Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp is much better without microtransactions

Although it started out pretty relaxed over the years, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp became more and more bloated due to monetization. There were all sorts of things you could spend real money on, including loot boxes to unlock rare items. When I logged into the game last week after a months-long absence, my screen was dominated by notifications vying for my attention, most of which were related to spending money.

This is what makes the new paid version of the app so fascinating. The original Pocket camp was technically shut down, replaced by Bag camp completedeliminating all in-app purchases for a one-time fee. (It’ll cost $9.99 at launch on iOS and Android, rising to $19.99 in January.) And without the looming specter of having to spend real money, this version of Pocket camp is much more relaxed.

Basically the game is the same. Your job is to run a campsite for a group of friendly animals. This includes designing different places for them to be while also doing traditional activities Animal Crossing Activities such as fishing and catching insects. The game enables existing Pocket camp Players can transfer their saves – all you have to do is link a Nintendo account – and I found the process pretty seamless. I simply logged into the new app and my old campsite was waiting for me along with the seven years of stuff I had accumulated.

In the original version, you could spend money on a currency called Leaf Tickets, which allowed you to do many things, such as speed up crafting and plant growth, or unlock additional treasure from the sailor Gulliver. The most infamous thing you could buy with Leaf Tickets were fortune cookies, which are essentially loot boxes: eating one gives you a random item tied to a themed set. But you never knew what you were going to get. So if you were looking for a specific item to round out your camping cafe, you could easily spend a lot on cookies.

In CompleteLeaf Tickets have been replaced with Leaf Tokens. Basically the tokens are the same. What’s crucial, however, is that you can’t buy them with real money; You either earn them in-game by completing quests or you purchase them with Bells. Animal Crossingis the game currency. Psychologically it makes a big difference. It never feels like the game is trying to scam me out of real money since I can’t actually spend any. Instead, they’re a nice bonus that I can save up to buy cool things or speed up an annoyingly long renovation.

You can still feel the inherent prior monetization Complete‘s design; The loot box cookies remain, as do some of the more annoying features, such as treasure maps that require very specific items to explore. I’d like to see a version of this Pocket camp This was designed from the ground up to be a one-time, paid experience. But even as the free-to-play seams emerge, Complete is still a much more enjoyable experience by simply removing the ability to spend real money.

Over and beyond Complete adds a handful of really good features. There’s a new place to hang out with your human friends and listen to a KK Slider concert, and you can now designate a caretaker pet for your campsite to do some of the busy work when you’re not in the game. There are also friend cards that make it a little easier to find and play with other people.

Perhaps most interestingly, there is a new connection New horizons; Pocket camp Players can import certain custom designs from the Switch game, which greatly expands the options, especially for clothing. During the height of New horizons‘ Popularity, players (and brands too) have created all sorts of impressive things, and I’ve spent too much time digging through old creator codes trying to find stuff to wear. It’s not perfect – not all designs are compatible and some appear pretty pixelated in the mobile game – but at least I can finally wear a Montreal Expos cap when I grab a coffee at Brewster.

Nintendo’s mobile ambitions didn’t quite pan out the way many of us expected when Shigeru Miyamoto took the stage at an Apple event to introduce Apple Super Mario Run. This game did not make the profit that Nintendo had hoped, and neither did the company’s subsequent mobile games Fire Emblem Heroes And Mario Kart Tourare all heavily monetized. That was the case for pocket storage, too – but its new version offers a brief glimpse into an alternate timeline where Nintendo’s smartphone games aren’t always trying to sell you something.