Nintendo’s riotous territorial online shooter is preparing to make an indelible mark on the genre. By Matt Clapham
Every year, Splatoon co-director Yusuke Amano goes fishing for squid. It’s a common enough pastime in his home nation, the creatures’year-end spawning and subsequent migration north across the Sea Of Japan for summer creating ideal conditions for the sport. Yet despite the grin on his face as he announces this, we get the impression the break might have been less restful than usual lately. Wind back to circa 2013 and his then-new project, a four-versus-four multiplayer game full of squid, was in trouble. In trouble with Nintendo's higher-ups.
“[After] the prototype phase, we had all these ideas about the height, the ink, the characters, and the image of the character and the squid,” says co-director Tsubasa Sakaguchi. “But we couldn’t kind of filter it down to a final result that would result in a simple, fun game. And during this period, we were being scolded by Mr Miyamoto all the time.”
“He was saying, ‘I don’t understand. What do you want to do? There’s no appeal to this game,’” clarifies producer Hisashi Nogami, clad in an identical Splatoon T-shirt to the one the Mario creator wore when he spoke to us in E271. Clearly, Miyamoto’s opinion has changed.
With good reason: the brand-new development build we play today drips with allure. Inkopolis Plaza, the game’s staging area, is especially vibrant and welcoming. Inklings throng the crosswalk, their glossy ‘hair’ tentacles dangling out from under snorkels, caps, beanies and oversized cans, no two alike. The sun beats down through perfect blue skies on the neon-green Inkopolis Tower, through whose doors you’ll access a free-for-all Turf War or enter a pitched Ranked Battle online. To the left is an array of glassfronted shops, while to the right, poking out of a shaded manhole cover by a vending machine, are the peaked cap and bulbous eyes of Cap’n Cuttlefish, inviting us down to face the Octarian threat in the singleplayer Hero mode.
It’s sorely tempting, but we’re spun around and our eyes directed to an even more incongruous sight: giant Amiibo packaging freestanding by a graffiticovered wall. This is where you summon the game’s three figures – an Inkling male brimming with attitude, a female with lively locks, and a green squid leaping out of a splash of ink – each with a payload of 15 singleplayer challenges that will unlock five rare pieces of gear. The figures we’re shown are highly detailed, too, a sheen on the humanoids’ hair and half-filled ink tanks on their backs, colours popping through the clear plastic cylinders.
Diving into Turf War, all the varnish reveals itself to be lacquered on top of substance. Viewed in thirdperson and built around a dual moveset that separates out periods of surging momentum and gyroscopic shooting, Splatoon eschews years of FPS muscle memory to deliver something delightfully energetic. With the left trigger held down to enter squid form, you dart through your team’s ink, slip up painted walls, and press X to arc gracefully through the air. What happens when you press the right trigger is highly dependant on the gun in your hand, but whether you’re spraying out great globules of ink or squelching a paint roller down on someone’s head, attacking is met with chunky feedback. You have a sub weapon on the right bumper, while a press of the right stick triggers a special (assuming you’ve filled its gauge by covering enough ground), which might wrap you in a temporary shield, or grant you the Inkzooka, which fires deadly dervishes that leave bold streaks across the arena.
The energy to a match is addictive, and there’s plenty of tactical nuance to delve into. Squids are practically invisible if they stay still while submerged in their own ink, for instance, only the ripples of their movement giving them away, but enemy ink is like tar, so staying put for too long easily results in being cut off or exposed. Tap a friendly on the map to super jump to their position, eliminating downtime, but risking falling right into crossfire.
The result is gameplay as riotously colourful as the plaza, that’s often chaotic but never feels random. Indeed, spawning in with your three teammates, each geared up with their own weapon loadouts and clad in stat-boosting garb, the objective ahead of you could not be simpler: when the timer runs out, be the team that has inked the most of the map’s floor.
Yet it wasn’t always like this. Back when the game attracted Miyamoto’s wagging finger, the team agreed they had diluted its clarity. Born of the Garage group – one of many such incubators that Nogami says has been “a done thing for a long time” at Nintendo – the prototype had been necessarily focused. It had the inking mechanic that had so caught Nogami’s imagination. It had the concept of being invisible when on top of your own ink. But the player characters were just blocks, and being invisible meant automatically vanishing on the spot. The trio recognised how readable having ink made the action, but it was obvious the game needed more something.
