Splatoon development team is very confusing and it scares me

[AMICADO]

Splatoon Dev team. Gee, thanks for making such a great game! But they just confuse me.

Dev Research Lab
Now the squids research the men

From my research I have concluded several anomalies with splatoon’s content;
1. The incredible effort placed into minor details, lore, and world building.
2. The seeming lack of effort in additions to the gameplay.
3. The ruining of perfectly good ideas.
4. The bad advertising and informing of news.

Lets start with number one, my absolute favorite thing about the splatoon team, and the game as a whole! The abundance of details, world building, continuity, connections, references… I could spend a while talking about it all. The beauty in maps’ backgrounds! Just take a look around Brinewater springs for a few minutes (ignore the map layout I’ll get to that). The amount of detail in everything! Lemuria Hub might be my favorite. It’s based off a real train station in Japan. It connects inkadia, perfect for a final map. Lemuria is the name of a fictional submerged continent, just like the world of splatoon is. There are posters referring to real plays, mascots, phone booths, trains departing, and you can even see the tutorial area. Grand Festival is an incredible example as well, there being so many amazing tiny details everywhere, and we only even got that hub for 3 days. And thats obviously ignoring the other MASSIVE stuff in Grand Fest. Oh, and Side Order, Octo Expansion, Salmon Run… Everything, really. The whole backstory being given to octos, grizzco, sanitization. And my favorite, the snow in Side Order’s outside area is actually ASH from the MEMCAKES BEING BURNT. Yes, brutal. All that to say how cool splatoons art directive is. Well, more than the art directive.
OH AND I DIDN’T EVEN MENTION-

Now that we covered that good part, hows about the weird and bad part? Lack of effort in the additions to gameplay. What do I mean? Okay, so Brinewater. Yes, I mentioned it was very pretty… BUT ITS MY MOST HATED MAP. Why? Well, because the progression through it is a single line. Although the line does do a little ziggidy zaggity, it’s still a line. A single line. What was the team even thinking? It’s just blatantly not caring, you can’t actually make a map a straight line and expect it to be fun. Unless they did? And of course there are so many other terrible maps in the game as well. But bad map design isn’t too bad, it’s forgivable as a mistake. The lack of kits, however, is not. It’s not that hard to make new kits, alright? You have 3 months. Just change colors, replace the sub and special. that should take one person a week at max. How many people are on the team? You only need 4 guys on kits and you’re fine. It’s just frustrating. How hard can it be? And, weapon kits isn’t all they put little effort into. Balancing weapons and adding new weapons has been pretty underwhelming in Splatoon 3, and even in Splatoon 2, maybe even more than 3. Take tenta missiles. Why did they not fix tenta missiles? Seriously, this isn’t rhetorical. And sting ray. They overtuned it and left. Now, Splatoon 3 has much better special balance. Crab is gone, Cooler isn’t too terrible. But the specials are so weak in this game. Reefslider is absolute garbage, barely getting any good buffs. I’d like to talk about ideas for reefslider some time, actually. And Ultra stamp is still killed so easily. And Splattercolor screen is just weird. For it’s accessibility issues, and also feels like it has some quirks they just didn’t know how to patch. It’s so big. It can advantage the other team as well. it floats. It feels so rushed. And also us only getting 3 weapons in the new classes for S3. Ah, 3, actually maybe that was intended… no! Not this time. And they saved them for the end? Why would you save them for the end? I just can’t with these guys.

And now to the third one, which just makes absolutely no sense. The ruining of perfectly good ideas. Salmon Run! It’s great. UNLESS YOU’RE IN S2. Why did they do what they did. This once again isn’t rhetorical. IN WHAT WORLD DOES MAKING PEOPLE BE ABLE TO PLAY YOUR GAME LESS GET YOU MORE MONEY. Really. And they did it again with challenges in S3 I CANT BELIEVE IT.

And finally, their terrible advertising and news. And I’m not just talking about YOU’RE A KID NOW YOU’RE A SQUID NOW and Splatoon 3 SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT-SPLAT. I’m talking about Haikara walker and stuff. The crazy lore and art and effort that is just put into a magazine or website and barely mentioned anywhere. And also, as some call ‘Nintendo hating money’, they just don’t sell their merch in places outside of Japan. All the cool splatoon stuff that’s onlu in Japan.

So research has been complete.

This has been Dev Research Labs, thank you for reading this rant, and I’m sorry.

-DSL

 

[solz]

One more thing, the music!!

