It had been thought for some time that Animal Crossing: New Horizon would handle save data a little differently to other games, and this morning’s Nintendo Direct confirmed as much, but didn’t exactly clear things up.
In a press release sent by Nintendo Australia (and stated on the Animal Crossing website), it states that Save Cloud Data won’t be supported by the game (not surprising) and that in the event of console failure, loss or theft, Nintendo will recover your save data (but only once). This service will also only be available to Nintendo Switch Online subscribers.
“Animal Crossing: New Horizons does not support the Save Data Cloud functionality of Nintendo Switch Online. However, the ability to recover Animal Crossing: New Horizons save data from the server in the event of console failure, loss or theft will be available to Nintendo Switch Online members later this year.
Animal Crossing: New Horizons does not currently support the ability to transfer your save file from one Nintendo Switch console to another. However, a function specific to Animal Crossing: New Horizons to move users and save data to another console is planned for later this year.”
What this means is incredibly unclear, and it’s not quite clear why this isn’t available at launch. It’s pretty worrying that it could be months without a way to transfer your Animal Crossing save data to a new Nintendo Switch console, or recover it from a backup in the case of your Switch being broken, lost or stolen, but hopefully Nintendo act on this quickly.