“We had the basics,” Amano says. “And then we were like, ‘Let’s add the hiding [in ink] feature; let’s add jumping; we need height, because it’s a 3D map.’ And then we thought, ‘We need to be able to shoot up and down.’ And we realised we’d added all this stuff, and we got confused. We didn’t know what the game was about.”
The prototype’s mechanics had character, but they needed characters – two of them, to be precise. This wouldn’t come easily, either. Squirting ink is inextricably linked with squid in Japan, so the team joked about putting one on the box art. Yet they needed a humanoid to hold the guns. Sakaguchi sketches out a squid-headed man as the two men beside him chuckle. “At the beginning, we’d only been thinking of a humanoid character moving around and shooting,” Amano explains. “And when the idea of the squid came, we were thinking: ‘A human squid; that probably won’t sell.’”
Sakaguchi and Amano spent a lot of time getting nowhere. “It was one of the longest parts of development,” Amano says, his smile broadening, if anything, “and we were crying in our evenings – like, ‘How can the characters make this game really fun?”
Then an epiphany: what if they took the GamePad’s two triggers and the two types of character they wanted and married one of each to the other, splitting movement powers and shooting across the controller? “We thought, ‘This is it!’” says Sakaguchi. “The genre is action-shooting, but unlike a lot of other games out there where it’s an amalgamation, this game has action and shooting as its two pillars, and the user can switch between either.”
Things would change rapidly after that. “I remember the exact date,” says Sakaguchi. “On January 6, 2014, I was like, ‘OK, we need to organise and filter this down.’ We started thinking, ‘As the squid, you need to do more with the ink.’ So we started thinking you can hide in it, and when you’re moving inside it, you can swim faster. Then we thought of the feature where if you step on enemy ink, it traps your feet and you take damage. At the start, you couldn’t paint the walls, but we thought, ‘How about we can paint the walls? It will give more of the wet, visceral feeling.’ We put that in, but then we realised, ‘Wait, you can paint it, but you can’t do anything with it, so that’s no good.’ So we added the ability to climb up the walls when they’re inked.”
Everything has come back to ink. It’s the binding agent between the game’s distinct personalities. It is ammunition and it is win condition. It is movement medium, hiding place and trap. A lot of love has gone into the ink, and in its shimmering surface we see a world of possibilities for creative play. Expanded movesets are a clear trend in modern FPSes, but the interplay between squid and ink pulls map and character closer together than in any shooter we’ve played. One moment is etched in our mind: we’re holding the central tower in the skatepark arena, a charge-shot sniper rifle in hand. Popping one unfortunate as the team rushes our position lets another approach the base of the structure unchecked. It won’t be long before he springs up and annihilates us. Operating on sheer reflex, we assume squid form and leap over his head, dropping seamlessly into a puddle of our ink on the tower’s side, then instantly squirt up the building to emerge behind our would-be attacker. It’s enough to push him off our perch, and seconds later he’s a puddle. Ink is certainly far more than a gimmick to excuse a bright splash of colour on the box art.
In hindsight, it seems so obvious, but this is how you make waves in the most oversubscribed genre in gaming. Splatoon’s Turf Wars still feel like they belong in the same pool as Battlefield, Call Of Duty and their peers, but which of those games allows you to still contribute with every shot you miss, cares as much about your weapon’s splatter pattern as its hitting power, or makes reading the ground akin to reading the flow of battle?
It’s intended to be friendly in a genre that’s often anything but. Partially, that’s born of Amano’s own experiences online. “I like shooting games and I would invite friends to come play with me,” he says. “But they’d start playing and they’d be like, ‘Oh, but it’s complicated; the controls are not very easy,’ and I found that I would soon be on my own again... I didn’t have fun all the time online either, and when I’d choose certain matchmaking setups, I wouldn’t find anyone to play with. From time to time, I encountered these frustrating moments, so I wanted to come up with something new, a different genre, even though it’s similar to an existing shooter… We wanted to make a shooter that was different and could allow people who aren’t so used to the traditional types of shooters to come in.”