 

[isaac4]

I really relate to how you feel about the direction the developers went with this game.
They're clearly talented and are capable of designing some amazing things, all you have to do is look back at Grand Fest for an example of what they're able to create.
Despite that, a lot of Splatoon 3 feels rushed and poorly designed. It's a lot more obvious with the single-player campaigns but is still an issue for S3 as a whole.
The map design, sub/special balance, lack of third kits, lack of meaningful changes for most patches, limited time challenges, online issues that weren't addressed until two years after, and so much more that I don't feel like typing.
It gives me the impression that S3 wasn't a priority for Nintendo which would make sense if they're busy working on their new console but still feels very strange that the same game that barely added Fizzbangs to Splatfests over a year after launch is the same game that had Grand Fest (this is my second time mentioning but I have to, it was amazing).

 

[Cephalobro]

To me, it felt like Splatoon 3 simply tried to do too much. It obviously didn't work out in the end. They made everything multiplayer-focused become absolutely grindy which I really don't find it fun. Secondly, it seems like they still haven't fixed certain issues like missile spam and certain weapons that continue to be dominant.

Let's compare this with Splatoon 2, while some multiplayer aspects from Splatoon 2 were grindy, not everything was. For example, in Splatoon 2 you could easily rack up cash to buy everything the game has to offer by just playing a lot of Salmon Run, it's a good thing because you could get ahead if you put in the effort to do so.

I also hate how obtaining certain things in Splatoon 3 was now much more related to luck, yes I'm talking about the Shell-Out Machine, aside from it just being a form of lootbox (which I already hate those with a burning passion that's hotter than the sun itself due to how predatory they are), the cost to even attempt in getting something permanent from it is ridiculous. It's as if Splatoon 3 tried way too hard to keep everyone on the same level, which is really not a good game design to me, a player should be able to get ahead of others if they put in the effort to do so.

 

[jeffthesquid]

Personally, I find Splatoon 3 rushed. I think they should have stuck with Splatoon 1's open map thing with flank routes and just expanded on that idea. Why I would give the characters capes and have them fly around the level shooting ink. They would even land on walls and fight there. There could even be a move where an Inkling or Octoling launches himself/herself from a wall like a flying squirrel and use their weapon in mid air. Stuff like this they could have done but no, they had to rush everything for the sake of the investors. That's why I hate companies.

Also Splatfests are awesome but they could keep up the content if at least some of the fighting happened on the plaza itself and I do mean the plaza! I would expand out the plaza so you could fight behind buildings and even on top of them. It would be chaos but would stick with the theme of Splatoon 3.

So why am I pitching all these ideas... well, I'm a programmer/developer and I know that developers want to give their project love but it's always these stupid investors. Nintendo should make a Splatoon battle even were you can throw pies and shoot investors with paint balls. If I could work for Nintendo, first I would listen to what the fans want, then I would read fan created lore, then I would develop. Maybe keep the same city but expand it and make it different but the same as well. Kind of like Ying and Yang or BBQ sauce and meatloaf, you know, balanced.

I think we should start a thread where we design our own levels for Splatoon and talk about the story mode a bit. I personally don't like the Mr. Grizz story - so out of place... and what's with those levels that have the mirrored city, what does that have to do with Splatoon? I get the levels from Splatoon 1 with the domes and floating platform - they're remnants of human civilization. They goes well with the story. The Mr. Grizz thing is just stupid. Why would he have floating lanterns in his domes, why the tests... just stupid. I think Nintendo developers got mad at the investors so they invented Mr. Grizz to represent the evil corporate a**hole and they put him as the bad guy because they hate investors. Why not make one the investors the bad guy and make him much more sinister - a highly calculating individual who tricks out heroes into something. Take Mario 3, Bowser tricked Mario into thinking he was concerned about conquering the Mushroom World but really he set up that whole conquest to distract Mario and steal the princess. Damn, I would have made Deep Cut the villains, especially Shiver, she looks so evil. Yep, something along the lines that Shiver and her shark crew created Alterna, fabricated the story of the humans living there when if fact they didn't (they were all wiped out in the war), and decides to trap Callie, Marie, Pearl, and Marina there in order to take over as the sole idols of the Splatoon world. Furthermore, she wants to create a new type of Splatoon battle where the opponents ride of sharks. Anyways, I could go on but I'm a developer and my mind is always developing.

 

[missingno]

Lack of effort in the additions to gameplay.

