Yesterday we showed you the cover of Edge Magazine for May, which features a huge piece on Splatoon with its creators. The developers spoke briefly about how the game came to be from the life of a concept that Shigeru Miyamoto scolded them for to the product we’ll finally see on May 29.
According to Yusuke Amano, he’s a fan of shooter games but inviting friends over to play them led to frustration. Amano says he and his team wanted to build a shooter that was not frustrating to play and that the original concept for the game only came about last year, as they had an epiphany to combine the squid and human character designs as characters who can shapeshift from one form and back to the other.
With that roadblock out of the way, the team began rapidly developing mechanics for the game, including speeding up in your own ink while being slowed down and taking damage in enemy ink. It’s led to the game we see today. One of the most contentious points so far for fans is that Splatoon has a lack of voice chat. Given the nature of shooters online and how toxic some of the communities can be when it comes to competitive online play, Splatoon will never have voice chat.
Amano himself says the negativity perpetuated by players in this setting is not something Nintendo wants to embrace.
This is coming from personal experience. When I played online games, I didn’t like the negativity I got and people telling me ‘You’re crap. Go away’. So we wanted to focus on the positive aspects of online gaming.
So the toxic nature of online shooters has led Nintendo to shy away from including voice chat in their own game, as Amano says, they want to focus on bringing in new players, rather than have them abused at the hands of old players.
