Animal Crossing: New Horizons Nintendo Direct: 5 Things We Learned from Latest Nintendo Direct

Animal Crossing New Horizons Nintendo Direct (finally) gave us new information for the highly anticipated Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Here are five new features we learned from the Direct.

Animal Crossing New Horizons Nintendo Direct: 5 Things We Learned

1. You Can Choose Your Island's Layout at the Start

You get to choose the layout of your island. / Photo by Nintendo

When you start the game, you can now choose the layout of the island you wan to move to. It is unknown if the islands you choose from will be procedurally generated like previous entries, but you can at least have options of what kind of island you want to move into before you start customizing it. Speaking of which...

2. Terraforming and Paving

The land now bends to your will. / Photo by Nintendo

In a series first, you can now sculpt the land itself to your perfect design. At some point in the game, you will be able to acquire construction permits that allow you to freely transform the landscape. You can fill or create waterways, as well as creating and destroying cliffs.

You can also pave the ground with a variety of options, like brick or sand. You no longer need to mess with tiles and patterns anymore.

3. Island Tours

The airport lets you go to other islands. / Photo by Nintendo

The airport isn't just your way in to the island, it also lets you go on tours to other islands. You might meet other villagers there, where you can invite them to live on your island. You can also find exotic fruits and resources from these other islands as well it seems.

4. Furniture Customization and Patterns

You can finely tune your furniture to match your ideal aesthetic. / Photo by Nintendo

Since you'll have to make most of your items from scratch with the new crafting system, there is now a greater depth of customization for your furniture. You can even add designs to your furniture, which you can import using the QR reader on the companion app that will launch soon after the game comes out.

5. Local Multiplayer: Party Play

Call your posse. / Photo by Nintendo

Finally, we now know how local multiplayer will work. Up to eight players can reside on an island (one island per system), and up to four can play together on shared screen co-op. One player is assigned the "leader" and the rest "followers". The camera will follow the leader, and some actions will only be available to the leader like shopping and gathering, but you can reassign the leader at any time.

Animal Crossing New Horizons releases March 20 on Nintendo Switch.