Animal Crossing: New Horizons looks great by all accounts, and people are rightfully excited to get their hands on the game, but some aspects in particular have been attracting the wrong kind of attention in the lead-up to the game’s launch. Most notably, the way the game is handling save data has drawn criticism from quite a few people.
During the recent Direct presentation focusing on the game, Nintendo revealed that Animal Crossing: New Horizons would – owing to several restrictions surrounding its handling of save data – allow users to recover their saves from Nintendo if their console was lost or got stolen- but they would only be allowed to do it once. However, as spotted by Nintendo Everything, the company recently uploaded a new version of the Direct presentation, and changes made to a certain section indicate that backlash to the aforementioned restriction might be forcing Nintendo to reconsider.
During the section that talks about save data recovery, while the previous version of the Direct stipulated the one-time limit on the feature, the new version no longer mentions that, and simply states, “More details on save data recovery functionality will be shared at a future date.”
Nintendo have been backtracking on things related to Animal Crossing quite a bit in recent days. After initially saying that the game wouldn’t allow save data transfers, they recently stated that the feature would eventually be added to the game after all. Meanwhile, while the ESRB rating for the game initially mentioned in-game purchases – which could possibly hint at microtransactions – that too was promptly edited to remove any such mention.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons is due out for the Switch on March 20.