With the world reeling from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, now is the perfect time for many to sink hundreds upon hundreds of hours into Animal Crossing: New Horizons. A title practically tailor-made as a time sink, Nintendo has seen record-breaking sales thanks to the unintended side-effect of launching right as health officials were starting self-isolation lockdowns. With nowhere to go, why not create a new island life in a digital world?
It would be truly devastating to lose all of your progress thanks to a console failure, but Nintendo’s online service allows you to make a cloud backup of your save data should anything go wrong. There’s one caveat there, though: New Horizons doesn’t support the feature. Nintendo has given some bafflingly short-sighted reason as to why (basically to prevent cheating), but it did promise to create some kind of feature that would protect users in the event of a console failure.
Well, it’s been four months since launch. Where is the cloud save feature, Nintendo?
Still No Save Backup Feature
I understand that we’re living in a truly unprecedented time for most of humanity. The last time a pandemic of this scale hit the planet was over 100 years ago and no one was prepared for it to happen again. Nintendo is rightly prioritizing the health of its employees and making sure they can continue to work from home. That’s absolutely wonderful and should be commended.
That still doesn’t explain the silence with regards to messaging about the future of its games and their updates.
The company hasn’t hosted a Nintendo Direct stream in months, letting speculation run rampant about what might be in store. More important to this discussion, it has been especially quiet about updates to New Horizons. We learned of the July 2020 patch one week before its release. There was a vague hint of an August update, but nothing since.
Again, I know the severity of the situation calls for a different approach, but users have now put potentially upwards of 1,000 hours into their save files. If something were to happen to erase that, I can guarantee you that players would drop New Horizons in a heartbeat. It might even put people off from subscribing to Nintendo’s online service since apparently your $20 doesn’t give you the promised features.
Now isn’t the time for Nintendo to sit on its hands with this. If new games aren’t coming out within the next month or so, get that New Horizons backup feature out to the public. If that simply can’t happen, at least give the community regular updates about progress on this feature. That’s all I’m asking for with this. I don’t want the world here, just the assurance that my save data will be safe should my console fail.
Please, just give me that peace of mind, Nintendo.
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