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Animal Crossing: New Horizons will have skin tone customization, gender-neutral hairstyles for Villagers

Plus, the Switch game lets you adjust your Villager on the fly

Nintendo
Chelsea Stark (she/her), executive editor, has been covering video games for more than a decade.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons will expand on the character customization options form previous console games, letting players choose their own skin tone and instantly swap any of their character’s features any time during play.

Animal Crossing villagers’ facial features have been in the past determined by short quizzes at the start of each game, but Aya Kyogoku, the director of Nintendo Switch Animal Crossing game New Horizons, said players will be able to control every option of their character from the get-go.

“Right from the start, you’ll be able to choose the way you want to look,” Kyogoku said, in an interview with Polygon during E3. “All the facial parts or hairstyles are all gender-free. So you can select from a pool of hairstyles and facial features and then they’re also changeable at any point in the game. So if you feel like a certain way one day, then you can make that change pretty easily.”

These options include hair color and style, eye color, and facial features, with one notable addition: For the first time in a mainline Animal Crossing game, players can change their villager’s skin color. The only way to change your villager’s default pale skin color in Animal Crossing: New Leaf was to get a tan, and some fans used save editors to permanently alter their villagers skin color to more accurately reflect themselves within the game.

The most recent game in the franchise, Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp for mobile devices, was highly customizable. Clothing and Villager customization options were mostly gender-free.

Thankfully, the character editor sounds like its expanding for Animal Crossing’s next game, which arrives on the Nintendo Switch on March 20, 2020.

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