Function vs. form
Crossing a line? A case study of Animal Crossing: New Horizon’s UX
A great game’s playability tarnished by tedious UX
Ah, the sweet, simple pleasure that is Animal Crossing.
For years, gamers of all intensities have been entertained by the carefully crafted modesty of this Nintendo game series. It doesn’t feel so long ago (2005) that I sat in the darkness of my room at age nine, running around in a new, digital life for the first time. As famed dog musician K.K. Slider said:
For those of you who haven’t heard about this fastest-selling and incredibly popular gaming phenomenon: Animal Crossing: New Horizons is the latest entry in the life simulation series about sharing a town with — you guessed it — animals. Players typically buy, sell, and collect a variety of items (furniture, clothing, fruit, critters, fossils, art) to expand their homes and amass an assortment of things. The game is so open-ended, though, that you never have to participate in that materialism unless you want to.
The original game situates you as a regular villager in a small town. Things were different back in those days. Much like real life, you were stuck with the face given to you (even if you looked like a disgruntled service worker after a 10 hour shift) and the layout of the town your train pulled into couldn’t change either. The map system formed a perfect grid that only changed screens when you reached the boundary of your current square. There was no autosave function (we relied on Gyroids to do that work) and your inventory only had 15 slots. TL;DR: gameplay was harder.
In later iterations, you were made the mayor of the town, or were located in a more urban setting altogether. In New Horizons, you are the Resident Representative of a relaxing deserted island community.
The Animal Crossing series has always walked the line between creating a world that elongates time and a world that is user-friendly.
As the game, its audience, and technological capabilities have grown, the series has slowly introduced features to improve gameplay and usability — but do these changes keep pace with this growth?
Users want what they want. Even with new characters, new premises, expanded item storage capabilities, and boundless customizability, many fans feel the series’ newest installment, New Horizons, lacks playability. People who identify as even slightly more than “casual” players often lament how the game’s UX deliberately decelerates gameplay. In fact, there are entire forums, videos, case studies, and redesigns dedicated to changing or hating on New Horizons’ UX.
In replies to these forums and videos, many fans defend the game, arguing that Animal Crossing is supposed to be a relaxed, effortless, and leisurely social simulation. Nintendo wholly reinforces this belief. For years, Nintendo’s creators have struggled against audiences in a debate of “who knows best.” UX perspectives like mine would argue that users always know best. However, in a 2017 interview with Rolling Stone, Nintendo game designer and director Jordan Amaro (Splatoon 2, Resident Evil 7: Biohazard) disagrees:
In Japan, there’s a sense of, “We’re making this thing for you, and this is how we think this thing is better enjoyed.”
“I bought this game. Why can’t I just enjoy this game the way I want?” That’s not how we think here. Yes, you did buy the game. But we made this game. And we’re pretty confident about how this game should be enjoyed… We think we know what you don’t know you want. You think you know what you want. But we know what you will want once you understand it.
So who’s right: the fans who want to play at their desired speed, or the creators determined to carry out an artistic vision? Function or form? To find out, let’s take a journey through the game’s most resented and detested UX scenarios. The truth is just a seaplane-ride away.
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Sorting functions
While item storage has greatly improved since the original game — I remember building a basement just to place things on the floor — New Horizon’s item systems haven’t kept up with the game itself. When inventory and storage spaces are larger and there are thousands of items to choose from, the storage interface becomes a crucial gameplay component.
Inventory
You begin with 20 open spaces in your inventory — but once you get going, these fill up quickly with tools, resources, and collectibles. Eventually, you’re able to unlock an extra 10 inventory slots, raising your total to 30. This nearly doubles inventory totals from previous games, which allowed 16 slots or less.
In a larger inventory, however, things can get lost. Keeping organized takes constant inventory rearrangement. While items in your home’s storage space have an autosort function, your personal inventory contains no such feature. Understandably, manual sorting frustrates many players who want to organize their possessions quickly and get on with their virtual days.
