Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp

A few reviewers have been nonplussed with the f2p elements in Nintendo’s new mobile game, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp. Well, I have spent an ridiculous amount of time prancing about in there and I think AC:PC is about as light on the f2p scale as you can go while still having microtransactions.

Yolo, a pure reflection of my id. Appreciate the shorts, they were expensive.

If you’ve played an Animal Crossing game you know the drill. You move into a place (in this case, you become a campsite manager), make friends with various animals, give them presents, and buy clothes and furniture. You can hunt for bugs, fish, and harvest tree fruit, and in AC:PC these are all one-tap actions that at most require basic timing on a 3-count.

AC:PC adds crafting to the mix, so while you can still buy some furniture from one of the Nooks you end up having to make a lot of it yourself. If you reach a high enough level of friendship with an animal you can invite them to your campsite, but you have to have furniture they like before they will agree to visit.

The chief issue for most is the Leaf Tickets, which can be earned in-game or purchased, and various shenanigans which entice one to use Leaf Tickets to overcome built-in inconveniences (primarily, to reduce item crafting times or compensate for missing crafting ingredients). The game also features limited space inventories and crafting requires several different types of materials (wood, cotton, preserves, some kind of metal, etc.), adding another layer of in-game currencies to Leaf Tickets and the franchise’s basic currency, bells.

I have a problem with the crafting times because they increase exponentially, so while early furniture can be crafted in several minutes, later it takes hours to craft certain pieces and o0Ops your f2p is showing. It makes sense to wait hours to craft an amenity–a new tent–but not a side table or a glass of milk or something.

I only had a problem with the inventory limits until I realized that the player’s inventory capacities periodically increase on level-up. That’s fine, and you can increase inventory with leaf tickets as well. Otherwise, the f2p elements in this game essentially mirror the original experience. We’ve always had to wait for fruit to grow, for example. Having the various activities, like fishing and bug catching, relegated to specific regions is a little limiting, but it’s a free mobile game and whaddayagonnado.

This isn’t to say there aren’t any harpoons lying around. You can spend ridiculous amounts of leaf tickets for specialty furniture that summons special characters to your camp. Certain types of vehicle customization require leaf tickets. It’s whale bait, take it or leave it. I have managed to powergame this thing, as much as one is able to powergame a “hanging out with buds” simulator, and I have yet to encounter a goal that seemed unreasonably steep. I’m at level 22 and I’ve mostly completed all the stretch goals and have a stunning wardrobe as you have seen.

In a way I think AC and mobile naturally compliment each other. AC:PC operates in cycles. Animals move positions every 3 hours, fruit regrows every 3 hours, and the shops reset I think every 6. This is to encourage you to play more often, but it works a little better for me than Animal Crossing’s 24-hour day cycle.

Social interactions are limited to friending someone, buying items they’re selling in their market boxes, and giving a kudos. I generally use the kudos as a thank you message if someone is selling something I need. Limiting the social features this way works, but I think ultimately they need to be expanded. Bringing back the letter writing feature from the first game, but providing text options instead of free form or even limiting it to something pictoral like emojis would be useful.

This post is already way too long for this endless casual game about wearing sweaters and having cookouts with squirrels and such. I’m not sure how much longer I’ll play, I don’t think there’s quite enough content to sustain a binge-player, but it has provided a welcome casual distraction while I recharged my various physical and emotional batteries over the weekend.

tl;dr the f2p features aren’t really a problem I have a cool shirt.

My Nintendo

I can’t connect my Animal Crossing game to the myNintendo account I made expressly for this purpose and I am about to lose my shit thinking of all the leaf tickets I could have had.

They’ve made me into their creature so easily. This is ridiculous.

Animal Crossing Holiday Event

My plan was to take a break from Animal Crossing when I hit level 30, which would be today. It felt like a natural stopping point. I’ve completed almost all of the stretch goals and am at the point where I have to wait several days to craft tier 2 amenities. Inventory management becomes a little more strategic at this point, because semi-rares start to build up, but I refuse to list anything but commons in the Market Box and I am saving my Leaf Tickets for time-limited specialty items. This is in accordance with scripture, which states, “Thou shalt not list rares in thy Market Boxes.” It really doesn’t get more cut and dried than that.

Nintendo, having targeted me specifically with their hellapp for nefarious reasons unknown, knew this–either through time travel or some form of arcane divination, who can say–and started their first Holiday Event today. You now earn candy canes alongside the usual rewards, which can be used to craft holiday items like festive trees and such, and there are a slew of new timed goals to go with it throughout the month of December. So now I am happily grinding towards a tree and snowman and I’m off today and I do not give a damn if I have to ice various digits I will be the first on my friends list to have a full Christmas spread so help me god.

Earning holiday currency alongside the usual stuff is the way to go. Everyone wins, even those who are not interested in participating in holiday events. Outside the crafting times, which are still arbitrary and stupid, and the spawn rates for one or two common items which I feel might be slightly off, everything works like it should, as far as I can tell. Animal Crossing is a series about waiting, but if you’re remotely strategic about it there’s always something to do. It doesn’t really feel like f2p waiting, at least not to me.

