Animal Crossing: New Horizons is getting its first paid DLC called Happy Home Paradise and it will give players much more creative freedom, making the gameplay very similar to The Sims series. New Horizons can be a fairly grind-heavy game, which can detract from the creative side of it, but luckily for fans that just want to decorate and design homes, the Happy Home Paradise DLC offers plenty of artistic freedom. With the base game of New Horizons, players can add things to their home but have very little control over the layout and structure, but with the new update, players will be able to add walls, counters, pillars, and more to really make the archipelago their own.
The Sims has a huge collection of DLC and is one of the most classic life-simulators out there, along with a community for mods. Players have a nearly endless amount of options when it comes to building structures and customizing their characters. But The Sims focuses more heavily on relationships with other human characters, and more realistic life goals than Animal Crossing does, which for some players may take away from the cute factor. While Animal Crossing definitely shares many similarities with The Sims, New Horizons can feel more constrained. In The Sims, players can start from scratch and build a house from the ground up, and adjust everything from the building material to the type of grass on their lawn.
Happy Home Paradise offers a lot of new functions to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and is definitely a large part of the revival happening in the community right now. This huge DLC will help bridge the gap between these two staple life-simulators and give Animal Crossing fans more freedom and flexibility. Happy Home Paradise will give players the opportunity to spend all their time decorating and designing, instead of digging up fossils and plucking weeds. One of the most common cheat codes used by fans of The Sims franchise is the fan-favorite "motherlode" which gives players essentially unlimited money because while some players may enjoy collecting resources, many just want a creative outlet - much like ACNH players.
ACNH's Happy Home Designer Gives Players A Second Island
Happy Home Paradise takes place on an archipelago and gives fans almost a whole new island to curate. Players join the Paradise Planning team and get to work designing ideal vacation homes for the animals that visit the islands. So far it looks like the DLC comes with 48 new plots for vacation homes or other buildings such as a restaurant or hospital. Based on the footage from the Direct, the vacationing animals will be able to walk around the islands and visit these community buildings, meaning that Happy Home Paradise essentially gives players a whole other island to develop to their liking. This DLC addition to New Horizons will be more mechanically similar to The Sims in that players are given a specified square of land on which they can build, and they can not alter the terrain or anything outside of the plot.
With The Sims games, players have the opportunity to build many homes inside their town, homes that they have complete creative control over. With Animal Crossing, players are typically limited to the one house of their own character. But the installment of Happy Home Paradise means that players will have control over all of the DLC's vacation homes on the archipelago. The size of the interior of the homes can be changed and expanded, which will allow even more space for creativity. The closest that players have come to having free reign in a space like this is on Harv's Island, which is part of the main game, but the villagers there are more like props and the player doesn't have access to the yard. With Happy Home Paradise, fans can build a new community with vacationers both from their own island and via amiibo after the update.
The terrain in Happy Home Paradise can not be modified in the same way that it can on players' original islands. This is much more similar to how The Sims handles outside space, in that the player is given a square plot on which they can place fences, paths, and plants, but the hills can not be altered, and the creative space is limited to the single plot of land. Happy Home Paradise also introduces a new way to decorate Animal Crossing exteriors and outside space with functions that seem to work more like interior designing. Fans will finally be able to drag and drop fences and pathways, unlike on their own islands. Each island in the archipelago has its own biome that will affect that type of terrain available for building on, and players will have the option to change the time of day and season per space. Everything in the yard of the vacation home can be moved around freely as if it was inside, which will make gardening and redecorating a much more pleasant experience.
ACNH's Happy Home Paradise Will Allow For More Creativity Like In The Sims
As with any creative game, fans of The Sims series have made some pretty incredible replicas of famous places. But for Animal Crossing fans this is often much harder and requires a lot more nuanced camera angles. The introduction of Happy Home Paradise DLC may just help New Horizons players build out specific buildings and places as a new creative outlet, and join the ranks of Minecraft and The Sims players alike. Though the NPC animal guests will have specific requests for decorations of their vacation homes, the designs are ultimately up to the player and can be changed at any time.
The Nintendo Direct that announced Happy Home Paradise, along with a free update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, gave players a sneak peek into the large number of items that will be released with the two new updates. This not only includes popular furniture sets like the Ranch Set, but also new trees and bushes. These additions to the New Horizons catalog will hopefully give players enough flexibility to do some impressive recreations.
Happy Home Paradise brings so many new features and functions and items that even The Sims fans should be kept busy for a while. Players will get to customize their walls by applying wallpaper to just one wall at a time or placing partition walls to break up a space a bit. The game is getting a lighting and sound update that will allow players to apply ambient noises to a room, or change the color of the lights. There seems to be an overwhelming amount of new content for New Horizons, and no doubt there will be even more to discover once the updates are released. For fans of The Sims that may not have tried out the Animal Crossing franchise yet, now might just be the time. Animal Crossing: New Horizons Happy Home Paradise DLC will be available starting November 5, 2021, and is priced at $24.99 USD.