I completely agree with this. If any other company had done this, I gaurantee there would have been major backlash. I still remember when ea changed the price system for fifa ultimate team "for fans to understand the value of the content" and how many people were enraged.

Literally I would rather Nintendo had been honest and said the content wasn't ready than give a bs reason for gimped features (at least slightly mad studios came out and truthfully said they had issues with their game)

thats what the mute button is for. If you don't like voice chat fine you should be given the option to mute it, not limit the option for everyone else

This is not necessarily a bad thing. If winning takes brute force then players should bring in their best brute force. If winning takes strategy then players should bring with them their best strategy. Brute force is itself a strategy.

I agree with you that voice chat should be an optional feature but the lack of it certainly does not render the game unplayable. It's certainly playable and good players should be able to implement strategy by being familiar with the game, going off of what other players are doing, what weapons have been chosen, what equipment they're carrying, etc.

I can play Gears of War 2 just fine without having to speak to the other players because we're all quite familiar with what it takes to win.

More lame excuses. The two map per 4 hours limit is just there to mask the abysmal amount of maps. The voice chat excuse still holds absolutely no water.

Is this for real? I don't understand how people can be okay with all this.

I can see a contradiction if you omit the rest of what he was saying.   

"We want players to develop strategies." - "It would be mostly for strategic use.  -BUT-  We designed the game so that it's still possible to play strategically [without vc]" 

Players are encouraged to develop strategies by game mechanics other than VC- hence no contradiction.  I don't know the accuracy of what he is claiming because I don't own the game, but it seems reasonable enough.

I get what you are saying though.  Voice chat is an expected feature.  Still, it doesn't change whether or not players are able to compete and climb rankings.  I don't think the inclusion/exclusion of  voice chat really has much of an effect on casual players.

I'm not trying to change your mind.  I don't have an issue with your disappointment in the lack of voice chat.  I agree that the game would be more complete if it had been included.  Regardless, the developers clearly felt it was unnecessary and that there were negatives attached.  I don't think his explanaition on VC was ridiculous at all.  His explanation on releasing the game bit by bit on the other hand.....

Brute force is a strategy but it's practically the only one you can make as a team. You can have you're own independant method but you're not working as a group. This game is not unplayable but not being able to communicate makes this game really really low on my list when I do eventually get a Wii U.

Me and my friends are really looking forward to Rainbow Six Seige this year and I wouldn't touch that game if I couldn't speak to my friends (and for some reason PS4 party chat didn't work)

Voice chat will not have any affect whatsoever on the ability to render the game at any framerate.

Splatoon is not a very complex game and it's not at all comparable to games like Rainbow Six so my suggestion is if you're looking for strategically complex games, you should certainly look elsewhere.

Yeah, you're probably right. Framerate would depend more on the GPU than the CPU.

Uhhh... no?

They're designing an experience. It's not their job to cater to every request of the player, but to create what they think is the perfect game. They've provided their reasoning for deciding that voice chat isn't appropriate - they saw two uses for it, one of which they felt was still achievable without voice chat (strategic play) and the other they felt often gets used in a negative way.

You can certainly disagree with their reasoning, but they are entirely within their rights, indeed their duty, to make such decisions with their game. Indeed, one of the biggest problems with games is the failure to try to design a cohesive, consistent experience.

Your comment comes across as rather self-entitled. It's their game. They shouldn't have the right to do things like require you to have online to play a single player component, but if it's a matter of gameplay design, it's their prerogative and their job to design it as they see fit.

Voice chat has a number of downsides, including the fact that the system and the network has to process/carry the extra information. This can reduce visual quality (even if the player isn't using voice chat, the game's graphics have to be designed on the basis of it being there, to avoid excessive slowdown issues), impact framerate (which tends to be important in faster games like Splatoon), and affect network lag rates. And voice chat has to be implemented, including interface, etc, and that means time and money that may be better spent elsewhere.

Note that nowhere here am I saying that they were right or wrong to not include voice chat. Personally, it doesn't affect me much, so I withhold my judgment on their choice. My issue, here, isn't with your position on its lack of inclusion, but on the view of the studio that you have put forward, suggesting that somehow this decision is some arrogant case of a studio forcing gamers to do as they say.