Splatoon 3 developers explain how Tricolor Turf Wars came to be

Splatoon 3 introduced Tricolor Turf Wars as one of its big new features, and the developers behind the game have now discussed how it came to be.

Tricolor Turf War puts a spin on Splatfests that started out with the series’ very first game. During the second half of these events, three teams fight at the same time and it’s up to the first-place team to defend themselves in the 4-v-2-v-2 match type.

Director Shintaro Sato and producer Hisashi Nogami spoke about Tricolor Turf Wars in Splatoon 3 as part of a recent Famitsu interview. Here’s our translation:

How did the Tricolor Turf War mode, where players battle with three colors, come about?

Satou: Since this is [Splatoon] 3, we were thinking about tricolor battles to begin with. However, if we simply added an extra team to the existing Turf War ruleset, we expected various problems to arise, such as one team getting ganged up on by the other two. At the same time, while developing [Splatoon] 2, we were considering whether we could implement asymmetric battles with an attacking side and a defending side.

We thought perhaps we could solve both problems by mixing them together, and the result was Tricolor Turf War.

Nogami: More adjustments needed to be made compared to battles with only two colors, we ended up having to create a Tricolor Turf War map for every Splatfest, but I think that has allowed for different situations to arise every time.

Splatoon 3 is available on Switch now. You can also read about what the team said regarding the game’s DLC here.

Translation provided by SatsumaFS and Simon Griffin on behalf of Nintendo Everything.