This Controversial Animal Crossing: New Horizons Version 3.0 Feature Is Dividing Fans

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The new Version 3.0 Update has brought life back to Animal Crossing: New Horizons with great new features like the Resort Hotel and Slumber Island, but there’s one aspect that’s been surprisingly controversial with some players.

As part of the new Resort Hotel built on your island’s pier, villagers that have visited your island to take up residence in hotel rooms can actually leave the hotel going on adventures walking the island.

Beyond just roaming your island, the tourist villagers can also be found within buildings, including hanging out at The Roost with Brewster or browsing exhibits at the Museum. It’s not limited to just one at a time either — you can find as many as 4 or 5 different tourists around an island at once.

Mixed Reactions From Fans

Early reactions from Animal Crossing players online to this feature so far have been a bit of a mixed bag though, with some fans having less than favourable responses to seeing unexpected villagers show up around their island.

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Many players have spent years building up intricately designed islands with a particular theme in mind. Because Animal Crossing: New Horizons allows you so much control over who moves in and out of your island, it’s previously been possible to get quite picky about who best fits your theme and keep out anyone who doesn’t.

For example, if your island has a deliberate theme focused on Halloween, you might have carefully curated a particular set of matching villagers like Kiki, Lucky, Cherry, and Muffy. Understandably, to then have a tourist like the bright pink rabbit Chrissy show up suddenly roaming next to spooky trees might not be to your tastes.

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On the other hand, there’s certainly some charm to being surprised by a new guest each day and mixing up your island’s feel. It brings the experience of New Horizons just a tiny bit closer to the feeling of some older Animal Crossing games where you might wake up any day and find a new villager moving in!

Since the tourist villagers can also show up at The Roost and other places around town, there’s a bit of resemblance to the Main Street area in Animal Crossing: New Leaf where you might run into past villagers who left town or even the City area in Animal Crossing: City Folk where anyone might be shopping alongside you.

It’s sometimes felt a bit odd as well that the Campsite feature in Animal Crossing: New Horizons never let visitors who occupied it leave the tent and roam around outside, so the tourists not finding themselves trapped in hotel rooms is a pleasant surprise in that regard.

How Much Control Should Animal Crossing Players Have?

Much of this debate arguably loops back around into the core of what Animal Crossing: New Horizons is as a game, and where it falls within the entire history of the Animal Crossing series.

Compared to previous games in the franchise, Animal Crossing: New Horizons offers the highest degree of player control in many ways. You can choose the exact location of every villager’s house, boot out current villagers at your command, easily ‘roll’ for new ones at your pick with mystery islands, and more — that’s only concerning villagers too, let alone matters like terraforming your island.

If you’re a newer player to the series who has only played New Horizons, then it may surprise you to learn the majority of these features are exclusive to the game. In past Animal Crossing games, it was totally commonplace for villagers to plunk down a new house wherever they pleased, move out at will, and have far fewer options (or none) for choosing who would move to your town next.

These aspects change a bit depending on the specific game, but generally speaking the farther you go back in the series, the fewer controls and options you have regarding how villagers move in, move out, and live in your space. Or rather, in some previous games, it’s not really your space — you’ve got to share it.

So in many ways, the tourist villagers in Version 3.0 are simply bringing a tiny piece of ‘old Animal Crossing’ back to Animal Crossing: New Horizons all these years later.

Can You Kick Out Tourist Villagers?

One way you can get a bit of control back, if you so desire, is by taking time to dress up the mannequins inside the Resort Hotel to your island’s theme. Villagers visiting your island as tourists will typically wear the clothing you offer for them on the mannequin, so they’ll at least be dressed to match your island.

Unfortunately, there don’t appear to be any methods or workarounds to completely stop the tourist villagers visiting your island from the Resort Hotel though, if you don’t welcome their presence.

However, there is one exception: the tourist villagers on your island seem to only begin appearing after you’ve designed your first room at the Resort Hotel. Obviously, this makes sense as they need a room to stay in.

So while you can’t reverse course on an island that you’ve already been playing the update’s new features on, you should be able to prevent tourist villagers from appearing on a brand new island or second island you haven’t yet designed rooms at the Resort Hotel.

Will Nintendo Make Changes?

Ultimately, whether any changes happen will depend on the developers’ intentions and motivations behind tourist villagers in the first place.

If the feature came from an active decision and thought process from the game designers along the lines of, ‘this will help bring back some more spontaneity to New Horizons and make the island feel more alive, even if a few players dislike it’, then it’s likely they’ll remain firm and make no adjustments. And as they should frankly, it’s their game!

However, if Nintendo didn’t have such intentions and this was more of an oversight where the developers just didn’t expect tourist villagers to bother some players so much, then I do think it’s possible we could see a minor update coming soon.

We’ve seen in the past with Animal Crossing: New Horizons that the developers do seem to keep an active pulse on what players are saying and experiencing online about the game when they were caught by surprise. For example, in the first Bunny Day event, we saw adjustments made to how often eggs appeared after intense feedback online about how islands felt ‘overtaken’ by eggs.

Many of the smaller changes in Version 3.0 seem clearly targeted in response to fan feedback too with features like expanded bulk buying of Customization Kits and crafting from house storage.

A change to tourist villagers could be relatively simple, such as implementing a dialogue option with either Leilani at the Resort Hotel or Isabelle at Resident Services that allows players to request closing the airport to tourists. I’m sure the developers could come up with a better explanation than that, but it wouldn’t have to be a dramatic change or entire removal of the feature.

Let us know in the comments below how you’re feeling about these tourist villagers on your island so far if you’ve encountered any — love ’em or hate ’em?

For more on the Version 3.0 Update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons, check out our other new articles and guides below:

Stay tuned to Animal Crossing World for everything on the Version 3.0 Update of Animal Crossing: New Horizons! Follow us on X, Facebook, Bluesky, and our mailing list below for updates. Or check out our most popular guides like Redd Art, Bush Types & Colors, Villager Houses, Sea Creatures, and K.K. Slider Songs.

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Animal Crossing: New Horizons News Version 3.0 Update

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