there — and I simply cannot intuit why they’re there. Maybe I meant to make a tarot shop, or maybe I just needed to free up some inventory space. Who knows? Certainly not me. —Ash Parrish
No, not my first time, actually. Image: Nintendo
My island, once populated with lovable neighbors and thoughtful placement of shrubs and amenities, is gone. It has been wiped from existence by its creator, me, in a swift act of negligence while moving data from an original Switch to a Switch 2. I guess I didn’t do something correctly. Oops. Precious erased neighbors, cover your ears for what I’m about to say. I should feel more sad, but I’m not. Maybe I’ll become engrossed in building a new island once the Switch 2 Edition update comes out in January. If I do, I will erect a memorial to you all on it that I hopefully don’t accidentally erase someday. —Cameron Faulkner
Image: Nintendo
My house is perfect, an oasis of organized calm. The kitchen is warm and inviting, espresso maker on the counter beautifully complimenting the totally-not-a-KitchenAid mixer on the sideboard. There are no clothes strewn on the hardwood parquet of my bedroom floor. Upstairs, in the office, there is nothing on my desk except my laptop and a mug of coffee. The bathroom, too, is spotless. If only I could say the same for literally any part of my real home, where my children — now ages 12 and 7 — currently sit on our stained, ratty sofa, fighting over who gets to be the lead player in ACNH today.
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