Animal Crossing: New Horizons finally adds cloud backups - and Nintendo screws it up

When Nintendo revealed the summer update for Animal Crossing: New Horizons earlier this year, it said that the update would be launching in multiple waves. The first wave is already in the books, and today, Nintendo has detailed Wave 2, which will be available in just a couple of days. On top of a few more summer-themed additions, Wave 2 will bring a long-requested feature to the game.

The summer-themed new features players can look forward to include fireworks, with a display happening in the night sky every Sunday in August at 7 PM local time. While it sounds like you won't be setting off the fireworks yourself, you'll be able to design fireworks and include them in the show every weekend. You will also be able to head to the plaza to purchase raffle tickets for bells and have a chance to win festive items.

In addition to these fireworks displays, players will also be able to nap and dream in any bed placed in their homes (Nintendo says you'll need to upgrade from your tent to take advantage of this feature). While dreaming, you might encounter Luna, who will transport you to a "dream" island. While Nintendo notes that nothing you do on dream islands is saved, you will be able to invite other players to your dream islands, assuming that you're both subscribed to Switch Online.

Arguably the biggest feature shipping along with Wave 2 is a new island backup and restoration service. As the name suggests, you'll be able to use this feature to back up your island, and while you need to be subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online to take advantage of this feature, it's important to remember that this doesn't function the same way as Switch cloud saves.

Instead of being able to restore your island whenever you want, you'll instead need to contact Nintendo Customer Support and have them restore the island for you. So, this is really only useful in cases where players have lost their Switch or their save file has become corrupt for whatever reason. Nintendo also says that it's working on a system that will allow players to move their islands and save files to a separate Switch, but we won't know more until a later date.

So, there you have it: the second wave of the Summer Update will add a long-requested feature in cloud backups, but that backup functionality probably isn't arriving in a state that most users would approve of. It is very strange that Nintendo is making you contact customer support to restore your backup, but at the end of the day, that's probably better to having no cloud backups at all. Wave 2 of New Horizons' Summer Update is due out on July 30th.