Nintendo recently released an update to Animal Crossing: New Horizons, marking the first update to the game in several months. Nintendo has provided version 2.0.6 update notes for Animal Crossing: New Horizons for gamers and parents.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons was a game released on March 20, 2020, during the commencement of the COVID-19 pandemic. One of the games that drew people together during quarantine was Nintendo’s taste of simple island life. Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released at the right moment for new and returning players to visit their loved ones digitally, from holding graduations to throwing parties and finding diverse and innovative methods to convert their town and inhabitants into a Christmas display.
However, those who anticipated anything significant from version 2.0.6 may be disappointed. Version 2.0.6 rectified various bugs to enhance the gaming experience, according to the Nintendo release notes. Version 2.0.5, released in February 2022, addressed game-specific bugs with messaging, the Room Sketch app, and the Happy Home Paradise extension, to mention a few. Version 2.0.6 was published nine months to the day after version 2.0.5, the longest gap between updates to Animal Crossing: New Horizons so far. Despite the lag in updates, Animal Crossing: New Horizons remains as popular as ever, having just been named Japan’s best-selling game.
[Splatoon 2 / ARMS / Super Mario Maker 2 / Animal Crossing: New Horizons]
All these games just got updates with the equivalent of “stability” in the patch notes.
This is probably a patch to fix a major security bug in a common code component.
I’ll post info when available.
— SantamealDome ? (@OatmealDome) November 15, 2022
However, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was not the first first-party Nintendo game to get an unexpected update. OatmealDome, a Twitter account noted for data mining and documenting Nintendo Switch system upgrades in more detail than Nintendo’s release notes, claimed on November 14 that four Nintendo first-party games got updates. Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Splatoon 2, ARMS, and Super Mario Maker 2 all received upgrades, and OatmealDome noted that the rapid changes were likely due to severe security issues discovered in a shared code component that these games may share.
OatmealDome subsequently responded that the upgrades were most likely not done to update those games’ net codes to that found in Splatoon 3, and that doing so would take some time and money. However, at a recent Q&A session, Nintendo president Shuntaro Furukawa revealed that they were looking into methods to improve the Nintendo Switch Online service with further additions. It remains to be seen if this includes enhancements to the new code of previous games.
