What lessons should Animal Crossing: New Horizons take from New Leaf?

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is into its second year and if history is to be believed, New Horizons' shelf life will be quite long. The shortest distance between releases was three years, from Wild World to City Folk.

New Leaf, the predecessor to New Horizons, had an eight-year run and was extremely popular. It did a lot of things well and fans generally loved that iteration. What lessons can New Horizons take from New Leaf?

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Lessons learned from Animal Crossing: New Leaf

New Leaf has been one of the best entries in the Animal Crossing franchise. Many players still have and play it today, despite it being outdated. There are players who consider it to be better than New Horizons, for various reasons.

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So what lessons can New Horizons take from New Leaf?

1) Quality of life

The quality of life in Animal Crossing doesn't have anything to do with graphics or any of that, all of which is improved in New Horizons. New Leaf was able to stay relevant and popular for so long because the quality of life in the game was so good. New Horizons hasn't gotten there yet.

Players have been asking for updates that will drastically change the quality of life in the game, and the only question is: will they get it?

the biggest quality of life feature they could add to animal crossing: new horizons for my cataloguing ass is just a simple feature of letting you know which items in the stores you've already bought before without me having to check my nookphone

— SungWon Cho (@ProZD) May 18, 2020

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2) Too many steps

For a couple of gameplay features, there are just too many steps in New Horizons. For terraforming, it's not an easy process. Living on the same island can get boring, so players like to change it up, but that's a tedious process in New Horizons.

Crafting requires a lot more steps in New Horizons, especially when trying to craft a lot of items. There is no crafting in bulk in New Horizons, which hurts players.

Crafting in Animal Crossing can take a while if players need to craft lots of items. Bulk crafting would go a long way (Image via Nintendo)

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3) Monthly updates

New Leaf had the same type of seasonal items and events, but they were packaged and coded in already. There weren't a bunch of monthly updates to add a seasonal event like there are in New Horizons. This is kind of nitpicking, but it's a small thing that New Leaf definitely did better than New Horizons.

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Note: The article reflects the views of the writer.