Since launch, Nintendo has worked to keep Animal Crossing: New Horizons relevant by adding frequent updates. Largely, these have revolved around patching in holidays and seasonal content. This is a smart strategy as it prevents players from time traveling to holiday events and spoiling them, but for longtime Animal Crossing players, there hasn't been much to spoil since the events have been so familiar. The majority have been recycled from the Nintendo 3DS processor, Animal Crossing: New Leaf with a few new ideas and minor tweaks. In 2021, Nintendo should leverage the unique crafting mechanics of New Horizons to make the holidays fresh.

Getting to experience events like Toy Day or Turkey Day through new lenses in the coming year would do a lot to entice players to stick around. After all, the longer into an Animal Crossing game's life cycle the community gets, the more players begin to fall off it as they drift away from their once familiar daily routine. Allowing players to engage with fresh seasonal events would certainly help undercut some of the late-game Animal Crossing fatigue.

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As such, these events could also be great showcases for why crafting and resource collecting are still worthwhile systems even hundreds of hours into an Animal Crossing island. Considering the mechanical depth New Horizons added to the series, it feels like a mistake to have holidays retread concepts from comparatively limited experiences. Take, for instance, Toy Day. Instead of simply helping Jingle wrap presents and distribute them, the player could riff on the Santa's elves concept by actually crafting the toys that the villagers want. Most holidays could be made more engaging by making the crafting system central to the day.

Villagers ring in 2021 in Animal Crossing: New Horizons

At the same time, multiplayer should be made central to these holiday celebrations as well. New Horizons owes a lot of its sustained success to how it allows players to connect during the pandemic. In an era where Nintendo hasn't been adapting its company stances to COVID-19 especially well, New Horizons has a been a refreshing counterpoint. However, the holidays largely revolve around the player interacting only with the seasonal NPC and their villagers. Sometimes, the full suite of holiday features aren't even available during multiplayer sessions.

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Devising ways for the holiday content to include multiplayer could lead to creative solutions. Maybe holidays could come with limited time mini-games in the style of those found on New Leaf's Tortimer Island. There are so many possibilities for events like these which would not only promote multiplayer, but also add some fun variety to the core New Horizons gameplay.

After all, it's gameplay variety that the New Horizons updates should bring. The post-launch content up to this point hasn't been nearly as interested in introducing new ideas as the base game was. That should be the priority for the next chapter of Animal Crossing. Luckily, Nintendo is in a position to actually deliver this. The ability to push DLC updates regularly changes the dynamic of Animal Crossing's growth and is the natural extension of the series' life simulator gameplay. Hopefully 2021 will see Nintendo utilize this opportunity to its fullest and keep this Nintendo Switch hit's momentum into the new year.

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