Written by Lauryn Smith, Entertainment Editor & Staff Writer
Ever since its release in March, Animal Crossing: New Horizons has completely taken the world by storm, and has become one of the highest-selling games for the Nintendo Switch. As a fan of the game myself, I could sing my praises about the (for the most part) fun events and charming villager characters Nintendo’s life simulator has to offer those in quarantine.
However, there is a big problem that I and many Animal Crossing fans have with New Horizons, and that is the disappointingly small furniture catalog in the game. This is something made extremely apparent when compared to the catalog of Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, a spin-off game for mobile devices that, like New Horizons, is updated on a monthly basis.
For a bit of context, one of the biggest appeals of the Animal Crossing games is the player’s ability to decorate their town to fit whatever specific image or theme they have in mind for it. The main way this is accomplished is by placing furniture items together to create different locations and scenes. For example, one might make a picnic area for a forest or an arcade for an urban city.
With this knowledge in mind, it only makes sense that an Animal Crossing game would have a large selection of furniture items to appeal to the different aesthetic tastes of its players. While New Horizons does have a fair amount of furniture to decorate with, the game’s catalog is noticeably less diverse than those of other games in the series.
According to the wiki page for Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp, there are, without exaggeration, thousands of furniture items (both event exclusive and not event exclusive) to craft and buy, many of which are not even available in New Horizons itself. According to the VillagerDB database website, New Horizons has a significantly smaller number of 1,085 furniture items, as of writing this article.
Source: Screenshot from the game provided by Lauryn Smith
You may be wondering how exactly a simple mobile game like Pocket Camp got such a ridiculously large furniture catalog. Sure, the game was released back in October of 2017, but it seems odd that a spin-off game has more to offer in terms of customization than a main series title. There is actually one specific factor that causes this disparity, and that is the in-game events created for the games.
Both Pocket Camp and New Horizons have events (typically based on a holiday/ theme related to the date of their release) coupled with their monthly updates. With these events comes a new batch of furniture that can be obtained by the player, either by crafting them using gathered materials or buying them from the in-game stores. However, Pocket Camp not only has more events, but said events add way more items to the game than New Horizons events do.
Along with that, Pocket Camp also has fortune cookies, a loot-box feature that offers a selection of cookies to buy, each with their own different aesthetic and furniture/clothing set. Each cookie can give the player one or five items (depending on if they buy a single cookie or the five-cookie bundle) from the items it offers. In the game, the cookies are replaced about one to four months after their release, creating a constant source of furniture to shove in the ever-growing catalog.
So what exactly is the issue with all of this? After all, it only makes sense for Nintendo to regularly add new content to freshen up Pocket Camp’s unengaging and repetitive gameplay, and there is a clear financial incentive. Players will be tempted to use real money to buy Leaf Tickets (the in-game currency used to buy Fortune Cookies) for a chance to obtain more impressive looking furniture.
The big problem here is that Pocket Camp does not deserve all of this tantalizing content, New Horizons, the game that sold over 22 million units, does. I understand creating an update for a mobile game is much easier than making one for a Switch game, and the events in New Horizons tend to have more depth put into them, but this does not always have to be the case.
Nintendo could implement more events similar to the wedding event back in June, where the player visits Harv’s island and has to create a scene with the new furniture. At some point, the player could be able to purchase said furniture, possibly with a system similar to the heart crystals from the wedding event. Besides, the new furniture would be of much more use in New Horizons.
In Pocket Camp, the player has a very limited area to place their furniture, and there is no way to make it bigger. Sure, one could argue that the player also has more space provided by their personal camper and cabin, but the size of those locations is still pretty small.
Nintendo has an opportunity to give New Horizons a huge and diverse furniture catalog to inspire the imaginations of players, yet they choose to waste their efforts with the less popular spin-off game, all for some easy profit.