Splatoon 2 producer on how old you are in Splatoon 2, relationship between Inklings and Octolings, more

All sorts of outlets were able to speak with Splatoon 2 producer Hiashi Nogami at E3 this month. Another interview has emerged online, covering topics such as your age in the game, the relationship between Inklings and Octolings and whether they were previously enemies, and more.

We have some excerpts from the interview posted by Nintendo Life below. You can read the full talk here.

On whether Octolings being hacked in the original Splatoon was inspiration for making them playable in Splatoon 2…

Nogami: I can’t say we got inspiration from that, but we did see that and we had the idea of wanting players to play as an Octoling character before that. We had that in our back pocket as a surprise to reveal later on, and when we say that we kind of thought to ourselves, “Aw, come on guys! You took our idea!”

On how Splatoon 2 is a living game with frequent updates…

I think you’re right that this is new territory for Nintendo. As a developer, the games I’ve been involved in until now have been the type where you work really hard during development to build all the contents into the game, and when it comes out you stand back and you let it go. With this game, we have a lot of things we wanted to try, that we knew we would want to bring out after the game released, while we were developing it. Some of these things were our ideas, and some were ideas from fans once the game came out.

We want to try and strike that right balance between what we are hoping to include in the game and what the fans are wanting. Actually, I would say this was a first for me, to participate in this type of development. The speed at which we need to keep up with those demands from fans and things we want to include after the game has launched increased to a level greater than it was when we were working on the original release.

Having to repeat this cycle for each update means we have to have ideas for what we want to include a few months ahead of time. And then we’ll have to really put our heads down and work on everything. Then we have to release that content, watch it after it’s released and then begin that cycle again of, “Okay, what’s the next idea?” This sometimes measn having to work in two or three week batches on these updates and you have to work a much faster and more compact schedule than we were previously used to.But, that’s not to say that it’s all hard work and no fun. The advantage to this development style is that we can have our own ideas, such as things that we want to include going forward with updates but also respond to new developments that we see from the community. We might see requests and think, “Oh, okay, that’s something we hadn’t thought of,” and we’ll see if we can find a way to weave that into our plan going forward, and that’s something I find really positive about this development style.

On how old you are in Splatoon 2…

On the development team, we’ve had discussions that they’re right about the peak of when you have that teen spirit, which is right about fourteen to sixteen years old. So, like a teenager at the height of their teenage years, their interests are kind of all over the place. They want to become really good at sports, and they want to look really cool. They want to do a variety of activities. Regardless of what your actual age may be, we want people to be able to enter this world and kind of inhabit that spirit of that teenager I mentioned earlier.

On whether Octolings and Inklings were enemies previously…

… In Hero mode, you were having to go after these Octarians who were behaving badly. They were kind of the bad guys among the Octoling clan. But in the Octo Expansion, you have an Octoling character who is combining forces with Captain Cuttlefish, who is an Inkling. They combine forces because of their shared goal to reach the surface together, and when they reach the surface, they find that society has progressed and now Octolings and Inklings live together.

On whether there will be any opinion among fans that they’ve been playing as the bad guys all along…

What I hope people realize is that not any one type of character in the world of Splatoon is completely good or bad. You know, the Inklings have their society, the Octolings have their society and the Salmonids from Salmon Run have their own thing going on. And, what I’m hoping is that people realize that they each have their own characteristics, but sometimes those societies intermingle and come crashing together and this is one of the examples of what happens when that occurs.