In this month’s issue of Nintendo Dream magazine, there’s an interview with some of the Splatoon developers, Yusuke Amano and Tsubasa Sakaguchi, as well as producer Hisashi Nogami.
Nintendo Dream starts the interview by asking how matchmaking works in Splatoon. Amano explains that rather than focusing on levels, the game pairs players with similar playstyles in Turf War. Levels are more of “an indicator for how long the person has played the game.”
Since Splatoon selects and matches users together based on how they play, Amano notes that those who tend to splat enemies are likely to play together. Likewise, those who concentrate on painting the field rather than splatting others are more likely to get paired up.
Next, when Nintendo Dream asked why there are two maps that are rotated once every four hours in the game, Amano said:
I think if maps were selected at random from all the possibilities, everyone would only use weapons that have “the greatest common divisor” and that work the same way in every map. But when maps are limited to two, you can have alternative weapon choices like “I’ll go with a charger for these two maps”. If there are more than three stages, all-rounder weapons become popular.
Similar to other Ranked Battles, Nogami confirms that the upcoming Tower Control matches will take five minutes each round.
The next topic addressed by the developers was updates. Nogami and Amano had this to say about it:
Nogami: There is still more to be done to maintain customers’ interest and to prevent them from getting tired [of the game].
Amano: There is still much content under investigation*. It is like “what shall we include in the next update?”
*Developers keep using wording “under investigation” or “under research” as a reference to Squid Research Lab.
Nintendo Dream then commented that even though Splatoon has launched, development isn’t over. The developers continued:
Nogami: We wanted to pile up content with updates from the start. We prepared some amount [of content] according to our expectations, but as we saw actual reactions [from players], we’re going to make some revisions.
Amano: We’re thankful that everyone has leveled up faster than we expected and played the game immensely. If we’re going to pile up [content], we’re going to do it with an aggressive approach.
Don’t forget Splatoon will have a big update in August and continue to receive other smaller updates until then!