I’m going to keep this short and sweet: I’m done with “Animal Crossing: New Horizons“. After playing it damn near every day for the last three years and eight months, I have decided to set the game aside, and do something else… Namely, play “Starfield“.
Why? Well, I could go into a variety of reasons for this change, but in the end it comes down to one, simple thing – I wasn’t having fun. In fact, ACNH hasn’t been fun for a long time. I have continued to play it out of a sense of necessity, a feeling like I had to check in on my island every day, because… I don’t know…
After some introspection, I really didn’t have a reason to check in, did I? Every morning after work, I would log into the game, do some of the daily chores around the island, bury some Bells to grow a money tree, and check in at Resident Services, so I’d continue to earn the maximum Miles every day. Does that sound like fun to you? I expect not. In the end, it was just another job, a self-imposed obligation to a game that had stopped being fun years ago.
So, what changed my mind, then? Two things. First of all, I am having fun while playing “Starfield”, and I’d rather spend more time playing it, than doing the same old chores in ACNH. Also, my favorite holiday event in ACNH is Halloween, which passed recently, and I just couldn’t be bothered to log back in that evening to do the same old event.
This shouldn’t be surprising, though. ACNH hasn’t received any real content updates since they put out that one expansion. Furthermore, My Lovely Bride™ and I both bought that expansion, and I didn’t even really bother to play it. This should have been a bit of a clue, that it was time to walk away… and yet I stayed, until now.
Now then, I expect I will pop back into the game once or twice, here or there, as I am curious about what will happen while I am gone. Will residents move away? Will my house become infested with cockroaches? Will the residents who remain, if any, feel like I abandoned them?
I suppose we’ll see, in a month or so.
