Splatoon! Bow to your immortal queen, and indisputed best girl- Marie

[Blue Blood]

To be honest every time I ALMOST thought I needed voice chat common courtesy pretty much solved the problem instantly.  Two of us are heading the same way from the start of the map?  If they turn off another direction before I do, I keep going, if not, I turn off another direction.  Most of the time I did what other players weren't, for example hardly anyone on my team for most of the Oil Rig matches were aiming to get as high as possible so I usually did that and took out areas/enemies from the vantage point.  But if I could already see someone else doing that I'd head to an unoccupied space or look for spots that BOTH teams seemed to be ignoring.

 

But yeah, we'll see how other modes hold up.

 

I'm mostly talking about from a simple perspective of enjoyment. You feel a bit alienated if you can't talk to your teammates in any real capacity. Maybe the game doesn't need it for strategy. The demo was certainly manic enough that strategy would just be most unnecessary. But it's fun to talk. 

[Candescence]

I can't see any reasoning for that other than just laziness.

 

The devs already stated that no voice chat is a deliberate design decision. And it boils down to the fact that random voice chat is fucking cancer.

 

Party/friend chat I'd absolutely welcome, but random voice chat is just not worth the effort. Voice chat in most multiplayer games in random matches could basically be boiled down to homophobic slurs, harassment and people screaming at you for not playing absolutely perfectly (especially in co-op games) most of the time. And God help you if you're stuck with a kid with a high-pitched voice who just won't shut up. Muting helps, but not enough.

 

Really, if a game has to have voice chat with randoms, it should be turned off by default.

[Junko]

How many people do a thing that I do where, the first thing I do in any game is fuck with the settings? I suppose maybe in my case it doesn't need to be off by default, because I'd end up turning it on anyway.

The devs already stated that no voice chat is a deliberate design decision. And it boils down to the fact that random voice chat is fucking cancer.

Party/friend chat I'd absolutely welcome, but random voice chat is just not worth the effort. Voice chat in most multiplayer games in random matches could basically be boiled down to homophobic slurs, harassment and people screaming at you for not playing absolutely perfectly (especially in co-op games) most of the time. And God help you if you're stuck with a kid with a high-pitched voice who just won't shut up. Muting helps, but not enough.

Really, if a game has to have voice chat with randoms, it should be turned off by default.

But then... How does muting not solve this issue? If you can't deal with it, literally every game I've played with voice chat has the option to mute or even out right turn it off. Just because there's fucking asshole out there doesn't mean ruin the system for everyone else.

[Milo]

IGN aren't happy about the lack of voice chat...

http://www.ign.com/articles/2015/05/10/dear-nintendo-splatoon-needs-a-voice-chat-option

7.8/10 too much silence incoming...

 

Don't you mean 7.8/10 "too much colored water"?

[Gabz Girl]

Remy has a point. Turf War is already frantic as hell and you can tell which areas need painting just by looking at the Gamepad. You don't need voice chat for that shit. We'll have to see how other modes do without voice chat, but so far I think Turf War needs it the least.

[Carbo]

"Lazy" is the wrong word to look for when describing what Nintendo are doing here. "Misguided" would be the better term.

It might seem like a small thing but there's nothing more unprofessional you can say as a critic when making a comment about the negative qualities of something. For one thing it's incredibly unhelpful, and for the other it assumes a little too much about a developer in spite of the intent, something that they made clear here. You're not going to convince Nintendo to put it in if you start deriding their capability in effort. With Splatoon it's been mentioned many times in the past how the omission was a conscious decision, spawned primarily by the vitriol associated with public voice chats but also the design of the game itself encouraging individual proactivity over any co-ordinated approaches. Lazy is the last word I would ever use to describe a Nintendo game, lest of all Splatoon which is thriving off of continuous content and a netcode which yesterday was proven to be amazingly stable for a Nintendo game, proving that they have the chops to do online if they put their minds to it.

That said, in spite of my general ambivalence to voice chat it is still a short-sighted decision to not provide the ability to opt-in, and I would hope that in spite of the comments made about public voice chat (which I can understand being omitted still when a friend drops into a random game), the matchmaking lobby update will allow to voice chat within teams. Things like this can generally help the competitive side of things and Nintendo wouldn't have to worry about any unsolicited voice chatters saying things that others wouldn't be okay with. I mean, I wouldn't use it, I'd just stay on Skype, but convenience and options are never a bad thing and like it or not, Smash and Mario Kart already had this, so Nintendo doesn't have much of an excuse.

I will say that it was pretty funny of IGN to use "celebrate in silence" as an annotation for the picture they posted when that picture has the canned messages in the bottom corner there for that very purpose of positive reinforcement.

[Gabz Girl]

Yeah I'm not even gonna bother clicking on that IGN article. Smells like clickbait BS to me.

[Daisy-Fan]

i do thing in this age voice chat should be available too, but overall i dont think it could turn out to be a good idea with this game honestly, unless you like to hear salty teammates. However using the chat to play with your friend list could it be the reasonable idea since they on your friend list. normal i find Skype play the role well better to be honest.

[Kaze no Klonoa]

Splatoon has a lot of preorders up. It's currently the 13th most popular gaming related product on Amazon as of now.

