Today, Game Informer put up a lengthy interview with Splatoon 2 producer Hisashi Nogami and lead programmer Shintaro Sato. Plenty was discussed here, including Salmon Run, letting players share art and messages, Splatfests, how much content will be available at launch, why voice chat is limited to friends / other familiar people, and music. There were other topics sprinkled in as well.

We’ve rounded up some of the noteworthy comments from Nogami and Sato below. You can read the full interview on Game Informer here.

On Salmon Run’s difficulty…

Nogami: Here on the showfloor, we’re showing off the local version of Salmon Run with having four players together in that physical space, but we also have the online version of Salmon Run in the game. That will not be available to you when you first start the game; you’ll need to get some experience in multiplayer first before accessing it. You start off the game with a quick tutorial, then you make your way into multiplayer to continue your learning there. Once you’ve raised your level up to level 4, online Salmon Run will be available. Rather than a tutorial, we think of that first multiplayer experience as more of a warming up period.

After you’ve gone through this warming up period in multiplayer, in the online period of Salmon Run as well – you’re being hired by Grizzco Industries in the online version as like a part-time job – so you have to go through your worker training once you enter the online version of Salmon Run. I think it is true what you said, but multiplayer and single-player sort of serve as training grounds for players where you can build your skills. Salmon Run does sort of require a base-level of competence and knowledge about that game. That’s true.

Salmon Run is really for players wanting to set their sights a bit higher – players who have enjoyed some of the cooperative aspects of multiplayer, which does certainly involve a team effort, and want to take that cooperation to the next level in dedicated sort of cooperative mode. That said, for multiplayer, it doesn’t take that long to raise your level up to level 4 in multiplayer, meaning the mode will be available relatively quickly. Also, unlike real-world job training where they really put you through your paces, the learning curve of the introductory period of online Salmon Run is not actually that steep. Once you’ve passed through that, players can, according to their skill levels and desires, can raise the difficulty on their own, bit by bit.

Another point about the job training period of online Salmon Run is that there are these boss Salmonids. There are seven of them in total, and in that job training period, you’re shown tips and strategies for taking down all of them. The goal is not to just throw players into the fire of Salmon Run right away and come up with strategies for these newly appearing enemies on the fly, but instead to teach those strategies for taking down those boss Salmonids first, and then when they have that shared knowledge to put them into the mode.

On whether there will be a way to share messages like with Miiverse in the first Splatoon…

Nogami: As you pointed out, while we don’t have Miiverse on the Nintendo Switch, we have made sure to allow players in the same way to post artwork on the ground and walls, or messages to other players. So I think players will be able to continue communicating in an indirect fashion and seeing what players from around the Splatoon 2 community are thinking.

On Splatfests…

Nogami: First of all, we are definitely planning to continue Splatfest in Splatoon 2. As I mentioned with the players posting messages and artwork in the plaza, Splatfest is a way that we feel that by creating that festival atmosphere, we’re able to create a sense of unity or an indirect way of communicating that they are participating and sharing the same type of event. You can rest assured that while we’ll give you more detailed information later on what that may look like, we will be decorating the Inkopolis Square in a party and festive way.

On the amount of content at launch…

Sato: We haven’t announced that yet. We haven’t spoken about the number of stages concretely, but what we can say is that at launch, Splatoon 2 will have more stages available for multiplayer than Splatoon 1 did at launch. Also, with Splatoon 1, we did a process of continually updating the game after its release. We plan to continue that pattern with Splatoon 2 and by the time we finish the updates for Splatoon 2, the number of multiplayer stages will be greater than that of the multiplayer stages released for Splatoon 1.

On why voice chat is limited to friends and other close players…

Nogami: First off, I think it’s appropriate to say that we think that voice chat is a type of communication that’s not necessarily required for players to enjoy the game. At its core in the multiplayer gameplay, we think the most important thing is to be constantly paying attention to the conditions on the ground in the stage you’re playing and to think about what your teammates are doing and what might the opponents be doing. That’s sort of a core gameplay element.

But, it’s true that in the development of its community, there have appeared a number of high-level players and players who want to take the game more seriously. For players like that who want to take their communication and coordination to the next level, we wanted to answer their expectations by including something like voice chat.

It’s also natural that talking to your friends is fun. So even for the players who are seriously minded, we’ve realized that being able to share the experience via voice chat is fun and we wanted to make that possible for them. We wanted to include voice chat as an option for voice chat in Splatoon 2 without giving people the feeling that you need voice chat in order to play Splatoon 2.

On Cap’n Cuttlefish…

Nogami While it’s not out of the question that sometime in the future he may make an appearance, we’ve received reports that he is seeing the sights and traveling around the world of Splatoon at the moment. Just to make sure there is no misunderstanding, he is still alive.

On using the Mario amiibo to get a Mario hat for your Inkling…

Nogami: It is true, after all, that in the world of Splatoon 2, this is a world where the human civilization has fallen away and it’s been 12,000 years of evolution since that time. It could be that if someone were to uncover or excavate a hat like [Mario’s] that it may be possible. We can’t cancel out that possibility entirely. It’s also worth mentioning that you can use the Splatoon 1 Amiibo in Splatoon 2.

On the biggest lesson learned from developing Splatoon 1 that they’re bringing into Splatoon 2…

Nogami: It’s a feature of Splatoon 1’s development that after we released the game on a disc, that wasn’t the end. We had this plan for continuing the series of updates and we would keep our eye on the community and what they were saying occasionally adjust our plans as necessary based on what we were seeing in the community. Some of those examples of that were adjustments to weapons-balancing or stage features, but also in the types of reactions that we saw in Splatfests and Splatfest themes we should create going forward.

Sato: In our work as developers up until now, we really had to work our best to try and imagine everything that players could want from a particular game and try to put all of that into the game and release it into the world and sit back and watch to see if we hit the mark or if we missed with those expectations.

Nogami: It was really a new experience for us to first take an action in creating a game, then see the player’s reaction and be able to respond to it. That experience over the course of Splatoon 1 was really beneficial for us as developers in continuing to create the content and we want to take the learnings from that forward into Splatoon 2.

On the music…

Nogami: The music of Splatoon is another example of the trends that have continued to change in this two-year span of time we’ve seen, so we plan on filling Splatoon 2 with a lot of new types of music. And you will also find some new music that has been remixed in a traditional way and we hope you look forward to that as well.

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