There is this precarious balance between earned inventory slots and the amount of stuff you need to meet the demands of your insatiable campers, but the inventory limits help drive the player-driven Market Box economy quite nicely. Players tend to fall into two camps. The few players who list rares and common bundles at full market value and everyone else, who lists useful bundles of commons for essentially free–the minimum or close to it. We can’t talk to each other, but the community has clearly embraced a philosophy of you-scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours. After all, if my inventory is full and I don’t need these 5 fruit beetles, why not sell them cheap to help someone out? Once you get going, bells are the least important form of currency in the game, and outside the camper expansions you can always scrounge up whatever you need for new clothes or crafting just by helping the animals.

I am sort of side-eyeing the camper extensions because it’s going to be an endless money sink. Someone remarked they are on a 200,000 bell loan. I’m currently on the second, a 30,000 loan, and in no hurry to repay it. The way the game is set up, you will just add levels to the camper indefinitely, and since you can’t use the camper for something useful like additional storage (which would break the Market Box economy anyway), it seems slightly more futile of all the futile things in this time-sink of a game.Collapse

Pocket Camp is Weird

Did you know that you can leave fruit on the ground and fruit trees will continue to produce? That’s not the weird part, that’s fucking awesome–21 virtual inventory slots right there.

No, the weird thing about Pocket Camp is the game’s attempts to incentivize late-level grinding. Which is to say it attempts to do so very poorly in a way that is slightly incompetent. Obviously it depends on what you’re here for. I’m here to collect cute clothes, hang out with cute animals and make cute furniture. Leveling in and of itself is not a draw for me.

Every animal gives you a shirt at level 7, so I am greatly incentivized to do that, and it’s comparatively easy. To invite an animal to your campsite, you must then craft 4 or 5 items they want. I am incentivized to the extent that I want the furniture or like the animal–some of their requests are weird or frankly stupid, but if I like the animal I’ll go ahead and do it so they can hang in my camp.

All animals have a natural cap at 10, and to increase this you have to craft amenities, which take a LOT of time and resources. There’s not any practical reason to do this unless you like the amenities (admittedly some are pretty cool) or just want to level them up. After level 10 or so the animal gives you a recipe for a unique item they want you to craft, but the items are potentially weird and resource-expensive. (For instance, Beau wants a stack of campfire wood, which costs like 100-something wood or make???) After that, at level 20 you will get a… picture of the animal? To hang in your camper? Okay, so it’s the AC equivalent of a figurine, but it’s not a great end goal.

This week Pocket Camp has a limited time event called Host the Most where you get rewards for hosting up to four new animals. They added four new animals, which is the cool part. Some of the rewards are leaf tickets, but some are cards, which are exclusively used to get extra requests/appearances from animals–so the event is rather circular in that case. The event temporarily boosts everyone’s level gains, which is good, but it also reminds you how unnecessarily grindy friendship leveling can be? I’m sort of winding down on this game until the next holiday event, zodiac, but I’m using this opportunity to get a few shirts I want.

AC:PC feels like an advertisement for the AC franchise, and it does that very well. If that’s the goal, player retention isn’t super important, okay. But if the goal is to make money and keep players engaged, the later-game reward setup is a strange way to go about it.

Gardens

Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp recently rolled out the garden update. It’s pretty cool and most of you don’t care, so it’s under a cut.

You have 20 plots to grow flowers, which currently can be either tulips or pansies. You have access to 4 basic seeds and you can crossbreed to create other types of seeds, and flowers can be turned into craftable items (potted plants, toy bears, shirts, chairs). You can visit your friends gardens and water and crosspollinate with their flowers, which rewards both parties with friend powder. Previously, friend powder was much harder to come by, now I have stacks of it sitting around.

Crosspollination needs some tweaking, because the results are too random and there’s a small chance of failure. Since you already LOSE a grown plant, which is at least 3 hours of growth time, it doesn’t make sense to double-penalize the player that way. In its current state it would take a lot of doing to get the 10 ultra-rare blue tulips needed for a potted blue tulip, much less the other craftable items. The weighting could be intentional to get players to buy flower fertilizer, in which case they wouldn’t tweak it, but seeing as how they’ve adjusted everything else that I considered unbalanced I expect this too will be adjusted.

This update also improved rents considerably. Previously, you’d go around and talk to everyone every few hours or so because you had no idea who wanted to chat and might get 100-500 bells or 1 or 2 essence if you were lucky. Now you get a popup advising who is ready to chat, and the gifts are 500 or 2,500 bells, 5 friendship points, or a significant amount of resources (10-20 primary, 10x secondary, and a random amount of essence). Essence used to be a huge chokepoint, now it’s perfectly reasonable to casually earn 20-30 essence while amenities are crafting without having to get into weird grindy stuff.