Home storage
Strangely enough, though, the home storage only has auto-sort functions. While your inventory can only be manually sorted, your home storage can only be sorted by filters. It seems like a weird place to lack consistency.
And the automatic sorting in your storage is strange, too — sorting by type sorts almost by type. There are a fair number of hiccups. If there’s only an automatic sort function, shouldn’t it be accurate enough to make items easily findable?
Grouped actions
Menu sorting is irritating and sometimes time-consuming — but if players have one major gripe with the speed of gameplay, it lies with actions that can’t be grouped.
De-Stacking items
As New Horizons introduced crafting with resources such as stone, iron, and wood, the game also expanded its inventory stacking potential. Formerly, only money and fruit could be stacked; now, fruit can be stacked in larger quantities and crafting materials (which also include weeds, sticks, and shells) can be stacked, too. This stacking happens automatically, which means less manual arranging for players.
Unfortunately, disarranging stacks is more difficult. Aside from money, which can be de-stacked in increments, players can only remove one item from a stack at a time. For example: say you have a stack of 30 iron and want to give 5 to a friend. You’ll have to remove each iron piece separately before manually creating the five-piece stack yourself.
Presumably, the auto-stacking feature was introduced to save time — so why isn’t un-stacking just as simple?
Other inventory interactions
Interacting with usable items in the inventory is a further detriment to efficient gameplay Fruits — which, when eaten, allow you to uproot trees or destroy rocks — can only be eaten one at a time. Worse, bugs and fish in your inventory can only be released individually, and the inventory menu closes each time this happens. When you’re catching bugs en masse to earn money or to find one you need for your collection, these tedious processes waste time.
Crafting, trading, and buying
Players either love or hate the new crafting system. Regardless, crafting is an integral part of New Horizons and now sits at the forefront of gameplay. The crafting recipes you can acquire and recreate help you build tools, new furniture, and even your island’s general store early in the game.
Despite its importance the crafting process has been similarly slowed. Even when you meet the requirements for crafting multiple copies of the same item, you must craft each one individually. This means you select an item, watch your player build it and show it off, then return to the menu to do it over again. In many instances, such as with larger furniture, this use case doesn’t happen often — but what if you’re crafting high quantities of your store’s daily “hot item” to sell for extra cash? Or crafting a whole bunch of bait to fish with during a fishing tournament? Then this workflow quickly becomes one of the most irritating aspects of the game.
Users can trade in Nook Miles — reward points for completing specific activities — for money vouchers or plane tickets. This trading process works in a similar one-by-one basis. Select, animation, repeat.
Buying items from the two in-game stores is a similarly clunky procedure. At Nook’s Cranny, a general store with rotating inventory, there are (after upgrading) two items that have an unlimited rate of purchase. But they can only be bought one at a time. When I wanted to purchase 20 books to make a few bookshelves, I had less than what you’d call a pleasant experience.
The game’s clothing store, Able Sisters, has a similar function. In the changing room, where you view the store’s current inventory, only one item from each category (such as tops, hats, shoes) can be purchased at a time. To buy multiple items in a category, you have to cash out, leave the changing room, and reenter. It seems like a failing business model for a clothing store on a small island where the animals don’t even wear pants.
Interacting with nonplayer character (NPC) visitors
That fishing tournament I mentioned earlier? What a pain in the tuches it is.
Although Saharah, my personal queen and carpet trader from far away, had her dialogue patched in the Version 1.3 update, there are still NPC interactions that leave much to be desired. These underwhelming interactions jump out during two events that should be some of the most fun days in the game: the fishing tournament and the bug off.
The engagement process at either event is an absolute drag. In both cases, players engage with several long dialogues to set off different event actions. To sign up for the event is one dialogue; to determine points is another; then you still have to sell any critters you’ve captured; and if you want to exchange your points for prizes, say hello to another interaction. If you’re competing multiple times to earn prizes and score enough points for a trophy, this process becomes downright insufferable. Tell me grouping these interactions together wouldn’t create a more enjoyable experience for users. You can’t.