It seems very like Nintendo to make an arena shooter that’s not primarily about shooting men, where aiming skill is important (and it is: slain enemies are not only not covering ground while they respawn, but pop and spray ink of your colour where they once stood) and yet the greenest beginner can pitch in. It won’t be for the Arma crowd, but the greatest compliment we can pay Splatoon is that has nailed that Nintendo feel. We’re reminded of the vibe of local Mario Kart tussles as the staffer next to us swears periodically under their breath whenever they get splattered, dimly aware of their bosses watching from halfway across the world, but not enough to be able to fully overcome the emotion of the moment.
Not that you’ll be able to hear any cussing yourself: Splatoon has no voice chat now, and it never will. You can blame the infamous toxicity of online players for that. “This is coming from personal experience,” Amano says. “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.”
Amano admits that means missing out on part of what makes online play special: “I don’t want you to misunderstand – I’m not denying having chat in an online game does contribute to fun. But, as we’ve said, we want to grab new people.”
That safe haven and a 13-year-old screaming homophobic abuse in your ears just aren’t compatible. Given how few players on consoles ever seem to use their headsets, perhaps only a vocal minority will care, but it’s a serious point of concern for a game that relies so heavily on teamwork. It’s an absence compounded by Wii U itself: robust party chat would allow you to self select the voices in your headset, but it’s absent too. It’s still not ruinous – the GamePad’s ever-present map takes up some of the slack, as do clear UI prompts when a teammate super jumps to your position – but this build feels clearly lacking in a way to call for aid or coordinate a push. We do spot the rudiments of a preset phrase system on the D-pad, and we can only hope it will expand to cover the gaps by launch. It would be a massive shame for a game this satisfying in a LAN-like setup to be curtailed by a communication breakdown.
If the multiplayer creates only a similar feel to Mario Kart when played in the same room, the singleplayer Hero mode has more than a splash of Mario Galaxy about it. Each level is split into self-contained puzzle-shooting segments, and you progress by working your way to launch pads, which fire you in squid form between them. At the end awaits not a Power Star, but an electric catfish behind a weak shield: the power source you collect across the campaign. Repeat a level, and a cuddly toy version awaits in its spot, ready to be plucked from atop its pedestal.
Mario never found himself flung around a cavern with Truman Show-esque panels on the walls to simulate a sky, of course, nor solved his problems with guns. But then Mario platformers were never teaching you tactics for online matches. The basic enemies, vacant-eyed tentacles on legs riding ink-spitting devices which look like the offspring of a Roomba and a megaphone, are easy marks. But even the first level soon introduces foes that require more than a simple flood of ink to overcome. One enemy on a high platform has affixed a welding mask to the front of his vehicle, rendering him impervious to a frontal assault. And so we learn the value of our slow-fused secondary grenade weapon as a tool of distraction, holding the right bumper to line up its arc, and then unleashing a flurry of fire at the enemy’s fleshy back when it turns to follow it. Another foe is a rolling ball that wallows in ooze, but you can use the gumming properties of unfriendly ink to slow down its charge. And we die for the first time as we round a stubby wall and waltz right into the eye lines of a pair of tougher enemies with more tentacles on their heads, which bury us under a barrage of slime. Next time, we pop in and out of cover to lay down a path of ink before squidding behind the unsuspecting mooks, leisurely lining up our shot and then pressing the right trigger to burst from the ground firing. All are tactics we feed back into Turf War; all help us climb the scoreboard. Yet the tests are so playful and lighthearted that we rarely feel like we’re being taken to school, but rather being allowed to be ingenious on the fly.
There’s more to Hero mode than an extended tutorial, however, and many levels introduce an environmental toy to master. Some are immensely satisfying: gushers are little spigots you can shoot to unleash a massive geyser of ink, and serve a triple purpose. Leaping in will transport you to the top of the column, providing a quick lift to new platforms, but a gusher makes for a great vantage point, or a deadly surprise for any enemy careless enough to be directly above one. Fans move platforms when shot, which can either bring enemies closer or carry you about. We use a sequence of them to cruise across an indoor sea, pestered by propeller-capped enemies. Floating sponges are trickier to control, expanding to create giant cubes when soaked in your own ink, but contracting when hit by enemy fire. You’ll have to top them up or move fast to avoid a fall and restart. Three strikes is all you get between checkpoints, though the AI is far from fierce and the difficulty level is generally mild.
