When I started up Splatoon there was a line of dialogue from Marie that was something along the lines of “Chargers can shoot you around corners! They’re so OP!”
And I can’t help but feel really pissed off about that line. Splatoon’s latency issues are a serious problem in the game, and someone working on the game had the audacity to write that line to be added in the August update. Instead of fixing this very real issue, they added a line to the game to make fun of people complaining about it.
That is, in my mind, completely and utterly unacceptable. It’s not funny, it’s not cheeky or endearing, it is completely anti-player. It is the game acknowledging the failure of the game designers to create a product that meets the bare minimum requirements of a shooter game in 2015 and it makes fun of the player for taking issue with that failure.
Splatoon is a game that is full of anti-player mechanics and extremely simple mistakes that could only come from sheer incompetence. There are huge issues like matchmaking not taking player stats or region in to account despite the game actually tracking both of those things. Player’s item date is stored clientside and tampering with that data is as simple as owning a USB drive. If you lose a lot in Ranked and want to undo the damage, just keep a backup of your save file on your hard drive and keep your “current” save game on the USB drive. If you have a bad run, copy the backup to the USB drive and the damage is undone. If you want to re-roll the stats on items to obtain ridiculously overpowered gear, just do the same thing. No other company would have made a mistake like this, and if they did they’d have put out a hotfix within the week. Nintendo is not just any company though, they’re The Big Infallible Nintendo. They can do no wrong, so they just don’t listen to their player base. These two major issues are well-documented and have been present since launch, yet they’ve recieved no acknowledgement from the folks upstairs.
Then there’s the small issues, little things that they’ve gotten wrong that nobody else would have. You can’t walk through teammates despite this being the standards in all shooters for well over a decade. You can’t shoot through teammates either. The system that determines how many points you gain or lose in Ranked mode seems capricious and completely random. Sometimes you gain 8, sometimes you lose 12, there’s no way to tell what’s going to happen. If one of your teammates disconnects in Ranked, there’s no form of compensation for the team that’s down a member, you just kinda have to lie back and accept the loss that’s completely out of your control. If you get absolutely steamrolled in Tower Control and lose the match within 10 seconds, the game actually seems to punish you harder than if it were a fair fight. Once you’re in a lobby, there’s no way to back out of it. If you get stuck in a lobby and you can’t read any of the names you’re just stuck playing a laggy match, you can’t opt out of it.
Splatoon is fundamentally broken and is full of amateur mistakes. The core mechanics of the game are fun, but the very basics of the game are FUBAR. All of these tiny issues pile on and make everything worse until the player just gets so frustrated that they stop playing. Have you noticed that people have said that Splatoon makes them unreasonably upset and they can’t seem to identify why? It’s something of a trend. Splatoon makes people extremely salty, more than any other game seems to make them. Why is that?
It’s because there are so many factors that punish the player that are out of the player’s control. So many things that can wrestle control of the game out of the player’s hands and punish them for it. It’s because Nintendo is so impenetrable and there’s no form of acknowledgement of these issues. No, the only acknowledgement of the issues players are experiencing is a single line of in-game dialogue that breaks the fourth wall in order to mock players experiencing connection issues that are the result of Nintendo’s gross incompetence. That’s it. That’s all you get. You say to Nintendo “Please, your game is broken” and Nintendo responds with an insult.
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