Small Talk: Usability Issues in Animal Crossing: New Horizons
By: Mykaela R
Tags: User Experience Design, Game Design, Animal Crossing, Usability, Nintendo

Animal Crossing: New Horizons is Nintendo’s most recent installment in their small town life simulator franchise. Millions of players across the world have fallen in love with the bliss of a virtual island getaway. Despite its massive popularity, the everyday experience of island life is interrupted by a few usability issues. The four most prevalent issues encountered are:

Dialog and menu navigation

Inventory management

Dealing with multiples

Tool aiming

I have outlined these issues below as well as suggested some possible solutions to increase the ease of use of the game.

Dialog and Menu Navigation

Issue

New Horizon’s menu actions primarily come in the form of conversations with the island residents and workers. Because of this, simple actions often take a long time because the player has to wait for the NPC they’re interacting with in order to take the next step in the objective they are trying to accomplish. While charming and fun the first few times, this process can become tedious and boring. The primary areas where the amount of dialog gets in the way of the gameplay experience occurs when:

Players talk to Tom Nook about moving buildings and constructing ramps/bridges

Players talk to Isabelle about general island management

Players talk to Timmy and Tommy about buying/selling items in the shop

Players talk to Blathers about assessing fossils and donating creatures/items

Players talk to Orville about visiting other islands or opening their own island

Players talk to regular island guests about their respective purposes (Saharah, Gulliver, Celeste, Leif, Flick, CJ, Redd, Wisp, Labelle, Kicks, Daisy Mae, and KK Slider)

Since a majority of these interactions occur on a daily basis in order to complete common everyday tasks (and sometimes even more than once a day), the player is forced to go through the same standard dialogs. The overexposure to so much tedious text often starts to annoy the player as they become more experienced in the game

Potential Solution

Since social interaction is a core aspect of the game, it wouldn’t make sense to take the dialogs out completely and just have the player interact with different levels of menus. Instead, a more appropriate solution would be to provide the player with a game setting or a button shortcut that allows more experienced players to interact more efficiently if they want to. Technically, the game already has this (the player can press R on each new dialog box to make the text type faster), but the feature needs to be improved upon a little. Providing a more enhanced shortcut button that could skip the text entirely and allow the player to access the menu options immediately would cut down on time spent on very familiar text would alleviate the tediousness of the more extensive menu options in the airport, for example. Providing an optional method to adjust the dialog interactions accounts for players of different playstyles and experiences and allows them to adjust their preferences to their personal ease of use.

Inventory Management

Issue

Along the same lines, the way the player is able to manage and see information about their personal inventory could also use some usability improvements, especially since working with the inventory system is also a major aspect of the game. Selecting items for use brings up only one action menu, which is nice and simple, but requiring the use of the same menu over and over every time you want to store or place an object becomes tedious with time.

Additionally, viewing critical information about items in storage, inventory, NookPhone apps, or in shops is generally absent. In most instances, the viewer lacks information such as whether or not they’ve already bought an item, how many they have, buy/sell price, and/or if they have the materials they need for the item. The NookPhone app for DIY recipes comes close to accomplishing this: it shows at a glance if the player has built the recipe before and how many they have in their pockets. In the other scenarios, such as in shops or in general inventory, this information is missing entirely. This leads the player to unintentionally purchasing or crafting multiples of items when they didn’t actually need to, which wastes the player’s materials and bells.

Potential Solution

The inventory management controls could be drastically improved by incorporating abilities that are available in the camera app or the decoration mode inside the player’s house. Both of these features have a complete legend of button shortcuts displayed in the HUD when they are activated, and allow the player to control the respective mode without navigating through menu options. Adding similar elements that assign button shortcuts to frequently used actions in the pockets and storage inventories will alleviate the slowness and repetition of the inventory item management process, especially since most buttons remain unmapped in those contexts.

Regarding the item information, the most efficient method of data implementation would be to add small badges that denote the status and amount of items already owned to the item name tooltip, since that tooltip always shows on every item that’s highlighted in shops and inventories. Small icons, similar to the ones used in the DIY Recipes app (but still distinct from them) can be placed below the name of the item with the applicable numbers next to the icon. This provides an unobtrusive but more efficient way to inform the player about each item and eliminates the frustration of needing to run back across the island to check inventory or open and close menus multiple times when the player forgets to grab necessary materials.

