First thing is: Let's face it, the Pokemon games are more or less the same games, using the same engine, just with new content.
Ultimately, that is all any game is. Devs reuse engines and assets like animations and models as much as they can. It's rather expensive and time intensive to do all of this stuff from scratch. It makes no logical or financial sense to start completely over if you can reuse old models and assets. I doubt the company would put up the money for that, and I'd be surprised if the dev team wanted to.
Why would they include the updates on the Octoling Model in an official update for public consoles?
if they are really not meant to appear in that game, then why updating it on people's consoles?
I've already addressed both of these questions, but I'll save you some backtracking. Inklings and Octolings use the same animations. If the devs updated shared animations (used by both Inklings and Octolings), that may give the impression that Octolings got updated animations. NWPlayer speculated that they got new victory mouth animations in the 2.0.0 update in August, but that is all the information on it I can find. She has not provided further explanation as of yet, nor has she responded to any of my questions in this thread. Because of this, I can't say what specifically she found or why she got that impression.
As for why they'd update these on the console, I suspect they didn't expect people to dig in the game code to find it. They probably figured it would stay buried in proprietary archive files that only certain SDKs could read. That's fairly common as well. Fallout 3/NV had "cut content" that was included in the final release. People could use the PC version's command console to give themselves the weapons. They had complete animations, models, textures, and SFX, but simply weren't set to appear in the game. Instead of taking the time and effort to remove them from the game files, the devs just didn't set the items to appear. It's possible the Splatoon devs did something very similar. Another rather infamous example was the GTA San Andreas "Hot Coffee" mod. It was a game feature the devs decided not to use. Instead of removing it, they just buried it.
But we are talking updates on people's consoles, for something that is supposedly only set to appear in the sequel, that doesn't even use the same console.
Probably not even the same game engine.
That doesn't make a lot of sense in my eyes.
I said it was a possibility, not a certainty. It's also possible they simply overlooked the Octoling mouth animations and decided to fix it. I can't say for sure. Porting the game engine and assets to a new console wouldn't be difficult. Even mediocre Fallout NV modders have been able to port FO3 mods to run in NV. If they get the groundwork laid, it would be cheaper and easier to port than build from scratch. Since the Octoling models were already pretty much finished, that may have been a final touch they wanted to add to make them complete. If that was the case, they'd literally just have to port the assets instead of messing with animations and face rigging while making playable Octolings in the sequel.
As for why...my best guess would be funding. If they still had some money left in the Splatoon budget, they may have spent it on updated Octoling assets so that they'd have more money in the sequel's budget to build male Octolings from scratch or convert male Inkling models into Male Octos.The less sequel dev time and money the spend on female Octolings, the more time they can spend on the males with the new budget. Just a guess.
