Animal Crossing: New Horizons is quite divisive when it comes to its changes, but not these ones:
- The new handling of the golden tools, in which they too have limited durability (even the golden axe, which was unbreakable in previous entries) and have very few benefits in this game compared to previous games, has not gone over well in the fandom, nor has the removal of silver tools which would have been a good opportunity for a "basic but unbreakable" tier to be implemented. In fact, even the basic tools (save for the traversal tools) being breakable is a generally disliked change, being seen as annoying at best, and game ruining at worst.
- Bunny Day being changed from a single day to a two-week long event with random eggs spawning in place of items you find has been received with much backlash, to the point where Nintendo actually had to go out of their way to reduce the spawn rate of eggs in an update, though this did nothing to eliminate complaints altogether. The event is generally considered one of the most poorly-handled aspects of New Horizons. It didn't help that it had the misfortune to overlap with Cherry Blossom Season in the Northern Hemisphere, making it harder to get Cherry Blossom DIYs before that ended.
- The triangle shades
go from resembling Kamina's glasses or the Squirtle Squad leader's glasses to something more akin to cat eye sunglasses, making them look more generic. - The live-service update system itself is a point of contention, as New Leaf never had such a system (New Leaf only ever had one major update; Welcome amiibo). Much of the criticism the system attracts is because many of the updates contain content that was already base-game content in New Leaf.note Some have argued that this is a pointed and unfair discouragement of the time-traveling style of play, as part of the charm of Animal Crossing is that you can play how you want to, and as controversial Time Travel has become, it seems unnecessarily cruel to chop off parts of the game just dissuade players from doing it. The updates being tied to having an internet connection is also unfair to those who do not have reliable access to the internet (which is not an uncommon occurrence, and the Switch is a portable console too, and you're never always going to be near WiFi).
- The significant number of absent characters* hasn't gone well with fans, who feel it makes the game feel emptier due to the lack of facilities on their island.
- The varied fixed room sizes for your house expansions can be welcome for offering more variety in room sizes and shapes than before, where every fully-expanded room was an 8x8 square. However, the varied shapes and sizes now result in only the main room being as large as a fully-upgraded room from before. The other rooms are 6x6 and 10x6, so your house has less space in its fully-expanded form, and with the surrounding first-floor rooms the player may feel especially cheated, since the familiar square shape suggests that each room can be upgraded to a full 8x8 like the main room, but they cannot. Despite the heavy customization offered in every other department, the player cannot decide the shape and sizes of their rooms when they expand. The Happy Home Paradise DLC even introduces the ability to change room size...but it's only for the designs you make for Paradise Planning and is a notable build technique you cannot take back home.
- For an example within New Horizons itself, the Nature Day patch nerfed the spawn rate of several expensive insects while increasing the spawn rate of low-value insects, most notably cutting down the spawn rate for scorpions and tarantulas to 2 year-round. Bug-hunters see this as an unfair nerf just to prevent players from making too much money so quickly, despite turnips potentially netting you millions in just one trip.
- Another derided change that came with the Nature Day patch was the removal of the two Mystery Islands that feature rare hybrid flowers. Many fans who found out about the change reacted with a combination of anger and confusion, noting that all it seemed to do was screw players out of being able to more easily obtain rare flowers and Peacock Butterflies (which only spawn around blue, black, and purple flowers, all of which are only otherwise available by crossbreeding— itself made much more difficult in New Horizons). Fans see it as Nintendo attempting to control how fans play the game, unfairly punishing everyone for the actions of players who abuse the system for in and out of game profit. The fact that the change was neither announced nor publicly addressed by Nintendo has only made it worse.
- The nerfing of the ABD's interest system, from 0.5% to just 0.05%, had also been met with complaints for some time, with fans who abuse the interest rates by time-traveling in order to net more bells being seen as the primary reason for it. Many of those who complained see it as Nintendo unfairly attempting to control how they play, similarly to the axing of the hybrid flower islands, in this case being seen as them targeting time travelers specifically, with those who don't time travel being caught in the cross-fire as a result. Furthermore, this new rate is 1/10 the ABD interest rate of previous games, making the change even less palatable.
- Sable's services in New Leaf and past games not already covered by the terminal, which included being able to store the player's excess patterns and buy unwanted clothing and accessories were completely axed. All she now has is a minor role in the early game where talking to her repeatedly progressively unlocks patterns to customise items with. Once all the patterns are unlocked, talking to her only nets generic dialogue!
- Within hours of the version 1.5.0 (Fall Update) release, it was discovered that a glitch effectively allowing "touch trading"note of NPC posters had quietly been patched, with the effect that all posters that any player had merely "touch traded" (as opposed to having obtained them "properly" via Harv's Island, whether through directly scanning an amiibo or having said villager live on their island) were removed from their catalogue. Not only did some feel that this move was not in good faith (especially since Nintendo was about to re-release all the Series 1-4 Animal Crossing amiibo cards), others noted that a few posters could only be obtained by scanning in Sanrio amiibo cards from the New Leaf era, which were only reprinted when the 2.0 update released. In addition, until the launch of Series 5 amiibo cards in 2.0, the game's first eight new villagersnote had no amiibo and had to be moved in the hard way. Thus, obtaining 100% Completion through legitimate means was far more difficult than it needed to be.
- Another similar incident involved players with modded Switches using their consoles to create “star trees”, money trees that were modded to have star fragments on them. Naturally the exploit was patched, likely because it worked with a wide array of items, some of which would not be possible to pick up if the tree was shook and the items dropped. A lot of complaints were voiced about it by players wishing the trees could have been implemented as a legitimate mechanic.
- The villagers in the first couple games could be downright savage to the player at times. By New Horizons, the dialogue got more general and fairly repetitive. It was likely the dialogue nerf was to avoid complaints from offended players, but having multiple villagers of a personality comes close to feeling like clones.
- This is the first game where Mr.Resetti is mostly missing due to autosave making resets harder. Some fans miss him and wish the option of the Reset Surveillance Center still existed.