Dealing with Multiples

Issue

The issue regarding the ability to work with multiples runs alongside the inventory management issues because it appears in virtually the same places. The game does not provide the player the ability to purchase or craft multiples of an item in the shops or at a crafting table, respectively. There are a few limited instances where the player is allowed to deal in multiples:

Selling items at Nook’s Cranny — players can select as many items as they want in their inventory to sell to Timmy and Tommy

Buying specific kinds of items in 1 group of 5, such as plant starters from Leif and certain expendable items in Nook’s Cranny like saplings, customization kits, fireworks, and bubbles

Limited multiples at Able Sisters tailor shop, where the player can purchase more than one piece of clothing as long as they are in different clothing categories (e.g. the player can purchase a shirt, pair of pants, hat, and shoes all at once, but not four shirts at once)

The most frustrating areas where the player cannot work in multiples are:

When crafting DIYs at a crafting table. The player is not asked how many of the item they want to craft, and after crafting a single item, the player is taken to a menu that asks if they want to keep crafting.

When purchasing clothes from the tailor shop. The current multiple purchase system described above is only efficient if the player finds a single item in each category that they want to buy. If the player wants to buy more than one shirt, dress, hat, etc., they have to enter and exit the shop dressing room multiple times.

When redeeming Nook Miles and bells at the Nook Stop terminal. Similar to the crafting table, the game lets you redeem one item without asking how many you want and then displays a menu asking the player if they would like to redeem miles again.

Not allowing the player to work in multiples is inefficient and interrupts the flow of play by forcing the player to repeat actions over and over when they don’t necessarily need to be repeated over and over.

Potential Solution

Before confirming a purchase or DIY project, the game could display a modal that requires the player to insert the amount of items that the player wants to purchase. This would require only one extra step for each item instead of multiple extra steps. After the number is confirmed and the item(s) are bought/crafted, returning the player directly to the item menu instead of having them confirm whether or not they want to continue purchasing/crafting is potentially more efficient for the player flow — it smooths the process of buying/crafting multiple kinds of items while providing a simple, single-button exit.

Addressing the tailor shop purchases to accommodate buying multiple items requires a different approach because of the unique way the system is set up to allow the player to buy a single item in multiple categories simultaneously. Smoothing out the problem would mean allowing the player to select multiple items in each category as well as in multiple categories. The current system allows the player to buy across categories by letting the player try on different clothing items and then purchasing the clothes that they are wearing. Therefore, we need to be able to differentiate trying on clothes and selecting clothes for purchase. An ideal solution that builds off of experiences people are already familiar with in e-commerce circumstances is incorporating a shopping cart mechanic. Players can then add multiple items to the cart with one button, try on clothes with a different button, and then use the purchase button to buy all items in the cart. This prevents the player from needing to enter and exit the dressing room multiple times.

Tool Aiming

Issue

The game does not provide any way to indicate whether or not the player has correctly aimed their character at their intended target. This scenario is applicable when the player is terraforming, fishing, digging, and planting. The only way the play can currently tell where they are aiming is the direction they are facing — but in some cases, the player can miscalculate the precision of the direction they are facing and accidentally dig a hole, plant trees and flowers, cast the fishing line, or create/destroy cliffs or water features in the wrong spot. This often leads to wasting the limited durability of tools, which cost materials to make.

Potential Solution

Because the layout of the game is based on a grid, resolving the aim issue could be done by incorporating some elements from Minecraft, which also works heavily off of a grid. Minecraft uses a crosshair as well as a subtle outline to highlight which block on the grid the player is aiming at. Even though New Horizons is not a first-person game, adding a visible outline around the block the game recognizes the player is aiming at could improve the accuracy of tool use and save players materials over time. Since the water is not as grid based when fishing, substituting a grid outline with a circular highlight could be a better substitute in that case.

Conclusion

Most of the more apparent UX issues in Animal Crossing: New Horizons revolve around the aspects of the game that become especially tedious over time. Typically, good user experience means frictionless play through the most frequently used mechanics in the game since they are used so often. Though New Horizons is a game of comfort and is generally taken at a slower, more leisurely pace, that doesn’t mean it has to be tedious. Addressing these barriers in gameplay will add to the island getaway experience, not subtract from it.