The one video game that everyone in our family plays is Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Which is really a way of saying that I play it too :P My wife and my son are way more into video games than I am.
Anyway, Nintendo has announced the last major free update to the game and the first paid update. I won’t be surprised if it isn’t the last, seeing as how Nintendo is in the business of making money.
There is a crazy amount of stuff being added to the game. If this is how Nintendo is ending this version of Animal Crossing, they are doing it with barrels of dynamite instead of a whimper. I can’t even appreciate all of what’s being added since I don’t know the history of the game, unlike my wife who knows who a lot of the NPCs getting added in are.
But what I wanted to comment on is the DLC that you’ll have to pay for.
It’s basically a whole new game.
A whole new area will be added, an archipelago where you make design and decorate vacation homes for the various anthropomorphic creatures that inhabit the world of Animal Crossing. It is the reincarnation of an earlier game in the series, Happy Home Designer.
I have often compared Animal Crossing to the Can-D and dollhouses from The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch because the world cannot have enough Philip K Dick references. The archipelago expansion, where you have even greater control over the environment, pushes that comparison even further.
If the trailers are to be believed, you will be decorating and furnishing and landscaping with a speed and ease that wasn’t there before. You can make your visions of the perfect getaway digitally real. You go from doing everything by hand to divine power.
Animal Crossing is not part of the video game paradigm where you are an action protagonist. Instead, you are an artistic protagonist. Which isn’t unique but isn’t as common.
Animal Crossing, at its heart, is a detailed, interactive dollhouse. And apparently Nintendo not only knows that but will figure out how to take it up to eleven..
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