This November, the Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Happy Home Paradise DLC brings the game's first paid expansion to Nintendo Switch. Free additions like Brewster’s cafe, DIY recipes for cooking, and a town ordinance system are also coming via New Horizons' 2.0 update, but the Happy Home Paradise DLC promises to take players away from their established islands to craft custom vacation spots for villagers, potentially providing a game’s worth of new options for creativity.
Per the official trailer for the Animal Crossing DLC, the goal of Happy Home Paradise is "helping characters acquire their dream vacation homes." The player is given the option to fly from their home village to a resort archipelago, overseen by the Paradise Planning Team, where villagers lounge on the beach, pondering aloud their ideals for a dream home. The trailer shows the player selecting an island from a map of the archipelago, and each island seems to have its own terrain and shape that can't be altered. After meeting the vacationing animal’s base requirements for their getaway home, the player is given free reign to customize it and the surrounding area.
Though players have a great deal of creative control over their Animal Crossing islands, the vacation homes of Happy Home Paradise may offer faster customization and more choices. The trailer shows the player quickly laying down new paths and adjusting the placement of the villagers' homes, just as they would individual furniture items in the overhead decorating view within player houses. On players' home islands, the Island Designer only lets them manually lay down roadways one square at a time, and Tom Nook allows homes to be moved overnight for a fee. A large inventory of furniture also appears to be available in Happy Home Paradise, rather than requiring players to craft or find individual furniture items.
Animal Crossing's DLC Sends Players To Build Villagers' Dream Vacation Homes
As players successfully construct vacation homes, the catalog of available furniture items expands. A new Nookphone app grants access to the Paradise Planning Portfolio, where players can view before and after images of their home-building projects, their vacation home designs for others to view, and check in on their past clients. This gives them the option to go back and improve on their work, either remodeling the vacation homes with new items or "polishing" furniture, which produces unique visual effects, like sparkles or flittering butterflies. Players can also suggest that villagers become roommates, facilitating potential friendships for the animals on their island getaways.
In addition to the vacation homes themselves, players can customize other buildings on the archipelago. Happy Home Paradise offers new facilities to build around the headquarters of the Paradise Planning Team, including schools, restaurants, and hospitals, and villagers will be able to make use of these amenities. These facilities seem reserved for the DLC islands of the archipelago, but other elements of the DLC can be brought home.
New Design Options From ACNH's DLC Can Be Brought To The Home Island
The option at Dodo Airlines that takes players to the Happy Home Paradise archipelago says, "I want to go to work," but players are not paid for their labor in Bells. Instead, they're rewarded with a new currency called Poki, which can be redeemed in the Paradise Planning Team's company story. There, players will find rare furniture items, which they can take back to their own islands.
The other element players can use in New Horizons' main town is Happy Home Paradise's new design techniques. When building vacation homes, players can add ing pillars, dividing walls, and countertops of varying heights, and select a "Soundscape" for each home. Once these are unlocked in the DLC, they can be brought back to the base game - as can the new furniture polishing mechanic.
The pool of potential vacationers starts with the characters waiting outside the Paradise Planning office, but the DLC will also allow players to invite villagers using Animal Crossing amiibo and amiibo cards. Some of the "endgame" goals for Happy Home Paradise include unlocking the ability to invite home-island villagers to take a vacation and unlocking the ability to customize villagers' houses on the home island. At present, island residents’ homes have a default theme, with a preset wallpaper and flooring, and the only way to customize their furniture is to gift them better items and hope they get rid of the inferior ones.
Animal Crossing's DLC Can Be Purchased Outright Or Via Switch Online
Access to the DLC requires ownership of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, and it can be purchased outright or $24.99 USD. Alternatively, players who subscribe to the new Nintendo Switch Online + Expansion Pack plan, which costs $49.99 per year for individuals, can play the DLC at no additional cost. Nintendo has clarified that, if these players unsubscribe from the Switch Online Expansion Pack, the features unlocked in Happy Home Paradise for use on their main island - "including adding counters, partition walls, as well as adding ambient lighting and soundscapes" - will remain. They will not be able to visit the archipelago and aid Paradise Planning in building more dream vacation homes, however, unless they renew the subscription or buy the DLC separately.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons - Happy Home Paradise will be released on November 5, 2021.
