Come on, Nintendo. You really want to think about this. Do you really want Animal Crossing fans going all Mr. Resetti on you? They’re a scary bunch, trust us.

Now, you’ll forgive franchise fans for feeling just a little disheartened by Animal Crossing: New Horizons right now. When the fact that a new Switch installment was on the way was announced, the excitement was palpable. We had only a vague ‘at some point in 2019’ release date to go on, but that presumably meant the holiday season. You know, the most lucrative time of the year.

Sadly, our hopes and dreams were crushed into tiny, rather salty fragments when E3 2019 rolled around. During the show, we learned that the game has been pushed into early 2020 (March 20). As Nintendo Life reports, the company announced that this decision was made to allow the employees to enjoy a better work-life balance, so that’s admirable, but it still means another three months without New Horizons in our lives.

In the meantime, there’s something else to get a little irate about (and we all know how much gamers love getting irate). That’s right, friends. When the game does hit hybrid handhelds everywhere, it’s not going to feature cloud saves. That newfangled Nintendo Switch Online subscription you have? That’s no good here.

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Via: Polygon

Needless to say, franchise fans are up in arms about this move. Nintendo have, again, provided their reasoning for the decision (as reported by Animal Crossing World), with New Horizons’ Higashi Nogami stating that the move was made to avoid manipulating time, which remains one of the founding concepts of the series.

While there is some logic to that argument, the fact remains that Animal Crossing represents an incredible time commitment from dedicated fans, and the fact that they won’t be able to back up their towns is a travesty. This is the argument being pushed by a new petition on Change.org, one that’s rapidly gaining pace at that.

“Many players spend hundreds - often up to thousands of hours - on one of these games, building up their fictional towns and developing friendships with its inhabitants. This is why we would like Nintendo to reconsider the decision to disable cloud saves and therefore withhold the only option for players to backup their game saves,” petition creator Lucia F writes. The sentiment has struck a chord with many: the plea to Nintendo has reached 15,532 signatures as of the time of writing.

Let’s hope the Big N pay attention. Yes, time manipulation is a thing, but so is the very real risk of losing all that progress simply because you drop your Switch. Save our towns!

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