Animal Crossing has always been anti-instant gratification. By design, you have to take your time, wait for days to pass in real time, and complete a seemingly endless list of chores to build a meaningful life with your animal friends. The slowness is part of its appeal. But with New Horizons, some of that slowness became tedious: crafting its many items one at a time, painstakingly building cliffs and rivers by hand, picking up and placing objects one by one.
As I gathered when I previewed it last month, the newly released, free 3.0 update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons addresses those issues with quality-of-life fixes that still fit the spirit of Animal Crossing. It’s a small update in terms of content — there’s just enough here to give you a reason to revisit the game if you’ve been looking for one, and not much more than that — but major in reducing friction where there wasn’t meant to be any.
Separately, there’s also the new Switch 2 Edition, which noticeably improves New Horizons’ performance and ups its resolution. Otherwise, it doesn’t add anything that important — but for $4.99, it doesn’t really have to.
One of the islands I visited via Dream Address, created by a player called Yan. Image: Nintendo, The Verge
Nintendo Switch 2 Edition
The main appeal of the Nintendo Switch 2 Edition is the performance upgrade. On the original Switch, New Horizons would start to struggle as you placed more and more decorations around your island, sometimes to the point of severe frame rate drops. It meant that building out your island could also make it progressively less playable. My island is a pretty bare construction zone, so when I downloaded the Switch 2 upgrade, I visited several highly decorated Dream Addresses to test it out.
Anecdotally, I can say that there’s a significant improvement in how New Horizons runs, at least to my eye. All the Dream Addresses I visited were so busy with decor, from thickets of trees to loads of furniture covered in custom designs, that there were completely inaccessible areas — and I didn’t see any significant lag or choppiness like I’d expect on the original Switch version. It’s a boon for maximalist decorators, especially those of us who still want our islands to be functional amid chaotic and cluttered builds.
For me, that alone is worth the $5 upgrade. (If you don’t own the game already, the Switch 2 version is $65 to the original Switch’s $60.) Otherwise, the Switch 2 Edition doesn’t add anything you need to have. Nintendo did show a side-by-side comparison of the game’s improved resolution in the trailer for the upgrade, but I didn’t really notice the difference (with the caveat that simple visual fidelity is not particularly important to me in most games). The new megaphone, which lets you use the Switch 2’s microphone to call the names of villagers and locate them, didn’t work well for me; I saw Fuchsia, walked a short distance away so she was out of frame, and called her name, but got no reply.
Image: Nintendo
And then there are the Joy-Con mouse controls, which are available when decorating interiors, creating custom designs, and writing messages on the bulletin board. I’m sure there’s someone out there who will find the mouse controls useful or intuitive, but I am not that person. First of all, I originally played this game on a tiny Switch Lite screen and I’m really enjoying this new world of playing it on a TV, so forgoing my Pro Controller to slide the right Joy-Con around on my couch cushions is not a compelling proposition. But I also found that the sensitivity of the mouse controls actually made it harder for me to be precise about item placement.
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