Cloud saves are a feature that you get with your Nintendo Switch Online subscription. However, the compatibility of this feature depends on the game. For example, an E3 2019 interview that French site Gamekult held with Animal Crossing: New Horizons director Aya Kyogoku and producer Higashi Nogami discussed cloud saves. According to Nogami, “New Horizons will not be compatible with cloud backups to avoid manipulating time, which remains one of the founding concepts of the series”. The interview also talked about amiibo, and there is some good news. Kyogoku said that “given the number of cards and figures available, we obviously think New Horizons will be compatible with amiibo, but I can not tell you more about this compatibility at this stage of development”.
Does Nintendo still wonder why people hack their Nintendo Switch?
This is one of the main reasons.
Nintendo, just let us mess with our own time for single player.
I’m gunna go ahead and say that people would still hack the Nintendo Switch regardless of their AC or cloud save policies.
I don’t know what is worse. Nintendo’s stupidity or the left’s.
I’m very conflicted by this. On one hand it’s great to stop abusers, and on the other it’s worrying cause it would be a nightmare losing your save, especially on a game like this.
Abusers? Whats that mean? Did the game come alive and slap you with a fish?
lol
Forgive me if I’m missing an obvious joke here, but what I meant by abusers was the people who use every small exploit to break the game in their favor. Say for instance, 5 people are start on separate tracks in a footrace with the same prizes placed along each track, and one person gets on a bike to cheat the race, revealing the prize before everyone else even had a chance, it kinda takes away from the surprise and experience. This especially becomes a problem when hacked/cheated items start floating across the ecosystem of the game, in turn ruining the online economy. This issue was especially prevalent in Wild World & City Folk. Many items became devalued and there was cheated money everywhere.
That all being said, Nintendo as a company should have several ways around this, especially since we’re paying customers. There shouldn’t be any cop out regardless of the situation. They’re just devaluing their service even further than they already have.
Yeah, I’m not sure why Nintendo just completely ditches a concept when one little obstacle blocks their way. They always do this… though it is more persistent in their online practices. They are so naive when anything related to net comes their way — but anyways… Even I can sum up a simple fix… Why not keep cloud backups but just limit the whole procedure for this game?? You would be able to back up your data as much as you want but when it comes to restoring that data to the game, you can only do that once every 2 weeks [maybe even once a month]. Granted some people may still exploit their “one time” restoration but I doubt that will be too concerning due to the whole process being a big tedious mission. In turn, it will potentially ward off exploitative behavior and still appease cloud demand.
As For players with more genuine behavior, the concept may seem too restrictive but — I mean, how often are people losing their saves and needing to restore them anyways? I doubt people will NEED to restore their data too many times… the issue of a player having their NonCloud data lost/damaged is super rare anyways, so I highly doubt this would be an inconvenience for the majority (if this concept was a reality).
TL;DR > Keep cloud saves for all games. If there is a concern for abusers, do not exclude the entire feature just limit the “restoration” aspect while keeping the “backup” aspect unrestricted.
This is one of the ideas that’s just so simple, it confuses me as to why they don’t do this. They took the easy route and just cut it all together :/
Ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. If they are so afraid of cheaters, why not think around it and make it so that you can’t manipulate stuff. I mean I’m sure there’s ways to do this. Not having cloud saves on AAA games that many switch owners will buy is absurd.
Or maybe, they should of allowed people to transfer saved data onto flash drives like the Wii U.
” why not think around it and make it so that you can’t manipulate stuff. I mean I’m sure there’s ways to do this.”
uhhh How? The only way I can think is to store 100% of your data server side like an MMO, which would require you to always be online, which people would hate much more than no cloud saves.
You can disagree with Nintendo that it’s worth it, but there’s nothing wrong with the reasoning.
How many of you guys lost save data and had to use cloud saving? So far I haven’t had an issue.
Exactly, i would rather manipulate time than have a cloud save.
