Its well known fact that Nintendo’s Animal Crossing series has ballooned in sales with each new entry surpassing the predecessor. With the first entry in the Animal Crossing series launching exclusively in Japan for the Nintendo 64 before being ported to the GameCube where it saw an international release, there have been five mainline entries so far with Animal Crossing: New Horizons for the Nintendo Switch being the latest.
The first game, Animal Crossing saw over 2 million sales worldwide and now, we have seen Animal Crossing: New Horizons has seen an incredible 46 million copies sold, which includes both physical and digital sales. It is currently the second best selling game on the Nintendo Switch system behind Mario Kart 8 Deluxe at 64 million.
Understandably, such sale figures across a franchise will raise a few eyebrows at other developers and publishers, with Ubisoft now rumoured to be creating a game inspired by Animal Crossing under the codename Alterra.
Obviously, as with any rumour it is important to take everything with a decent grain of salt and even when real, sometimes plans fall through so it may never see market.
Exactly what the end product would look like is unknown but it is expected to be using voxel based graphics. Gameplay wise, as with animal crossing, the player will create a home on an island and slowly over time and build it up while interacting with the locals. However, in addition, it will be possible to travel to other biomes in which much like Stardew Valley, the player will be killing various enemies and stealing supplies.
As things stand, there are no known target platforms but it’s reasonable to assume that it would be in development for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X and S as well as PC. It may well also be that next generation consoles from both Sony and Microsoft are either already available or soon to be released by the time Ubisoft’s Animal Crossing inspired game sees the light of day, in which case we fully expect a next generation version to be available as well. It is also worth pointing out that seeing the huge success Animal Crossing has been for Nintendo, and seeing how Ubisoft is one of the better supporting third parties of Nintendo platforms, we fully expect a release for the Nintendo Switch successor console.
