Are We Due A New Animal Crossing Game?

In the Discord chatroom today, fellow ACUKErs realised that Animal Crossing: New Leaf has recently passed its 3rd Year Anniversary - yay! Congratulations are due to Nintendo for producing such a great and well rounded game, that has really survived the test of time - the proof is ACUKErs who are still playing it, and the countless others who regularly post #ACNL material online.

With E3 season also just gone, and sadly no mention of Animal Crossing on the horizon by family-entertainment producer Nintendo, the general consensus among ACUKErs is that we're going to be patient and wait for the next full iteration of Animal Crossing to come out when Nintendo believe it's right.


There's nothing worse than a rushed game being released buggy or incomplete. Players always notice it, too, whether it's in the form of odd incomplete storylines, partially developed game features, or a glitch. Thankfully, Animal Crossing has had a history that seldom displayed weird glitches that were destructive to the quiet and charming immersive nature of the game.

And I for one would be happy to wait, knowing just how much love and attention goes into the localisation of the game, the names for each quirky character, even the naming of buildings and stores.

If you think about it, Animal Crossing is literally a year's worth of content that needs designing, testing, and sounding against local gamers to see that all of its sweet care-free character is portrayed equally in Japanese, English, French, Spanish, German and beyond... that's no easy feat! And it certainly owes the developers and localisation team on Project Animal Crossing some high levels of respect!

Predicting The Next Game Release

ACUKErs talked about when the last game was released. Since Animal Crossing Wild World was the big hit that brought the game to hands at home and beyond, we started calculating the average development time:

• 2001: Animal Crossing - GameCube
• 2005/ 2006: Animal Crossing: Wild World - DS (4-5yrs depending on region)
• 2008: Animal Crossing: Let's Go To The City / City Folk - Wii (2-3yrs)
• 2013: Animal Crossing: New Leaf - 3DS (4yrs)
• 2015: Amiibo Festival - Wii U (2yrs) and Happy Home Designer - 3DS (2yrs) Spin-off games
• 2016: Animal Crossing: New Leaf - Welcome Amiibo - 3DS (1yr, or 3yrs after last main game release).

We figure we're about due a game now, but it seems more likely we'll be expecting a mobile app release sooner than a full-blown Animal Crossing new addition to the series. Or perhaps we could expect a combination release, depending on the features of the mobile version, which has been suggested will have some form of connectivity with previous versions of the game (which previous versions remains purely speculative).

It also seems more than apparent to me that Nintendo have realised Animal Crossing is best suited to the handheld console, as this is when the game as flourished the most both in terms of sales, and in terms of its character as a charming game that carried on without you - while you carried your device with you! I deduce that from the lack of a Wii U version, which I also would contribute to not enough time to develop one, and from the way they have supported the second hand held version with a content and feature update, that I thought was fairly unusual for Nintendo (although I am more than happy for people to tell me when Nintendo has done that before -- I just may not have played those particular games before :) ).

(... To be fair, now that I think about it, Nintendo did do content updates with Mario Kart 8 for Wii U, but you felt that was very much an attempt to monetise the game further, and it kinda backfired on them - seeing how players complained they couldn't play certain tracks they'd purchased if all online parties didn't have the same tracks downloaded... 'backfired' probably isn't the right word -- perhaps what I mean is, Nintendo's plan to get everyone downloading content didn't quite work out well for gaming experience).

But I digress...

The point I'm trying to make is that I think Nintendo has a team working on the enormous amount of content that needs to be localised and lovingly humanised for a new Animal Crossing game, I would happily wait until 2018 for a new full version of Animal Crossing for Nintendo Switch, which I believe is the best of both console and handheld gaming environment. 

I think Nintendo has shown some incredible progress with the new open-world Zelda game, which just makes me dream of an open world Animal Crossing some day, and I think Nintendo has hit on gold with the Switch.

But until the latest version of an Animal Crossing game comes out, I'm happy to keep tending to my New Leaf town. :) Especially if it means I'm playing with lovely ACUKErs. :)