What to Expect From the Animal Crossing: New Horizons Direct?

With the Direct announced to be just under a week away, speculation as to what's going to be included is well under way! We've decided to go over the history of Animal Crossing Directs to see what we should expect to be shown to us come October 15th!

Currently, we know the only inclusion in the Direct will be something on Brewster and The Roost. A new series of amiibo Cards has also been announced, and we expect this will pop up at some time, too, and will have some sort of focus within the Direct. But what about the rest?

Currently, we've had four Animal Crossing specific Directs; one for the Welcome amiibo update to New Leaf in November 2016, one for New Horizons back in February 2020, a Pocket Camp Direct in October 2017, and a Japan only Direct for New Leaf back in October 2012, before Nintendo was really pushing for global release dates. There were also Directs for New Leaf in Korea and Japan in early 2013, but since this was after the games initial release, we won't include them, and for the sake of sticking to the Main Series, we'll omit the Pocket Camp Direct, too.

First, we'll start with the Direct that aired in Japan all the way back in October 2012, before we even had a proper English name for New Leaf (outside of AC:3DS), and most of us probably referred to it by its Japanese title, Animal Crossing: Jump Out.

This Direct was, believe it or not, one of our first proper in depth looks at the game, and it only aired 1 month before the game release in Japan! This whopping 45 minute long presentation gave us our first look at some of the features we didn't know about, including Club LOL, the Dream Suite, and Tortimer Island.

Before this Direct aired, what we actually knew about the game was minimal, and this really opened up the doors to show us just how packed this game was. Though this is a Direct for an unreleased game, and not an update to a released game, it's still a good starting point to what they might show us here. Remember, most of what got revealed in this Direct hadn't been shown before. Whatever will be shown in this upcoming Direct, at least 3/4 of it should be brand new content!

Let's jump ahead a few years and look at the Direct we got for New Horizons. This one lasted 27 minutes, and showed a huge amount of new features, which we have archived here. The main thing to note here is this was more of an introductory type of video, hence the slower pacing.

Now let's finish it with the Welcome amiibo Direct, which probably has the most relevance here. This one really was wild and again, gave us brand new details. Some of these we already knew as they'd been revealed on the website before hand, but if memory serves, the Desert Island Escape and Puzzle League minigames were new reveals, as was the introduction to MEOW Coupons, but we were drip fed information for months leading up to its release.

The update was first announced in July, which showed us some amiibo functionality, Wisp's return, Cece and Viche as new Splatoon crossover Villagers, and some of the Splatoon items. There was also a Nintendo Direct in September that showed us a few glimpses as Harvey and the new Campround area.

At this point you may be wondering what all this history has to do with the upcoming Direct, and you'd be right. Before we started speculating, we wanted to go over the history on what's been revealed in the build up to the game, in order to temper our expectations as to what's coming.

This 20 minute Direct isn't just going to be Brewster and that's it, we believe there will be a lot more to come, and here's what we expect to see.

New Villagers - With a new series of amiibo cards announced, we expect to see 50-100 new amiibo cards released alongside, minus the obligatory updated Isabelle and Tom Nook cards. That leaves a hefty amount of new Villagers to be introduced to, and whilst we do expect some of these cards will be occupied by the new characters added to New Horizons, there's certainly room for some brand new, or even returning villagers...

A New Island - When you look at your Map in New Horizons, nearly every single point of interest necessary, terrain, facilities, houses, but there's one thing that's very apparent on the map that's borderline useless - the wharf. The wharf makes an appearance on the map, and has absolutely no practical function at all... unless you're going to count the Tuna and Giant Trevally as "practical uses". We don't think it's too out of the question to expect Kapp'n and his boat to take us to a new Island where all these older characters who have yet to appear will be residing.

New Furniture / Nooks Cranny Upgrade - This one shouldn't be too hard to believe. We already know were getting new amiibo cards, which likely mean new villages, which also means new items for their houses. We also expect Nook's Cranny to finally get an upgrade, which will give us access to these new items.

Gyroids - If coffee was Brewster's first child, then Gyroids would be his second. Gyroids have been in the data for the game since one of the very first updates (as have mentioned of the cafe), so seeing them return alongside Brewster makes sense.

Museum Shop - Time to go all out for The Museum. We've got The Roost returning, so now it's time for the Shop (and maybe display rooms) to return. You may be asking yourself where this wild idea is coming from, and we'll ask you to move your eyes on over to the updated sign post for The Roost.

The overall logo is the same, but New Horizons has a little plaque underneath. The icon on the left looks like some coffee beans, but we're not exactly sure what the one on the right is meant to be - it kind of looks like three houses squished together. Maybe the left house symbolizes The Roost, the middle The Museum, and the right the Museum Shop? We're not too sure, so let us know if you have any other ideas!

There's some more stuff we expect to see at some stage, but that's entering spoiler and proper datamine territory. If you want to remain somewhat unspoiled, then please stop reading from this point onward. In saying that, this is a datamine and doesn't outright confirm these features will be coming to the game, so please take with a grain of salt.

Garden Shop - This seems to have existed for as long as the rumblings for the Cafe and Gyroids have. Leif getting his own gardening shop to sell more vegetables than just Pumpkins, and give us access to more flora, such as Plumeria Bushes, have been in the data for a long time.

Museum Shop - One of the earliest datamines did mention the Museum Shop would be returning. We did briefly speculate this earlier based on the updated logo, but it's also worth nothing there are mentions of it in the games data.

Sewing & Cooking - There's also been mentions of sewing and cooking in the games data. How these would work are anyone's guess, but we'd wager they'd just work like DIY Recipes - collect the required materials, and instead of going to the DIY Workbench to make them, maybe you'd need to go to a sewing machine or cooking appliance to get started. Sewing would grant us new clothing options, and cooking, obviously new food items.

It's going to be a long week ahead, but hopefully it will be worth the wait! As always, if you haven't already, be sure to follow us over on Twitter and TumblrFeel free to join our discord server too!

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