Team shooters have been popular since before Nintendo decided to try their own spin on it with Splatoon, but the team size in Splatoon is considerably smaller than what you’d expect for a multiplayer game. In a recent interview with the producer for the game Hisashi Nogami, he discussed the several different team sizes that were played around with in development before the team decided on the 4 vs. 4 mechanic.
It’s not like we couldn’t have made 3 vs. 3 battles, but if just one player is splatted, the balance changes drastically and the enemy team can make a push in one go. On the other hand, when we tried increasing the number of players, the effect of splatting one person was small. However, when we tried 4 vs. 4, just splatting one player got the other team into a quite unfavorable situation. It is like a power play in ice hockey.
It’s interesting to see Nogami compare the game to hockey as an inspiration, but we can definitely see where having a larger team like 8 vs. 8 would lead to the impact of missing players not being particularly detrimental to the team.
What do you think? Are you comfortable with the 4 vs. 4 mechanic of the game or do you wish bigger battles were possible?
