Animal Crossing’s Next Game Needs One Simple Change To Make Island Design More Fun

Animal Crossing: New Horizons improved on the decorative elements of the franchise, allowing players more freedom than ever to make their island getaways their own in appearances. With the introduction of terraforming, thousands of furniture pieces, large house upgrades, paths, inclines and more, there are endless possibilities for designing and building in the game than ever before. Becoming the most decorating-oriented game in the series, Animal Crossing: New Horizons may not have included some key NPCs or older gameplay elements from gems like New Leaf, but it expands the franchise in new and unseen ways.

While allowing the player a lot of expansive creativity, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is still limited in a number of ways, particularly given that it isn’t trying to purely be a game based around design and decor. Making pathways with custom AC designs became one of the most popular but frustrating features included, since players are given a limited number of design slots and paths that can take around nine slots each. The placing of every individual path also proved tedious, forcing people into slower ways to play, taking away from the overall pleasure of the game.

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Animal Crossing Path Removal Is A Pain

A Slightly Monotonous Time

Everything about Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ path-making is rather frustrating for the player, perhaps included in the game without much thought into the true potential it had for players to create unique designs. With people designing their own paths or flooring that take up multiple design slots, players often need to one-by-one hand place tiles onto the ground, a slow and tedious experience all around. The in-game painting, while not as complex, does also allow players to smooth over corners and round edges too, requiring even more clicks from the player to customize after placing.

Tom Nook from Animal Crossing with a villager and the otter Pascal.

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That’s not the only annoyance of laying paths in Animal Crossing: New Horizons either, as removing paths means players must either kick them out square by square or remove them individually in island designer – or even by accident while playing. While the game is slower-paced in general, this doesn’t seem to consider the overall player experience, often making any major island overhauls especially time-consuming. Swapping out custom pathways can also be a pain, as even with design slots replacing each other, the updated designs may not always work cohesively, making things unnecessarily complex.

How Animal Crossing Could Make Paths More Fun

Give Players More Control

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With such a slow and monotonous system for placing paths in Animal Crossing: New Horizons, it wouldn’t be all too difficult for Nintendo to improve things in future games in a number of ways, making the player’s experience substantially more enjoyable. For example, many sim, city-building, and management games have perfected the art of allowing players to drag to place pavements and paths, keeping such things largely effortless. This would allow players much quicker and more effective re-designs of their island and a lot more creative freedom to work with, completely changing entire areas without boring and limiting systems in place.

More official in-game path designs would also make things a lot easier than individually swapping between custom design slots and corner pieces, making it far easier for players to create more complex paths in their worlds. Being able to remove pathways in bulk would be equally desirable, potentially allowing the player to select large areas to remove all paths, furniture, and other items in the way for a quick refresh, similar to requesting clean up while terraforming. With plenty of opportunity to develop the pathway and design elements in future Animal Crossing games, there’s promise for a very impressive future.

Animal Crossing Paths Might Be Annoying For A Reason

The Franchise Isn’t Supposed To Be A Decorating Game

Merengue having a cake party with a friend

While it’s frustrating that after many years, Animal Crossing: New Horizons hasn’t gotten any easier for players to design in, there might be a key reason for Nintendo’s avoidance of it, as it clashes with much of what the game aims to be. Despite the game having the potential to be much more user-friendly and easier to use with decorating and designing, the entire concept of adding elements like that may erase the game’s real purpose. Intended to be a slower-paced, real-time getaway, more expansive controls over design may make Animal Crossing feel more like a building simulator than what it really is.

Timmy and Tommy in front of Resident Services, with a player smirking.

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An overhaul of mechanics and an inclusion of more intensive design elements would be very fitting when Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the most design-oriented game in the series, but such features may take away from how the game is intended to be played, almost changing the genre entirely. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s off the cards for future games to implement a little more control for players, but it seems unlikely that Nintendo will be giving players much more freedom than they have now. As players wait for the next installment in the series, they can only sit in anticipation of whether the next offering will live up to all their hopes and dreams.