Nintendo in recent years, haven’t released a lot of brand new IPs on their consoles. This year at E3 2014, we were shown the Nintendo Wii U exclusive, Splatoon. The idea of Splatoon is to completely reign victorious with your team and defeat your opponents team, by completely covering them and their turf in your ink. This 3rd person action shooter will feature 4 vs. 4 online multiplayer. What is unconfirmed though, is whether this new title will feature voice chat due to the nature of the game.
Nintendo is notorious for their lack in the online gaming environment. Even their latest home console, the Wii U, doesn’t have a universal “party chat” so to speak with their competitors the Xbox One and PS4 offering that feature. Yet in their games there is a game chat option like in Mario Kart 8 but it seems tacked on and not really engaging for the players. With Splatoon hoping to get in the shooter genre, it seems that voice chat is only natural right?
Well, in an interview conducted by Game Rant (full interview there), the game’s producer and manager, Hisashi Nogami, thoughts were “The idea being that the core concept is basically that players look at the way the ink is being spread around, the way it’s being painted around, and decide what to do.” He continued, “If in any way that doesn’t disrupt that balance we’ve created, we’ll definitely consider different ways of communication and introduce that to the game as we go forward with development.” Their team haven’t finalized the thoughts on how gameplay could be better produced with certain features, in this case voice chat.
“Basically, I haven’t decided.” stated Mr. Nogami
Earlier news closer to E3 came reports from a Nintendo Representative that it will feature full voice chat but that was never officially confirmed. It still seems that this subject is being pondered on.
What do you think? Will the final release include full voice chat? Will this feature affect your views on the game? Or are we all used to these features not always shining on Nintendo consoles.
Splatoon will be released exclusively on the Wii U in the first half of 2015 and can pre-ordered now.
