The latest Nintendo Direct held a plethora of exciting news and announcements for the Nintendo Switch, with classics getting ported for the console and new developments on upcoming releases.
Besides the Banjo and Kazooie showcase, which was pretty much the highlight yesterday, Nintendo also gave a glimpse of what’s happening for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, which was notably delayed to next year. The update slash announcement details some new and returning features for the game, which was stylized in a charming and relaxing manner as a fictional “Deserted Island Getaway Package” by Tom Nook and his company Nook, Inc. Check out the trailer below.
One of the key changes in Animal Crossing: New Horizons is how it moves away from other settings to a deserted island, which opens up new avenues of gameplay through its many locations and landscapes. Your vacation begins with a tent provided to you by Nook Inc., which you can place anywhere on the deserted island. Afterwards, Tom Nook gives you a NookPhone, which is a smartphone filled with apps that make your life on the island much easier. The NookPhone has its own camera, map, and a logbook for your crafting recipes, with which you can use to create tools and various other items to enhance your vacation experience.
Collecting and gathering materials for crafting is still very much the same, although Animal Crossing: New Horizons makes everything much livelier in comparison. You can create furniture and place it either inside or outside your tent, and your character will play a nice moving animation whenever you choose to relocate your stuff.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons also makes use of the local co-op capabilities of the Switch to allow for four players to play on one console. You can even connect two consoles together for eight players to play on one single map, although it’s hard to imagine how well this can be implemented considering how chaotic it sounds on paper.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons will be released exclusively for the Nintendo Switch on March 20, 2020.