There are a lot of things you can say about S3, but this absolutely isn't one of them. It is by far the biggest and most ambitious game in the series, packed with content. They threw a lot of ideas at the wall, and maybe not all of them stuck, but it isn't for lack of effort.

Nine times out of ten, whenever someone tries to describe anything in game development as a lack of effort, they're almost always wrong.

And now to the third one, which just makes absolutely no sense. The ruining of perfectly good ideas. Salmon Run! It’s great. UNLESS YOU’RE IN S2. Why did they do what they did. This once again isn’t rhetorical. IN WHAT WORLD DOES MAKING PEOPLE BE ABLE TO PLAY YOUR GAME LESS GET YOU MORE MONEY. Really. And they did it again with challenges in S3 I CANT BELIEVE IT.

Remember that Splatoon began as a multiplayer-focused game on a dying console. Nintendo knew it was a massive risk, and they took precautions to keep matchmaking quick and simple. That's how we got map rotations, so that there's just one queue everyone plays with whichever maps are preselected. It avoids a situation where the playerbase gets too split up and now pl_badwater and de_dust are the only maps you'll consistently find games on. Splatfests were also conceived as a way to get players coming back for events, a weekend where the queues are guaranteed to be bustling.

S1 did well relative to the Wii U, but only because that's a hell of a low bar. They still had every reason to be uncertain about how well S2 would fare. Introducing a new co-op mode introduced a new risk: splitting the playerbase. So they limited it and treated it as another event at first. This way it will be consistently populated while the event is running, and while it's running they can monitor how the versus queues are holding up, make sure they're not losing too many players to Salmon Run.

Over time, as the game proved to be successful and they had data on how healthy the queues were, they kept Salmon Run open more and more often, until finally deciding it could be 24/7 in S3. But it had to get there gradually. Salmon Run was a successful experiment, but don't forget that it was an experiment.

I actually think that one of S3's biggest problems is too many queues. Matchmaking quality has suffered as a result of players being divided across Series, Open, Takoroka, and Tentatek. Challenges are fine as limited events, but I think players would pretty quickly get bored of them if they were 24/7 and the queue population would suffer.

 

[OnePotWonder]

The one thing you can rely on with Nintendo is inconsistency. The new main weapons and atmospheric worldbuilding they added in this game are astoundingly good. The lack of kits, poor stage design, and pathetic story of Return of the Mammalians are all awful.

Salmon Run has been handled excellently, what with egg throws, the brand new stages, and king salmonids. Tableturf Battle, meanwhile, received virtually no attention or updates throughout the game's lifespan beyond new cards every season. The mode doesn't even have online matchmaking. Challenges provide some of the most fun and interesting gameplay twists Nintendo has ever thought up for the game. Or they're normal Anarchy Battles. Either way, they're only available for half the time they're active.

And that's just Splatoon. Nintendo's other mainline games are incredibly hit and miss as well. Look at Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

We're talking about the video game producer that just released a $100 Alarm Clock completely out of the blue. You can't predict Nintendo. The priorities of the company are a complete enigma.

 

[Smash Arena]

Splatoon 3 likely suffered from the time period its development took place in. Major production was from 2020 to 2022 assumedly, and we all know that there was a very disruptive world event going on at the time, which certainly interrupted development of Splatoon 3 and slowed it down considerably. Time was certainly lost just trying to rebuild the development environment for Work-From-Home. On top of that, WFH is NOT conducive to a collaborative environment like game development, not to mention all the additional time lost from data transfer over home internet connections. (Every time the developers wanted to share their work with team members, that's time spent uploading!) On top of that, there was so much uncertainty with the aforementioned world event that Nintendo likely expected to return to the office far sooner than what ended up happening.

Still, Splatoon 3 should not have launched in the state that it did. Nintendo should have delayed the game further, but made a poor decision and launched it in a lackluster state. Because of that, it felt like the development team was trying to play catch up for the entire lifespan of the game, only really reaching that point in the last two seasons or so. Even then, the game feels incomplete without third kits as well as how underwhelming Side Order turned out to be. I think Nintendo also wrote the game off a bit because a lot of players dropped the game early. Unfortunately, players dropping the game early was a bit of a Catch 22 as many dropped off due to the problems the game faced early on thanks to its rushed development (especially the rampant connection errors).

Overall, Splatoon 3 deserved a whole lot better, as did its players. Nintendo was thrown a real curveball with its development interruption, but struck out rather than adapting and potentially having another home run smash hit on its hands. (I've been watching a lot of the baseball postseason, so I've got baseball analogies to spare.)