I've been playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons since it released, but the format I've been writing about the game in this blog doesn't leave much room for me to express my feelings on the more nuts and bolts elements of the game, such as the UI. Obviously only having had the game for a little over a week I may not have unlocked some QoL and UI improvements to what's available at game start, so consider this to be a snapshot of my opinions as of when it is being written rather than a final assessment. Inventory Management New Leaf gave you 16 inventory slots, and you could stack fruit up to 10 via a manual process. You also had 10 separate mail slots and by attaching items to letters you could bodge together a 26 item inventory. New Horizons starts you off with 20 inventory slots, which can increase to 30 relatively quickly, while everything but tools, furniture, creatures and fossils stack automatically, which is a vast improvement. One thing I'm finding irritating is that you can only remove one thing from a stack at once. This means if you want to keep e.g. 20 weeds from the pile you want to sell, you need to do 'grab 1' up to 20 times, and then drag the individual weeds into a stack of 20. This isn't coming up often, but it's inconvenient when it does. A very appreciated quality of life upgrade to inventory management is that in most cases bells you pick up go straight into your wallet, without temporarily taking up pocket space. This is the sort of change that feels so natural it's surprising that it used to be handled in any other way. Character Customization In prior mainline entries, character options were chosen from a series of presets via a personality quiz, so if you had a preference you had to look up a guide. Changing hairstyles was also done via the slightly convoluted quiz Harriet would give you, and could only be done once a day. Again, if you had something specific in mind, a guide was required. But the biggest issue with the old system was the way skin tone was handled - Namely, there were no options, and changing the appearance required in-game 'tanning'. This is where New Horizons has made its biggest improvements. Most fundamentally, you get to actually design your character rather than doing a personality quiz to determine which pre-defined character you got. Various options are available, including skin tone, eye shape and colour, nose and mouth shape, and hairstyle and colour. In-game customisation of these options is similarly streamlined: By interacting with any mirror any of that can be changed via the same user interface and doing so increases the number of hair options available even before unlocking additional styles and colours. You also get the ability to edit and wear custom patterns as face paint as soon as you get your Nook Phone, just after the tutorial. This should allow for a lot of customization options, although it is a bit weird that things like freckles require using this system rather than having simple options for them. Home Decor, Storage, and Clothing Home decoration, up until Happy Home Designer and the Welcome Amiibo update to New Leaf, used to be done exclusively by placing the items on the floor and dragging them where you wanted them to go. New Horizons still allows this but with a quick button press, you can also access a dedicated UI for furniture placement. This lets you move items around at will while easily accessing anything in storage. It would be nice to be able to access this feature when doing outside decoration, even if excluding storage access, just to help ensure things are lined up just right. The way storage is accessed has also changed. Storage used to be a function of storage items, with all items accessing the same storage bin. In New Horizons, storage can now be freely accessed within the home with the press of a button as soon as you upgrade from a tent, without the need of using certain items. New Leaf greatly expanded the clothing options from prior games, adding several new slots. In the process, it made it possible for male characters to wear skirts and dresses, and female characters to wear shorts and trousers. New Horizons builds on New Leaf's improvements without fundamentally revolutionizing things - We can have bags now, and there's a much greater variety of items within each category. The way changing clothing can be done, however, has been vastly improved, now furniture isn't needed to access storage generally. Items such as wardrobes take you into a dedicated clothing menu, where you have access to all clothes in your storage and pockets, which you can then put on or remove, with a previewing of how they'll look as you do so and dedicated categories for things like hats and shoes. This process is far more convenient than how changing clothes worked in prior games - getting your outfit ready in your pockets and then interacting with each item of clothing individually to wear each. Miscellany I've found it a little tedious to switch out of crafting and then interact with the workbench again to customize newly crafted items, and the need to craft multiple items of the same type (e.g. 5 stone stools) one by one rather than as a batch. Additionally, it would make sense if using a workbench in the home if I could access resources and customization kits I have in storage without needing to manually extract them beforehand. Another minor issue I'm having with item customisation is that it uses hover to preview. This makes it harder to compare options not next to each other in the menu compared clicking to preview for face customization, and the inconsistency between the two systems also bugs me. When donating multiple items to Blathers it is a little inconvenient to need to ask for lectures on each item I'm donating individually rather than being able to get them when donating, as is possible when donating an individual item, although still being able to assess multiple fossils and donate multiple items is appreciated. The new tool ring that you can unlock feels faster than navigating between items with left and right or opening the menu, and the way mail is handled feels a lot smoother, both for looking through past mail and for sending letters (now postcards), while having a free draw mode on the bulletin board is a very much appreciated minor feature, especially being able to freely mix typed messages with drawn aspects, that I wouldn't have thought to desire if it wasn't present. Conclusion While some issues are still present with the UI for New Horizons, it is a vast improvement over that of prior AC games and one that just makes the experience of island living smoother than the small-town lifestyle of prior games, with most mundane things now being a lot more frictionless. These improvements do exasperate some of the remaining minor issues, however. But, with this game, it's plausible that I simply haven't found the right furniture item to solve some of those problems yet.
- Stephen