Animal Crossing Players Unhappy With 'Disappointing' Next-Gen Upgrade

It appears that some Animal Crossing: New Horizons players are unhappy with the latest update, particularly its next-gen upgrade on Switch 2.

Earlier this week, Nintendo released the new Update 3.0 for Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Prior to this, the game hadn’t received a major content update since 2021.

The update includes the new resort hotel, Resetti’s reset service, and the Slumber Island feature which allows you to design three new islands from scratch.

Alongside this came a next-gen upgrade for Nintendo Switch 2, taking advantage of the console’s additional graphical power and exclusive features as part of the update.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons Has A Resolution Problem On Nintendo Switch 2

Some fans, however, are unhappy with this update, with some calling the new graphic features “disappointing” following recent revelations about the anti-aliasing used in the update.

As shared by YouTuber Shesez, better known for their series Boundary Break, the new bump in resolution for Animal Crossing: New Horizons on Switch 2 uses FXAA.

As Shesez puts it, “instead of smoothing out the jaggy edges with straight lines ACNH blurs the edges after the frame has been rendered to soften it”, creating a blurry image rather than one that’s pretty clear.

FXAA doesn’t do much to improve image sharpness or detail, as it mostly softens jagged edges, which can blur fine details as opposed to making them clearer.

Other fans were quick to agree, pointing out some of the flaws with Animal Crossing: New Horizons’ Switch 2 next-gen update with regards to its anti-aliasing.

“I immediately noticed something was off when I saw the DOF effect in indoor areas,” wrote another fan on X. “It looks fine in the 1080p resolution it was designed for, but sticks out like a sore thumb here. The upscaling doesn't properly account for it so background characters and items get all pixelated.

“The moment any straight object is at an angle it's smeared jaggies galore. Nothing looks exactly the same from one jittery frame to the next, it's like they ran the entire game through waifu2x. Very disappointing to see how much they cheaped out on this. Was true 4K that hard?”

Nintendo has not commented on this, nor has it confirmed whether it’ll be improving the 4K resolution issues in future hotfixes.

While the game does generally look better now than it did on the original version for Nintendo Switch, I must admit that some of those blurry backgrounds and edges look pretty distracting when playing at 4K.