Laying paths
Decorating your island is one of the game’s best new features. Paths, specifically, are an excellent addition. In older games, you could only create paths by running repeatedly over the same spots, or by using customized patterns you designed yourself or obtained from QR codes on the internet. In New Horizons, though, paths become another part of island customizability. In fact, the game eventually gives you a set of paths that you can use, and your villagers will actually recognize these paths and travel along them.
In a game where you only have one island, decorating that space can make or break your experience. It’s a shame these paths can only be created one square at a time. As a player myself, I’d be much more inclined to redesign and better my island if making new walkways wasn’t such a pain in the path.
Confirmation dialogues
While not nearly as time-consuming as the lack of grouped game actions, confirmation dialogues are time-eaters that leave many fans pining for a better solution.
Are you sure you want to use this item you clicked on?
Confirmation dialogues are great to have when you’re pursuing an action of significance, importance, or potential danger — but opening your wardrobe or your crafting table don’t really qualify as any of these.
In both cases, pressing “A” to interact with these objects will open up a simple dialogue box. While not overly unbearable, these dialogues are superfluous when players can close the interaction by simply pressing the “B” button.
Some players may argue that it’s a necessary scenario since players can choose between two options for each interaction.
Wardrobe options
- Get Changed
- Edit wand outfits
Crafting bench options:
- Let’s craft!
- Customize something
But what if crafting/customization and getting changed/ wand outfits were located in the same place? What if players could flip back-and-forth between the two (using the under-utilized “ZL” and “ZR” buttons to swap screens)? This function would eliminate a confirmation dialogue and allow players to complete actions more efficiently. Wouldn’t that make a better, more comprehensive, and more enjoyable experience for players crafting and customizing at the same time?
The dreaded airport
When visiting a friend’s island, saying “be there in a minute” might actually be an understatement. The next time you’re late, you probably have the airport’s confirmation dialogues to thank.
Confirmation dialogues may be more important in this scenario — accessing the internet to travel may put some younger users at risk of seeing others’ inappropriate creations — but there are still ways to ensure players make informed choices without moving through a seemingly endless series of screens.
Maybe this problem is a matter of poor design. What if there were two dodo birds running the desks? What if there were more? Couldn’t the user experience actually be enhanced and more realistic here if there were different counters for incoming and outgoing flights? One dodo is cute — more, with different personalities or hairstyles, would be cuter.
Notification navigation
One pet peeve I have with my phone — my real life phone — is engaging with unanchored notifications. You know the drill: you’re alerted to a notification within an app, but when you click the notification and the app opens, you’re brought to the app’s homepage, desperately searching for a way to make that little red bubble disappear.
I play New Horizons to escape silly problems like this in my life, so I certainly don’t expect the same thing to happen when I use my in-game Nook Phone.
Nook Miles notifications
These UI problems do happen, though, and they take a lot of time to navigate. Completing in-game challenges for redeemable points (Nook Miles) is one such case. Earlier, I mentioned how time-consuming it was to redeem these points for rewards — but earning them isn’t a speedy task either.
Nook miles are already the most time-consuming thing in the game to earn. They’re so time-consuming, in fact, that they’ve become a kind of currency for trading within the game. So when you finally complete a task and open your phone to collect your Nook Miles, it’s a bit off-putting that the notification won’t automatically direct you to your accomplishment.
Catching ’em all
Similarly, when I catch a new bug or fish and it registers in my phone encyclopedia, I expect opening the phone app to reveal the new addition to my collection. When you receive a new recipe, it automatically sorts to the top of your recipe collection for you to see. Why doesn’t this happen with your critters, too?
