How does Animal Crossing perform on Nintendo Switch 2?
So, it finally happened. Nintendo launched a new and more powerful console than the really successful Nintendo Switch 2 and let’s be honest, it’s an incredibly exciting time. For too long you have had to deal with lag on decorated Animal Crossing islands, long loading screens from people flying in and out of treasure islands and yet somehow you find you are still playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch even after Nintendo stopped releasing updates for the game. Maybe you bought a Nintendo Switch 2 or maybe you are considering your options but if you have wondered how Animal Crossing performs on Nintendo’s next generation hardware.
It’s understandable that with the new console costing a lot more money than the previous generation and Nintendo games now costing $80, you may want to know if there’s real value in upgrading to a Nintendo Switch 2 to play Animal Crossing. So, let’s dive into some of the differences I’ve noticed in playing Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Nintendo Switch 2 and discuss whether it’s actually worth the upgrade.
ACNH is backwards compatible
The first thing to address is the backwards compatibility with Nintendo Switch 2 and confirm that it is official, ACNH is fully backwards compatible with Nintendo Switch 2 and you can choose to continue playing with the current island you have or start a brand new save file. The choice is yours on what you want to do so if, like me, you’ve played ACNH since launch and you want to continue your forever island to the new console, you can totally do that.
There is still the 1 island per console rule, so if you were thinking about having two islands on one system sadly that option isn’t present, but it’s nice that Nintendo did give us the choice on whether to start from scratch or continue with everything we had.
To transfer your current save data from your Nintendo Switch to Nintendo Switch 2, all you need to do is go into Settings, then scroll down to System and at the bottom of the screen there is an option to Transfer your data to Nintendo Switch 2. This will move all of your save data to your new console, including your Animal Crossing save file. When you go through all the steps across both Nintendo Switch consoles you will then be given the option to start fresh or keep existing data. You can pick whichever one is right for you and when you’ve decided, you will then be back in Animal Crossing as you were on your Nintendo Switch console.
What you need to remember is that the process of transferring your Animal Crossing data to Nintendo Switch 2 from your Nintendo Switch console is different from transferring data from one Nintendo Switch console to another Nintendo Switch console. If you were doing that, you would need the Island Transfer Tool, which is not necessary for you to continue playing Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch 2. However, before you do anything with transferring your data, make sure that you back up your island before you move it! If you have Nintendo Switch Online, double check that you have island backups enabled with Tom Nook on the homescreen before you do this so that you protect your Animal Crossing island.
Load times have reduced by about half
So, now that we’ve got Animal Crossing: New Horizons up and running on the Switch, let’s talk about all of the things that are different with how Animal Crossing performs on Nintendo Switch 2, starting with the big one that I spotted straight away.
As we all know by now, the original Nintendo Switch was really underpowered when it first launched and as new games continued to launch on the system and new updates got pushed out for the hardware, games became slower and slower. This unsurprisingly has meant that the load times for Animal Crossing: New Horizons load times have gone from working at about a snail’s pace to somewhere around the pace of an elderly snail with a walking stick on Nintendo Switch.
If you’ve ever gone to a treasure island or tried to save your game, you will probably have noticed that you have to sit there and wait forever for the game to do anything you’ve told it to do. What I was really hoping to see for New Horizons on Nintendo Switch 2 is a major improvement in performance, and I’ll be honest, I’m not disappointed at all.
The load times for everything are so much quicker than on Nintendo Switch 2. I don’t just mean the load times when you enter buildings. What I’ve also noticed is that saving is quicker and dialogue also seems to run slightly quicker than it did before. I’ve not done any official tests myself, this is just based on my own opinion, however, different places have done tests on load times for Animal Crossing with some suggesting that Animal Crossing load times have reduced in half, which is just crazy! I’m loving just how quick Animal Crossing runs on Nintendo Switch 2 and I’m really excited to see more from Nintendo in the future which takes advantage of the improved hardware.
Laggy islands are not as obvious
The other really big thing that I was hoping to see with ACNH moving onto Nintendo Switch 2 was a reduction in the amount of lag in the game. If you’ve visited a decorated island, you will be familiar with items popping into your view because the game is struggling to load all of the items around your character whilst you navigate an island.
In addition, we know that these same islands also cause significant lag to the player movements with players suddenly moving so much slower in the game whilst items load in. Seeing both of these things improve was what I was desperately hoping to see.
Did we lose all of the lag in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Nintendo Switch 2? No. There is still lag in the game, but it’s a lot less obvious than it was on Nintendo Switch. The big things that have improved are the items popping in on a decorated island.
We tested this on stream on my overly decorated industrial evil factory island which features a lot of simple panels. Although I could see a massive improvement with my character not moving as slowly as she was doing on Nintendo Switch, the biggest difference was seen in how items were loading onto the screen.
There is definitely a significant improvement in seeing more items on a screen at one time without a lot of items popping in and out but, we did notice that there is a distance limit on items loading in and if I were to stand on one tile all of the items in the distance would be visible and if I moved one tile further back, everything disappeared at the same time. It’s the most bizarre thing I’ve seen in Animal Crossing, but it is something to keep in mind if you are planning an overly decorated island.
What I did notice from decorating on my island though which is really heavily decorated already is that the glitch where items disappear from your pockets and don’t appear placed on the ground until you walk away from them was a lot worse on Nintendo Switch 2 than it was when I was decorating on the same island on Nintendo Switch.
Now, this could be for a lot of different reasons and mainly I put this down to there being a lot of simple panels on the island, but it is concerning that if you are someone who puts a lot of time and effort into decorating your islands. This is going to be something you are going to want to keep an eye on and I hope that there is a fix put in for this so you can fully enjoy the process of decorating your island.
Visual differences are minimal in game
The other thing which you may be wondering about Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch 2 is how it looks compared to Nintendo Switch. Does it have a major visual upgrade compared to Nintendo Switch? Sadly, no.
The visual differences in Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Nintendo Switch 2 are minimal and a lot of that is going to be because for reasons which don’t make sense to me, at the time of writing this, there is no upgrade pack for ACNH on Nintendo Switch 2. It’s not an awful difference, but you can definitely see that Animal Crossing does not run at 4K60 in docked. I’m not overly mad about it and I can easily play Animal Crossing without it running at 4K, but I’m definitely hoping to see an upgrade pack in the future to make Animal Crossing look nicer.
What is really good to see though is if you are playing in handheld, thanks to the Switch 2 having a bigger and brighter screen Animal Crossing does have a brighter and richer look to the colours and gameplay. It’s actually a joy to play ACNH in handheld mode and I love how much better it looks than Nintendo Switch, however, what I would really love to see is more graphical improvements to Animal Crossing: New Horizons in the future.
Summary
It’s very clear that Nintendo Switch 2 offers a lot of amazing things to Animal Crossing: New Horizons which make it perform so much better than it did on Nintendo Switch. I love how the game looks and feels on the new generation hardware and, even if the lag has not completely been removed, it has been significantly reduced to the point where you don’t see as many items glitching whilst you are walking around decorated islands.
There’s a lot of exciting things I can see coming to Animal Crossing in the future and I’m looking forward to seeing what is offered to the Animal Crossing franchise on a new generation console. What are you excited about for Animal Crossing on Nintendo Switch 2? Did you pick up a console or are you just waiting to see what comes up in the future? Let me know in the comments below and I’ll see you in the next one.
