The Splatoon developers themselves have been doing a great job of giving players information about the game, especially with the shop reveals that have happened over the past few weeks. We’ve seen all the shops that are available in the Inkling city as well as their owners, but now the developers have given us even more information after their recent interview in Famitsu magazine.
The interview was conducted with the game’s producer, Hisashi Nogami, who served as the director for every Animal Crossing game before City Folk. Other key people who chimed in to answer questions include Yusuke Amano the game’s director, and Tsubasa Sakaguchi, who is a character designer that previously worked on Twilight Princess. Most of the interview revolves around establishing game mechanics, which we’ve already seen discussed in the West, mainly at the E3 presentation.
- The Inkling city (where the plaza is) is known as ‘Highcolor/Haikara City’ in Japanese.
- The concept of two teams of four shooting ink in a turf battle has been there since the original prototype, even though the characters where tofu-like blocks at the time.
- They experimented with other team sizes, but found with more than four players felt like they had little effect on battles, and with less than four that they had too much responsibility.
- Killing/attacking opponents online to prevent them from painting ink is just one strategy to win. You get no points or advantage directly from doing so.
- Hero mode uses basically the same controls as online matches, so anyone with difficulty in the can use the hero mode to practice.
- Ideally, you’ll be matched with players of a similar rank to you (based off of experience points earned in matches). If not enough players, they’ll put you with people further away from your rank. If there’s only 8 players, you’ll be matched together.
- While online is focused on just painting the ground, hero mode focuses on using the ink to move forward.
- Amano says he wants you to be able to look at the map on the GamePad and see where needs to be worked on for your team.
- No way to directly communicate with people you’ve been randomly matched with. They will appear post-match in your Plaza, where you can check out their gear, weapons, and comment.
- They picked squids because they were the best at representing the gameplay present in the prototype.
- Music for stages is random. Possible that I’m misunderstanding, but each player will have a different song while playing.
- Music is designed to be the sort that would be popular with the young Inklings involved with the turf battles.
- Rather than making some huge number of stages, they want to create stages that feel different when you use different weapon combinations.
- You don’t earn money for gear in single player for balance reasons. Someone could grind money in hero mode and have their first online match with high level gear.
- In the final stages of development now.
- Aiming for, more or less, a simultaneous worldwide release.
- They plan on supporting the title post-release.
Perhaps the most interesting thing gleaned from this interview is that the team plans on supporting the game after release. If this support features the same level of support that we’ve seen for Hyrule Warriors, it could mean new DLC maps for the game on a regular basis, keeping the game fresh for all.
What do you think about the revealed information? Are you even more excited to get your hands on Splatoon? Let us know in the comments!
