Animal Crossing to feature DLC, DS connectivity

Arguably one of the biggest announcements at Nintendo’s media briefing, Animal Crossing: City Folk will be heading to the Wii November 16th. Two special features which have not been asked about (if they are in the game) are DLC and DS to Wii connectivity. Fortunately, Katsuya Eguchi confirmed (and discussed) that both functions will be available in the game.

“Addressing the connectivity between the DS and the Wii, if you have Animal Crossing on DS, we’re assuming you spent lots of time with that character and might be attached to him – his name, outfits, look – so you’ll be able to load that character into the Wii version and use that same character as you did in the DS game. Another thing we can do is use the DS as a means to help people who maybe don’t have Wi-Fi. We’ve talked about Wi-Fi and how neat it is to travel from town to town and interact with friends, but if you don’t have an internet connection you can take your character data and send it to your DS, bring your DS to a friend’s house, and upload your character to play around in his town and interact in the same way you would if you had a direct connection t them in Wi-Fi. The third thing we’ve done is add the ability to download new content as they become available online – which will help expand the universe with new furniture and things like that. Now if you don’t have Wi-Fi, you can take your DS to – at this point it’s still being determined exactly how – but an out of house destination where you can download the new content, and then bring it back to your home town and upload it. That way everyone can stay connected to the Animal Crossing world. When you take your character data over via the DS, you’re not using the DS to do any of the controlling. You can use that mode to explore the other player’s town independently, but you can’t play at the same time. To do that, you’ll need to connect via Wi-Fi and run around with one, or two, or three of your friends as we showed earlier.”