Accidents happen despite being careful. Your Switch could be stolen. I too have been lucky, but I know others who haven’t been and lost 200+ hour Splatoon saves. Just because you’ve been lucky doesn’t mean it’s fine to not back up game saves. On a system that promotes its portability, that’s absolutely not acceptable.
Uh, last I checked, people can pretty much manipulate freely by changing the inner clock of the system. So that does nothing.
Haha, so you might think. Go on, go and change the time on your Switch right now. Come back when you’re done…you might be a while.
But yeah, Animal Crossing is the type of game where losing your save data would be devastating, so exactly the kind of game you’d want cloud save backups. Nintendo as usual putting stopping the minority from exploiting their game above the majority who just want to keep their saves safe.
Actually I take the above back, you only can’t change the date and time if you have parental controls linked. I’m expecting Nintendo to have something in hand to deal with cheaters in this game though, such as you can only play online if you keep your clock synced. We’ll see.
Was about to say, I abused the calendar on BoTW to get amiibo outfits with no trouble.
“putting stopping the minority from exploiting their game above the majority who just want to keep their saves safe.”
Majority? I seriously, seriously doubt that anywhere close to half of Nintendo’s target demographic cares even a tiny bit about cloud saves. This is the kind of thing that only people who live on gaming message boards care about, and we really aren’t representative of the average customer.
Based username. Great character.
I’m just happy amiibo will still have use in this game people have constantly been stocking up on amiibos just for the game since its been announced not to mention the animal crossing series amiibo are heavily discounted in the U.S.
Yet there’s an auto Save Feature.
+CrazyDK
Yes there is…what’s your point?
Wait?
Is this game competitive?
Would “abusing” that feature do anything else than cheat yourself out of the gameplay?
I was wondering the same. Nintendo is so backwards thinking! On PC, modding your single player game for your liking (even if it deviates completely from the original concept) is what keeps many games alive! Why would you keep people from playing the game they paid money for, the way they enjoy the most?! For example the game Dead Cells has permadeath, which gets very frustrating very fast. The only way I could enjoy the game and complete it is by cheating and immediately close the game and restart it when I died, so that I didn’t have to start all over. According to Nintendo’s logic I shouldn’t be allowed to do that and instead just never play the game again, that I paid $25 for.
Man… collecting and unlocking stuff in Animal Crossing stuff in Animal Crossing is very time consuming and pretty much integral to the gameplay. Hope my game never corrupts.
See this is a game I can understand where Nintendo is coming from. Animal Crossing is made be a life simulator and if you could just undo what the game throws at you, it would break 1 of the core aspects to the experience.
Please, Correct me if I’m wrong…
Don’t most developers use cloud features like Firebase timestamp to prevent cheaters from clock manipulation?
Just wondering how disabling cloud features will stop cheaters.
So you want the game to require an online connection?
Eh, My Switch is offline most of the time anyway. And even if most of the stores are open while I’m at work? Well Kicks and Leif will have to get along without me.
How about this: make it so whenever the game auto saves it automatically overwrites previous cloud saves. If you’re not connected to the internet it waits for when you are.
Simple, I know.
Cloud saves work when you close the application. Maybe a future update can let you decide if cloud saves upload after a save or when you close the application.
I say Nintendo should just let people play the game the way they want to play it. Screwing with the time and stuff isn’t harming anyone.
Plus. as someone mentioned above, they should really put the people who care about losing their cloud saves before the minority who’d mess with their game.
No this is a good thing. Wouldn’t want to sully that hardcore competitive Animal Crossing scene.
It’s never a surprise when there are people making excuses for Nintendo’s stupidity. (Or any company’s stupidity for that matter.) *shrug* To each their own. Good thing I lost interest in Animal Crossing after the letdown that was City Folk.
People like cronotose can say that only a minority care about cloud saves but that’s far from the truth as Nintendo wouldn’t have made a cloud save feature at all if that was really the case.
I cannot roll my eyes hard enough.