Copyright Screen Rant
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is all about an idyllic existence, but that pursuit of harmonious living can get a little fuzzy at the edges. With so many ways to generate bells, for example, the average New Horizons player can quickly turn into a far more aggressive capitalist than Tom Nook ever was. Throw in the potential for tactics like time travel, and I start to wonder whether the players are the protagonists at all. I tend to avoid the extreme approaches, but I'm still capable of falling prey to temptations in New Horizons. It's all too easy to hoard items, for example, and playing Wild World always reminds me of how ascetic I used to be by comparison. With the upcoming release of an Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 update, Nintendo is enabling that particular problem to an even greater degree. Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 Offers Even More Storage Keep Tucking Those Items Away The trailer for Animal Crossing: New Horizons 3.0 has a long list of changes, but the tweak to storage capacity caught my eye the most. The update will nearly double the maximum storage size from its previous maximum of 5,000, allowing it to eventually be upgraded to 9,000. It's an eye-watering sum, particularly compared to the humble and vaguely realistic storage options that Animal Crossing once featured. I'm sure plenty of Animal Crossing players will eagerly make use of this, and I'm no stranger to hoarding in games myself. At some point, though, this does start to feel like overkill. Even in a virtual world, keeping 9,000 items in storage has to represent some kind of avarice. At any rate, it doesn't seem like the simple island life that New Horizons promises on its surface. Animal Crossing Has Left The Simple Life Behind This Isn't About The Basics Anymore I'm not lodging a formal complaint about the storage expansion, and it's easy enough to just never upgrade if you want to maintain a limit. It strikes me more as yet another reminder of how much the series has mutated over the years. The life simulation aspect has taken a backseat to the curation of a perfectly aesthetic environment, and this is one example of how those two impulses can often conflict. The release of another New Horizons update will help to tide players over until the next Animal Crossing, which might not be releasing for years yet. At the same time, it continues to raise the bar that the next game will be expected to clear.
