After months of silence on the future of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Nintendo has confirmed that more substantial updates will be heading to the game in the latter half of 2021. On Twitter this morning, the company revealed that new seasonal items would be available starting on July 29, 2021, in a free update before elaborating further on what's to come next. "In addition to these updates, more free content for Animal Crossing: New Horizons is currently in development for later this year," reads the post. It then calls for fans to have patience as Nintendo works on said content.
Likely caught off guard by the COVID-19 pandemic last year, Animal Crossing: New Horizons sort of fell by the wayside. Quickly rocketing up to not only Nintendo's most successful title of 2020 but the most successful game of the generation, Nintendo had to shift priorities to create more copies of the game while also dealing with shortages of its Switch hardware. Couple that with the same development team working on Splatoon 3 and there likely wasn't enough time to get updates out of the door.
We could speculate all we want about what these updates will contain, but it does fit into Nintendo's original statement of roughly two years of post-launch support for New Horizons. Far be it from me to say the game is "unfinished" or "lacking in content," but it definitely feels like Nintendo's usual drip-feed update strategy didn't pan out. With this new confirmation, however, maybe 2022 will see even more substantial updates come to the game and restore features that are absent from previous installments.
Source: Twitter