 

http://www.amazon.com/best-sellers-video-games/zgbs/videogames

[Autosaver]

Like I said before, I think the Wii U just needs a built in party chat. The overall issue most of you guys are complaining about is just a by-product of Nintendo's move on not expanding their chat system. When the Wii U was launched, there was some leaked details about the Wii U getting party chat by the software team who worked on the Wii U chat application. I'm not sure if it's the sales of the system or the 3DS scandal that caused this to get scrapped but it would immensely improve the experience of the system if I could chat with people.

 

The benefit on a Wii U chat system would allow you to use chats in any game regardless of the developer putting the feature in. You could also use it in single-player games or just to chat. The GamePad has a camera and a built in Mic. Seems silly for Nintendo to not take advantage of this.

[Junko]

Honestly, if Wii U Chat became a Home Menu application, it'd fix this tbh

[Solkia]

Like I said before, I think the Wii U just needs a built in party chat. The overall issue most of you guys are complaining about is just a by-product of Nintendo's move on not expanding their chat system. When the Wii U was launched, there was some leaked details about the Wii U getting party chat by the software team who worked on the Wii U chat application. I'm not sure if it's the sales of the system or the 3DS scandal that caused this to get scrapped but it would immensely improve the experience of the system if I could chat with people.

 

The benefit on a Wii U chat system would allow you to use chats in any game regardless of the developer putting the feature in. You could also use it in single-player games or just to chat. The GamePad has a camera and a built in Mic. Seems silly for Nintendo to not take advantage of this.

 

To be honest I would take this over voice chat limited to certain games.

 

Also about the "it's obvious which area's aren't painted so you don't need it": It never ceases to amaze me how damn oblivious my teammates can be to the obvious. So many Guild Wars PVP matches lost because no one knew what they were doing and I couldn't communicate with them.

 

I'd mention my L4D2 session with Jez and how we never would have gotten past it without talking to each other, but I doubt Splatoon is even remotely the same.

[Sean]

I felt like especially during the last testfire session, a lot of the battles I partook in were coordinated well enough. It's really easy to just look at the map and know instantly what to do, it's not a L4D situation since turf war is not a deathmatch or has any goal that's more elaborate than what you can see on the map screen

The impression I got from the demo was that strategizing lies with visualization and actions rather than direct communication, I liked that. I just hope the same can apply to the other modes.

[Autosaver]

I let my friend borrow my Wii U so I haven't played the demo yet. From what I read, you can use the D-Pad to ping which will show your location on the Gamepad to your teammates. Dunno if this solves the "Needing help in a certain spot" issue.

[Sami]

I wouldn't say it's lazy, just misguided. Nintendo desperately chasing that family friendly appeal.

 

I think it's stupid but whatever.

[Kaze no Klonoa]

I dunno, Splatoon just seems to be way too chaotic for any form of communication being that much effective. Matches are like 3 minutes, so players are better off focusing on doing the damn objective than actually conducting strategies while the match is going on. For example, say we have a Splatoon tournament at the SSMB. While participants will organize and come up with maybe one or two strategies, everybody on the team is pretty much better off just doing the damn objective. Pausing to bring up a way to make a comeback will waste you the precious time to make said comeback. Even if the matches were longer, Splatoon is still a chaotic game that demands action over strategy. It doesn't mean that voice chat shouldn't be added, oh hell no, but having voice chat in for teamwork and coordination doesn't seem to be a valid reason why we should have voice chat in the game, especially with Splatoon not really demanding heavy and deep tactics to overcome enemies.

[MegasonicZX]

I'd like to think that as the games life span grows people will just start naturally knowing what to do since one look at the map in this game during a heated battle will tell you all you need to know, it really depends moreso on the players themselves rather than having it be told to you. That said, having a chat option would be nice for those people that haven't gotten comfortable yet and need a little more guidance.

[sonicgirl313]

I wish there was voice chat, one of my teams had the typical shooter mindset because they kept trying to kill opponents by chasing after them, leaving me as the only one to try to claim turf.

[WhoWhatMan]

I personally feel like the quick messages does a good enough job on communicating. I used the "C'mon" message a lot to have someone to back me up if I'm trying to paint at the opponent's base or getting someone else to paint an area due to them having a more effective weapon.

While having Voice Chat is nice, I don't think it's extremely necessary for this game.

[The Kid]

I don't know if it's fair to call it "lazy" or "cheap" when it was done intentionally for a specific reason by the developer, rather than just not caring enough to put in the resources. It's a specific design decision. Time will tell if the decision will really hurt Splatoon in the end, but ultimately I feel like multiplayer is going to die just because of the low Wii U player base and people's general low attention span with multiplayer shooters.

 

I mean, I kind of hate public voice chat in online games, but an option would be nice.

[Radiant Hero Ike]

[Nexthehedgehog]

But why there are japanese text?

[sonicgirl313]

Drew this picture due to how excited I am for Splatoon. ...I regret nothing!

[Autosaver]

 

Nintendo, why

[sonicgirl313]

Well NoA seems to be going for that summer surf vibe it seems. Eh America always gets the bizarre commercials when you think it would be the other way around.