Animal Crossing for the Wii? We all know it’s going to happen, but when? IGN speculates a little bit on Animal Crossing for the Wii. Here’s the quote from the IGN website:
“Animal Crossing Wii: AU Predictions
It’s missing in action, but that doesn’t mean we can’t dream.
by Patrick Kolan, IGN AU
Australia, August 27, 2007 – After starting life on the ill-fated Nintendo 64DD system before being released on the N64 itself, Animal Crossing was a surprise hit for Nintendo. In fact, the game’s wake ripples much farther than that; it paved the way for a lot of more experimental communication-based and vaguely educational games on Nintendo systems and even from competitors. If there was no Animal Crossing, there’d probably be no Brain Training games, for instance. This was, in some ways, a major breakthrough for deep but mainstream gaming – echoed through incredible DS sales.
As far back as E3 2005, there was confirmation of a sequel to Animal Crossing in the works on Wii. Already, DS to Wii connectivity was being touted, but it wasn’t until mid-way through 2006 that IGN received a status update. In an interview with Katsuya Eguchi (producer on Animal Crossing: Wild World on DS), IGN did a little digging around about the future of Animal Crossing on Wii:
IGN Wii: How is work on Animal Crossing for Wii progressing and what can we expect from the final product?
Katsuya Eguchi: Right now we’re currently considering our options in terms of what we can do with the various features of the controller and through WiiConnect24. With regard to the controller, basically it could become potentially your axe, your shovel and your fishing rod. You can imagine what can happen there. Again, we don’t know if this will happen for sure because it’s kind of a trial and error process. With regard to WiiConnect24, you could have someone visit your town even when you weren’t actively playing and maybe leave you a letter or a gift. Also, through Wi-Fi Connection, players could play simultaneously.
IGN Wii: Is Animal Crossing for Wii in a state now where it’s playable, or is it still in concept form?
Katsuya Eguchi: We’re still just hammering out the concepts. It’s not playable yet.
The Smashville town in Super Smash Bros. Brawl hints that Nintendo is still keen to bring the series to Wii.
Since then, Animal Crossing Wii has turned up on a couple of release date schedules out of Japan with an ominous ‘TBA’ next to the release date. At E3 2007, Shigeru Miyamoto dropped another hint, but indicated work had paused at the time. It’s coming – but it’s not coming anytime soon, it seems. That leaves us with room to speculate, so let’s begin!
Animal Crossing becomes Mii Crossing?
…And the birth of a new graphics engine, after a two-generation leap in technology. Alright, to be fair, Mii Crossing is a bit of an exaggeration (so calm down, fanboys), but we’d guess that, since Mii Channel was produced by the same team who worked on the latest Animal Crossing title on DS, there’d be some talk internally about how to integrate Mii characters without spoiling the style of the game. Of course, it’ll still remain an Animal Crossing game – complete with furry critters – but we’re guessing the village will have the occasional Mii from your saved data and friends list pop up. They might be represented as full Mii figures, or more simply through the basic facial textures and coloured clothes applied to the humanoid Animal Crossing character.
As for the new engine, it won’t be a radical departure in complexity. However, you can expect proper 3D trees and environmental details instead of sprites, and items in the world will be texturally more sophisticated, if not higher in polygon count. We would also like to see a fully controllable camera to match the new engine, but the option to keep the camera fixed at a similar angle to the current (GameCcube) perspective.
Wii Remote Uses:
By its nature, the Wii Remote is perfect for most activities in Animal Crossing – digging, wood-chopping, bug-catching, fishing, painting, writing and so on. All of those tasks can be used in context with motion control. However, we kind of hope that simple actions like digging and chopping can remain button-based, since repeated swishing and slashing while wandering around might be a bit ridiculous. Then again, it worked for Twilight Princess, right? It would be cool if the game took advantage of the built-in speaker too – perhaps to play back incidental sounds, like digging, chopping and fishing.
Other activities could include simplified cooking games, involving fruit and vegies you’ve harvested in the game (again, assuming the game introduces a wider variety of foods).
Importing a Mii Character might not be as offensive and outlandish as you might think.
Extensive Online Integration:
When speaking with Kikizo Katsuya Eguchi indicated that plans were already underway to allow for cross-platform communication. “Another application might be someone could send a letter from their cellphone or from an email address on a PC to the Wii, and then the player living in the town in Animal Crossing could receive that letter,” said Eguchi. “There probably will be Friend Codes for the Wii version, however, we’re not so sure about compatibility,” he said. “So it’s most likely that everyone will be using new codes.”
Things get a little interesting here. Back in 2005, as mentioned above, hints were dropped about the potential for emailing and messaging via PC and mobile phone to Wii. Thanks to WiiConnect24, the Wii is always online. If you’ve had your ear to the ground for a little while, then you might have heard about Nintendo’s dabbling in the mobile phone market in different capacities. It’s entirely possible that, if you connect the dots a little, Nintendo are creating some sort of Animal Crossing-specific application (in the game) that can receive text messages and emails on your Wii. The specifics would be complicated, but we’re sure the logistics have been toyed with.
