It turns out that voice chat hasn’t been officially confirmed for Splatoon after all. Producer/manager Hisashi Nogami and project lead Tsubasa Sakaguchi, speaking with GameRant said that the functionality hasn’t been decided just yet.
“The core concept of Splatoon is that by looking at the way the ink is being spread around and progressing, you know, you can kind of see what your enemies are doing, what your teammates are doing, and then you’re able to decide what you want to do. And that’s kind of the main thing we’re always thinking about, and we kind of get similar questions about the number of people that can be in a multiplayer match, but for this game it’s really that four-on-four is the best number. With four-on-four, the amount of influence that a single player has is perfectly balanced, but also the speed at which the battle changes, the way the battle is developing changes is also completely perfect.”
“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. 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.”
Nogami concluded his comments by stating: “Basically, I haven’t decided.”