No one's talking about the new Splatoon news? You'll want to.

[pokoko]

Samus Aran said:

pokoko said:

The more abilities you add, the harder it is to create an AI that acts intelligently or fairly.  You usually end up with bots that spam one tactic or abuses one ability to the point of being really annoying.  The sheer hell of games that give AI grenades, for instance.  Running around and shooting would be easy but I can imagine that the squid abilities are hard to balance.

A map on the pad-thing that shows the position of your allies in real-time would be awesome.  That could make up for the lack of communication.

I wonder if "local multi-player" has to be filled out with internet players?

It does that. You can even touch the gamepad to jump straight to them.

That's ... interesting.  Seems like it would break any objective-based gameplay but it doesn't sound like Splatoon will have much of that, anyway.

Really, they're gearing this up to be a game that kids can pick up and play without getting totally slaughtered by organized opponents.  That's just the way it's going to be.  Still, if they could add other modes besides the standard death-match style, they could limit voice communication to only those modes.

Or, possibly, they aren't expecting very many people to keep playing for very long, so they're trying to keep the pool as undiluted as possible.  That might be a sign that this game will come in well below expectations.