The final level in our demo, drawn from a later area, shows what happens when Splatoon bares its teeth. This arena puts the catfish at the end of a winding maze, with gantries over the top and the toughest enemy yet seen – Octolings – between you and your objective. These black-clad females are the Octarian special forces, and have the same moveset as you. Beating them requires a deep delve into our trick bag; we push some back with grenades, evade others by slipping through ink, and fall back to our own turf to claim an advantage. A suitcase around the midpoint clads us in armour, represented by a natty bike helmet, and takes some of the pressure off. Claiming our sparking prize is a sweet moment indeed.
Even so, levels are all over relatively quickly, around five minutes apiece, but they’re clearly made to be replayed. Here is where the Amiibo integration ties in: the Inkling boy asks us to redo the first level using the Splat Roller, for instance, recasting grenade distraction challenges around the limited range of the weapon’s flicked ink, but steamrollering many of the other foes. The girl, we’re told, could set a tight time limit instead. If Hero mode is generously proportioned, and the size of the hub world suggests it is, the figures should feel like a treat for double dipping. Certainly what we play shows no evidence of being hamstrung to sell more toys.
Online multiplayer, of course, is where Splatoon’s real longevity lies. Three modes are presented: free-for-all Turf War, the competitive ladder of Ranked Battle, and one-versus-one. Ranked matches won’t just be Turf War with a grading scale either, introducing new objectives and styles of play. We try a few rounds of Splat Zones, which narrows the focus to a boxed-off area – or areas – of the map. Each side starts with the same number of points in a stock, and if you claim all the marked territories with a majority share of paint, yours begins to tick down. The winner is the side to empty theirs first. However, if your opponent reclaims even one zone, the counter stops. It subtly alters the flow of the match, but we find a squad wipe to be particularly powerful here, depriving defenders of reinforcements and attackers of the ability to sustain a push. We’re told this isn’t the only twist in store either.
All these modes float atop a loot system of more than ample proportion, with entire catalogues of hats, attire and shoes available to buy from the colourful plaza shops. While these can hone a playstyle, the guns and their attached loadouts totally transform it. Not every Splattershot comes with a grenade sub and the shield special, and a different variation might grant you the homing chase bomb, or the mighty rocket special seen at E3, which calls down a twister of ink. We’ve seen ink-curtain subs that act like one-way glass, allowing team fire out but blocking incoming ink. We’ve used the dart bomb, the surface-hugging plasma grenade of the Splatoon world. There’s at least another special (which we can’t talk about just yet), and there’s a rack of firearm oddities that we itch to try, given how delightfully responsive the more conventional tools are. In short, there’s plenty to look forward to.
And yet with so much to balance, Nintendo is once again playing by its own rules, testing the game almost entirely internally. That’s not without its challenges. “When we were working out the balance, all the staff have their favourites and preferences,” Amano says. “So when we were talking about whether one thing should be stronger or the other, everybody was like, ‘But my weapon’s not good in this situation; your weapon’s too strong…’ Rather than it being a discussion, it was more like a quarrel.”
Nogami interjects: “This quarrelling resulted when they were testing the balance of the maps and the weapons every day. And as they repeated this testing, the quarrel would happen.”
This is what it takes to make a new Nintendo IP: a quarrel every day, an air of constant creative tension, because it has to live up to the company’s reputation for polish. Splatoon may not be flawlessly balanced when it arrives in May, but it won’t be for a lack of effort. “Yeah, last week we spent two hours talking over how long it should take for the bomb to explode,” Amano says with a chuckle.
It’s affected a few nights as well, he confesses. “I’ve also contributed in my dreams. I couldn’t stop thinking about it, and I was trying to work out the best solution [as I slept]. And that’s no joke.”
“I had a similar thing,” Sakaguchi says. “I’m handling planning for the players, and in my dream I asked the programmer who was dealing with it to make something. He implemented it in the game; he showed it to me in the dream and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is it!’ So the next day I went in and got him to do what I saw in the dream. And that’s the truth!”
On May 29, Nintendo will go fishing in gaming’s most dangerous waters with a game about colourful squid, a game forged in hours of good-humoured arguments and informed by dreams. It sounds like madness, and to an extent it is. But it is an infectious kind of madness that seeps in through the fingers and takes over your brain, at once typically Nintendo and a massive departure from the company’s previous output. Everything, in fact, you’d want a new IP to be.