Decorating is one of the best parts of any Animal Crossing title, as players can curate a home and a town to fit whatever theme or style they want. Unlocking furniture, planting flowers, and terraforming are all part of tailoring an island (or town) to the player’s preferences. While decorating can be immensely fun, it can also be incredibly time-consuming and difficult, especially outdoors.
The next Animal Crossing game, which will likely come out at some point in the near future for the Switch 2, should take the outdoor decorating mechanic from New Horizons’ Happy Home Paradise and incorporate it into the base game. The DLC, which focused entirely on decorating, allowed players to freely place items using a cursor both indoors and outdoors, rather than forcing them to place each and every item outdoors via the player character. Taking some features from the popular DLC could make the next title a much less tedious experience when it comes to designing outdoor spaces.
Placing Furniture And Plants Has Never Been Easier
Happy Home Paradise was the only DLC created for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, released right after the final free update to the game in November 2021. In it, players are invited to work at Paradise Planning, a home design service for Villagers who want to shake up their living situation. Based on the Villager’s request, players decorate both the interior and exterior of a home down to every detail, including matching soundscapes. These themes can range from something as simple as a single color or a specific concept like a secret lab.
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While decorating was already a key part of New Horizons, Happy Home Paradise upgraded the design experience by allowing players to use decorating tools outside of the home. In the base game, the only place players are allowed to place items directly from their inventory with a free decorating mode is inside their own home. Outside the home, every item must be carried around, placed, pushed, and rotated by hand, which is both time-consuming and can cause limitations when working in tight spaces.
Happy Home Paradise not only provided a way to place furniture outdoors with a cursor, but it also allowed players to plant trees, bushes, and flowers wherever they wanted. This landscaping ability is incredibly useful, especially when combined with the instant pathmaking tool, as overhauling an outdoor space can be done in minutes rather than hours.
Animal Crossing Could Level Up Island Design
Easier Outdoor Tools Would Make Decorating Less Tedious
The next Animal Crossing game is currently unconfirmed, but there’s likely another in some stage of development due to the runaway success of New Horizons both critically and financially. This follow-up will be the perfect opportunity to improve town design by allowing players to use a free decorating mode just like in Happy Home Paradise. Part of the fun in Animal Crossing is taking things slow and putting thought into decorating a town, but oftentimes, outdoor decorating can become more of a time-consuming pain than a fun way to spend time on the island.
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Being able to place items outside the home freely would make decorating far more fun, especially with the landscaping tools that allow players to create paths and move trees, flowers, and bushes around freely. One of the most aggravating parts of New Horizons is creating natural foot paths throughout the island. Placing every single tile manually, always with the chance of accidentally erasing the ones next to it, is not a fun part of the game.
Simply incorporating the Happy Home Paradise mechanics into the next Animal Crossing title would free up time and allow players to more easily modify their town or island without tedious tile-by-tile menial tasks. While adding every part of how Happy Home Paradise works outdoors might make the next Animal Crossing slightly too easy, a good compromise could be that players can only move around plants that are already in the area. This would keep the slow, cozy pace of the series while allowing players to more easily customize their outdoor spaces.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons
9/10
- Released
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March 20, 2020
- ESRB
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E for Everyone: Comic Mischief
- Developer(s)
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Nintendo EPD
- Publisher(s)
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Nintendo
- Engine
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Havok
- Multiplayer
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Online Multiplayer, Local Multiplayer
- Cross-Platform Play
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no
