Animal Crossing: New Horizons, one of the most successful Animal Crossing games of all time, recently had its fifth anniversary. The game took the world by storm in an era when everyone wanted to lose themselves in a virtual paradise, but after five years, it’s clear that New Horizons was not everything it could’ve been at launch. When the game was released in March 2020, it had a huge gap of content that left fans wondering what had happened to some of their favorite features.

At the time, most players were happy to have their hands on a new game, but it makes me question, five years later, if we let New Horizons off too easily for its emptiness at launch. Classic Animal Crossing characters, like Brewster, Redd, and Kapp’n, weren’t added to New Horizons for years, and while the game did add a huge range of fun new features, it had a gaping hole in content that had been in every AC entry before.

New Horizons Left Out Too Many Classic Animal Crossing Features

Iconic NPCs Took Over A Year To The Island

Animal Crossing is a long-running series, and because of its longevity, it has a lot of traditions and features that appear in almost every title. Certain expectations come with a new Animal Crossing title, like classic NPCs roaming around and seasonal events for players to celebrate. While New Horizons managed to check most of the required boxes, like real-time events and characters like Tom Nook and his nephews, it severely lacked plenty of expected series features when it launched in early 2020.

These missing features include the summertime fireworks shows, town ordinances, the art gallery wing of the museum, the Roost, swimming, and a whole host of series-regular NPCs, including Redd, Leif, Cyrus, and Reese. All of these characters and features have been around for years, and since the Nintendo Switch was certainly able to handle a larger game, it doesn’t make any sense why they were left out of the game for so long.

Major Features Took Almost Two Years To Be Added

The Final Update Dropped In November 2021

For most games, holding back on some content makes sense. Developers want to reward players for continuing to log on after a few months, or to spark interest in players who may have stopped paying attention after a while. In this way, the New Horizon updates make a fair bit of sense. Additions like holidays and seasonal events, which were drip-fed regularly throughout the first year, helped keep the community interested.

However, this sort of slow content release schedule doesn’t excuse it taking almost two years to add functions to the game that should’ve been included from the start. The Roost café run by Brewster has been in every Animal Crossing game since Wild World in 2005. It took until November 2021 for it to be added to New Horizons, alongside Kapp’n, who has been a part of the series since the very first game in 2002.

This huge delay in bringing in long-time characters doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s not as if Nintendo wanted to make sure they had some content saved to release later, as that very same update added cooking and expanded gardening, which is a massive addition that the series has never seen before. Missing characters like Redd and features like the art museum are especially egregious examples, which makes it astounding that fans didn’t create more of an uproar when New Horizons first launched to complain about the lack of standard features.

Switch 2’s Animal Crossing Can’t Repeat New Horizons’ Worst Mistake

Leaving Out Content Is A Bad Move

Nintendo hasn’t officially announced that a sequel for the Animal Crossing series is in development, but considering that a new console has just been released, and New Horizons was one of the most successful games of all time, it’s highly likely another game is coming in the near future. Whenever the next Animal Crossing for the Nintendo Switch 2 comes out, it should avoid the mistakes New Horizons made in not adding classic series features.

A bare-bones release might be okay for an indie cozy game, but a AAA studio putting out another title in one of the most famous video game series in the world shouldn’t lack basic features and characters. Additional content is always good for keeping players engaged, but it should be new content to grow the series rather than classic features held back to keep fans artificially engaged. Shops, classic NPCs, town ordinances, and more should all be in the next Animal Crossing at launch.