Of course, it begs the question: why bother? Is there really any advantage to being able to email or text message someone via PC or phone into Animal Crossing? That’s the real stumbling block.
Perhaps the biggest opportunity lies in the Wii’s always-on net connection service, WiiConnect24. With this, your village is always open to visitors, who potentially can buy and sell items in your village, leave you messages, buy property, plant flowers and trees and inspect your house. Moreover, Nintendo can constantly update the game with special events and scenarios that will automatically be updated each time you play. This could make way for special weekend Nintendo events, in-game perks and bonuses for logging in at certain times and might make an interesting way of releasing new demos, screenshots and hidden items.
Being able to travel freely into another village might yield other interesting options too. How about being able to play two- or four-player multiplayer games in the town arcade? Or a spot of soccer on the soccer field? We loved just kicking the ball around in the GameCcube version; with WiiConnect24, the potential for socialising in real-time is incredible.
Custom Furniture and Floor Plans:
Again, Katsuya Eguchi elaborates on another much-asked for feature – custom furniture and objects. “I think it’s a great idea. Of course, if you made your own furniture, you’d want to share it with others, to be able to give and receive hand-made stuff. Otherwise why would you make it? To be able to do that, you have to build in some place to keep that in the memory. The save data would be pretty huge, then. That’s a challenge I’d like to face, though.”
So, perhaps through using pre-conceived blocks and shapes, Nintendo can minimise the raw size of the object files – every disc would ship with the shapes and the data just needs to tell the game engine what to do with them. That’s a simplistic view, of course, but we’d love to create and texture our own tables, chairs, beds and other objects and then send or sell them to friends.
The next step in the process might be to customise the layout of your house and actually build levels and wings depending on the Bell you earn along the way. Each wing could be assembled The Sims-style, and you could add your own custom textures, designed on DS or in-game.
The Animal Crossing movie hints at the sort of scale we’d love to see in Animal Crossing Wii.
Larger Village Size:
From larger houses to more of them: we’d like to see the number of residents in the village upped from 15 up to 30 residents, meaning double the land and more variety in it, too. We’re not talking Oblivion-large, but it might be nice to go and explore a little bit; check out the view from the top of the town hill, all the way down to the beach and off into the horizon. Rivers might feed into the sea, but a central lake for ice-skating on or swimming in would be cool, as would forests for scavenging.
A larger village also means more opportunities for cool stores. How about a movie theatre that streams the latest Nintendo trailers inside? Or a University where you can enrol and learn all about the game series, items in the world, techniques for catching fish, special secrets and so on? The game could even be updated with special-instance stores that Nintendo can send to your system via WiiConnect24.
Owning Multiple Properties:
For the future property owner in all of us, the possibility of owning more than one house is tantalising. In the world of Animal Crossing, you could potentially buy up to all four of the available player houses – and upgrade them – for three purposes: One, to store all your cool gyroids and objects in; two, so you can rent it out to AI characters in game; or three, rent it to friends from other villages as an alternate homestead. From here, other players could harvest your fruits, sell products and potentially score unique items that only occur in some villages, depending on the randomisation techniques inherent in the game.
Rental also provides you with some easy Bell, and adds a bit of strategy – you have to figure out how much you can rent it out for, based on the quality of the furnishings and size.
Proper keyboard compatibility might make fiddly on-screen menus like this a thing of the past.
Keyboard Compatibility:
One of the earliest moments that got us thinking about Animal Crossing again was the very subtle discovery that the Wii is now partially compatible with USB keyboards. This might be a very easy step forward for the traditionally laborious text input method of the past two games (although with the Wiimote things would be much faster). Moreover, it might actually get kids writing – which, hey, can only be a good thing, right?
Virtual Console Game Unlocks:
Undoubtedly, a bit part of the Animal Crossing (GamecCube and N64 versions) appeal was the chance to dig up or win versions of classic NES games. There were some 19 all up to be found. This time, since Virtual Console has made a number of these games available for a nominal price, maybe you can dig up some sort of trade-in pass for a downloadable copy of a VC title! Imagine. Drool.
There’s a catch, though; you can only use these games inside the Animal Crossing village – meaning you need to fire it up to play these games. So, for those who want easy access to the full experience and are too lazy to get into Animal Crossing, the incentive to buy the games is still there, and Nintendo’s suits stay happy, because the dollars keep rolling in. We’re also guessing that Classic Controller compatibility would be an option when playing the VC games inside the Animal Crossing world.
Tom Nook’s Online Store
Since online elements are so prevalent in our vision of Animal Crossing Wii, perhaps Tom Nook has embraced online commerce and can now facilitate buying and selling items 24 hours a day through an in-game website or through a Nintendo Animal Crossing channel. That way, players who can only log into the game at night can still buy most items that daytime players have access to.
The other half of the idea is that any player can sell or auction items they’ve found in the game, including unique patterns and house rental opportunities. This could be hosted either through the in-game website, through the Animal Crossing channel or even on the actual internet – presumably through the official Animal Crossing Community site.”
