Snowmam melting tomorrow and there goes our entire town economy unless i can build another
ice series furniture isn’t GOOD but it selling for 8888 bells definitely is good
playing New Leaf i don’t actually think the villagers are any better than in NH. i certainly haven’t fallen for any of them the way i did for Pashmina in New Horizons. but you depend on them a lot more: for furniture, to buy your things in Re-Tail, to suggest Public Works Projects, and to provide most of the gameplay via Requests. it feels a lot more interdependent and more like a community
in New Horizons your daily tasks are given by notifications on your phone. you can make and customize furniture on your own. you don’t have to talk to anyone and they’re not as central a part of the gameplay loop
@Lady Diorama maker disguised as a life sim
@coriander see the thing is i really enjoyed Happy Home Designer for the 3DS, i just think it was a mistake to try to combine them into the same game
@Lady Yeah
Yeah
I loved HHD and the NH DLC that was just HHD again but both are distinct enough that they felt like their own type thing
@coriander same issue as with pokémon and zelda imo; 2020s are all about maximizing “player agency” at the expense of actually good game design
@Lady God yeah you nailed it
@coriander sandbox games definitely opened some questions about how much structure games really need and whether the restrictions placed on players were really necessary, and i get that right now we are in a period of experimentation where they’re figuring out what happens if they just let players do whatever they want
but i hope they learn some lessons from it and realize that yeah actually game design has its place and not every idea they’ve tried recently has been a good one, even when press and initial impressions are awestruck “wow i can do so much now!”
@Lady Yeah it's like the classic thing about limitations breeding creativity
Sure you CAN do so much but WILL you? Or would you rather have narrowly-defined systems governing your play?
@coriander but this depends on publishers valuing games as art, and it’s a bit dicey given that games that let the player just do whatever are bigger hits with both casual gamers and streamers—and honestly there’s a place for that: game spaces as stages for players to enact their own stories for themselves or for viewers on a stream—but it’s very much in tension with games as intentionally crafted experiences and i don’t want it to be all that games become
@Lady @coriander i've been meaning to play the original deus ex sometime but i know enough about it to note that even as a very sandbox oriented game, it is extremely structured; the game is literally sectioned off into individual levels purrogressed through linearly, something current nintendo sandbox design would never do
@Lady I feel like that's, uh, true to its roots in the GC game? Things grew up, eventually, but the major draw was what changed seasonally / at specific times. I remember pulling it up so I could see what happened at exactly the new year transition, for example. It's not, say, Stardew Valley.
@aschmitz fish rotate once a month. special events and holidays obviously aren’t happening every day. and my experience with new horizons was that those two things weren’t enough to keep me playing; there needed to be reasons for me to log in the rest of the time, when nothing much was happening
i never played the original Animal Crossing, but i played a lot of Wild World for the DS. in that game, the reasons you logged in were:
• to check the rotating stock in the various stores
• to check for special visitors (Saharah, Redd, etc)
• to complete the daily allotment of tasks for villagers in an attempt to get some of their rarer furniture
• to accumulate Bells to afford the prices of everything else
my complaint with New Horizons is that the crafting mechanic severely diminished the value of all of these things. for furniture you can craft, you don’t have to wait for it to be in stock, you aren’t gifted it, and you don’t need to save up bells. it’s just a matter of resource management, which can be grinded around with island tours.
so you get most of the things you want relatively easily. yes, more things will come next season! but it’s easy to lose momentum and run out of things to do getting to that point. i don’t want a game that i only turn on on holidays or play for a week at season changes; that’s not what animal crossing is about, to me
@Lady Yeah, that's fair. To be honest it sort of tracks with my experience of the original, where there were definitely things to do, but there wasn't really enough of a story or progression for me to stay engaged. (It's possible that if I read more about it online now, I would find that there were things I could work towards or whatever, but I'm not sure how people were supposed to identify that organically.)
@Lady new horizons is the first animal crossing i played since the gamecube version and it was surprising to see how player-centered the games had become.
@Lady it was also frustrating to see that every UX problem with the gamecube version was still present. i was also surprised that the character writing was worse by an absolute mile
@wallhackio i guess i will leave it to @aescling to decide if New Leaf is any better
@Lady @wallhackio my actual opinion is “better how”, exactly, in that i think animal crossing gcn and new leaf have diffurent goals. in gcn mechanical incentives are mostly purrsonal—just getting the full house paid off, and managing the town’s trees well enough to get the golden axe—and there is a notable focus on villager interaction. new leaf is definitely missing some of that (gcn villagers can be outright antagonistic, stealing an item from you without warning, and are also just capable of being very mean if you push them), which i miss, but i also think it still works in its own right because the focus has changed dramatically to building your town over a (forced) rather long period of time
@Lady @wallhackio i don’t think the character writing is appurreciably better or worse in new leaf than new horizons
@Lady @wallhackio i am somewhat annoyed that you have an entire bottom screen fur menuing but the game still pauses if you open the inventory
the thing with New Horizons is they were like “we will give the player superpowers so they can design their island exactly how they want, and use seasonal events to entice people to keep playing” and this simply isn’t as good of a game design as an actual player/town growth arc