Instructions
Part of me understands that the game wants to keep gameplay leisurely and accessible to those who aren’t hardcore gamers. And they do introduce some efficiency into their UX with shortcuts and functions to help you navigate.
But if the game is designed with all player backgrounds in mind, why are instructions to accessing these helpful hints never revealed?
Some players didn’t realize menu items could be sorted manually in your inventory, for example, until they visited online forums and saw other people discussing it. Likewise, people weren’t aware that you can press “A” while crafting to speed up the animation, or that you can hold down “B” to speed up dialogue. The game never provides any of these hints, leaving users to figure it out on their own.
While leaving players to their own devices encourages exploration — and it’s likely more intense gamers will try smashing buttons to speed gameplay anyway — not having access to these features straight away might frustrate new users. There’s certainly a balance to find between overburdening with information and not supplying any information at all, but New Horizons lets users down by not telling them how to best access their game.
And if a player forgets something or needs help? Forget about it. The in-game Nook Phone doesn’t even offer an application to guide new users. Why couldn’t a simple help menu be added? Or, even ignoring this possibility for aesthetics: isn’t there another place players could turn to for assistance? Isabelle, the town’s administrative whiz, delivers a daily morning announcement where she almost always repeats one of the same irrelevant stories — might there be a way for players to opt-in to a “helpful hints” portion of her morning dialogue instead?
Accessibility options
We’re approaching the end of our list, and we’ve saved the most impactful missing feature for last.
There are no — I repeat, zero — accessibility features in Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Players with visual impairments can’t modify the game depth of field, contrast, lighting, or coloring. Players unable to use the controllers’ rumble functions may not be able to fish easily — they’re harder to catch when you can’t feel them bite. Other players with auditory impairments may want to adjust music or sound volumes, but this, too, is unchangeable. Game controls can’t be mapped either, and some players may struggle with having to repeatedly press a single button to enact ungrouped tasks.
Some users have stepped up to create islands that are accessible to all visitors, but the game itself does nothing to address players’ needs.
The results are in
I’m a massive fan of the Animal Crossing series, and New Horizons is my favorite installment yet. The customizability, lovable characters, and thousands of collectible items have kept me playing for over 300 hours.
But the UX is, well, beastly. While I haven’t found it overly annoying in my own experience, countless other players stopped playing — despite seasonal updates — because the game’s shortcomings simply weren’t worth their time.
Does the UX break the game? Not really. Did it stop people from purchasing it? Of course not! But it has impeded playability and stopped players from returning.
Takeaways
Why hasn’t Nintendo addressed these widespread concerns? More importantly, why were they issues in the first place? Any number of these UX problems could’ve been solved through user testing and by giving players more options to fit the game to their playstyle. Players who want to spend time manually rearranging their inventory would be free to do so; players who instead want to focus on other game areas wouldn’t have to worry about another menu wasting their time.
In a game based so heavily on customization, I’m not convinced that limiting players from customizing their playstyle — saying that the creator knows best — was the right move.
Slowing an interface down does not always create a relaxing user experience. Even advanced gamers playing New Horizons want to engage with a leisurely reality — but an inefficient user interface is anything but calming. No one wants to go slow because a menu forces them to. Generally, players would much rather spend their time engaging in the activities they love — hunting for fish and bugs, decorating their island, talking to their neighbors — than scrolling through items and sludging through menus.
Maybe a video game can get away with placing form over function, but it won’t work in your typical UX scenario. Users like to own their options and know that designers value their time and feelings. They don’t want to focus on menial tasks; they want to create and participate in an experience they’ll remember.
So give users what they want. Give them the beauty and personality of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, but don’t ignore their personal product experiences.
As we design our products, we remain indebted to our users: each action, function, and process should be created with their experience in mind. Finding balance between function and form isn’t easy. But we owe it to our users to try. Otherwise, we’ll fall into a usability debt that rivals even the debt a player can owe Tom Nook.
Support your users’ experiences and maybe they won’t be cross enough to write an article about it.
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