Animal Crossing’s Switch 2 update ignored online play's issues

"Looks like someone's on their way here!" haunts me

There have been many substantial improvements brought to Animal Crossing: New Horizons with its recent 3.0 and Nintendo Switch 2 updates, but neither has fixed the game's biggest problem: Online play is still an absolute pain in the ass. A recent IGN article set out to test just how well the new 12-player experience works, and the results were abysmal, taking 90 minutes in total to get everyone on one island.

Complaints about the multiplayer mechanics in New Horizons are nothing new. The entire process is very long-winded, necessitating a lengthy airport conversation, followed by an even longer air travel loading screen. For players already on the destination island, it's even worse — everyone present is frozen in place, forced to watch the entire arrival loading session despite already being there. With several visitors, it can feel almost impossible to play, and if crashes occur for any player, everyone is reset to their own island and forced to start the entire process again.

One of the biggest selling points of the Nintendo Switch 2 update for New Horizons was its expanded multiplayer options. Players can now host up to 11 other visitors, decorate together on Dream Islands, and utilize the new GameChat features for a more immersive experience. It's something that sounds great in theory, but is absolutely awful in practice. The IGN article details several setbacks that occurred during testing, including multiple crashes and a lot of waiting.

The article was shared on Reddit, and many chimed in to lament how the update failed to address anything regarding these online issues, with one user writing, "If there was ANYTHING they should have fixed/updated about online play, it was how everyone is stuck when someone comes in. There is no reason to do so, and it's [sic] feels like a biblical level punishment."

Since its very first entry, the Animal Crossing franchise has always emphasized playing with friends. In an interview from 2001 about the original Animal Crossing, director Katsuya Eguchi spoke about how one of the core values of the game was to inspire real-life connection with other players, stating, "A key concept for us was people communicating with each other." So how did it go so wrong?

Reddit user paulstronaut offered one potential explanation: "The problem is that when you join an island, the entire state of the island is snapshotted and sent to you...So basically they have to ensure every player has the exact same state at the exact same time before sending any real-time play. It’s a problem of the core of the game engine itself and it likely cannot be fixed without a complete rewrite." If that's truly how online play operates, it looks like players will simply have to cross their fingers and hope that the next Animal Crossing makes multiplayer less painful.