I'd like to take a minute to bring up the WiiU's other upcoming shooter: Devils Third -- which happens to already have all the above features pretty much confirmed. And that's with only the E3 2014 info and some interviews/teases of the game.

Maybe Splatoon is rushed, but Devil's Third isn't. 

Maybe we're hyping up the wrong shooter for WiiU.

So to answer your questions

... are we asking too much from Nintendo? No. They're able to develop titles with these kind of features.

Have we taken for granted that other FPS and TPS offer much more options?  Yes. Clearly there's another upcoming shooter on WiiU with more robust features -- but many WiiU gamers treat it like garbage.  NIntendo gamers do tend to like to white-knight the cause of "gameplay matters more than graphics" - but not in the case of DT (which probably really has more intricate graphical detail than Splatoon does)

I think we'll get more than a few good surprises in a Splatoon direct and it'll be a great game. But honestly, I don't think these features really matter to a lot of Nintendo fans -- but they may prevent Splatoon from really reaching a mass audience.

Splatoon looks a lot more fun than DT, that's all there's to it.

I dunno. I don't think "every other game is doing it so this one has to do it too" is a valid argument in any case. If Splatoon has less content than expected of a full-price game then it should be cheaper than the average $60, sure. But having different content is a good thing. And we don't know all of Splatoon's content, we don't know how many maps it has, how many different kinds of weapons it has, what kind of local multiplayer it has, how long its single-player is.

The devs flat-out describe Hero Mode as a 3D platformer, so if you insist on demanding that Splatoon follow the same standard practices as other games in its genre, let's compare its online multiplayer to that of other 3D platform games. Such as......... such as........... y'know.... all those online multiplayer 3D platform games...... whose names escape me right now.

It just doesn't make any sense to me to say, "This title has similar gameplay to those other titles, therefore it has to have the same kind of content." That is the path that leads to stagnation. WHY CAN'T YOU SEE THE PATHETIC LIMITATION OF THE SPIRAL RACE

To be fair, that's a subjective matter, but I get it. The games do appeal to clearly different tastes that may not overlap.

The way I see it, DT looks fun for some of the same reasons as Splatoon. To me, the mechanics of slash-and-dash with shooting in DT isn't all that different from the paint mechanic used to empower movement in Splatoon. The both mechanics offer a unique variant on territory control that hasn't been explored much in shooters up to this point imo.

The features missing from Splatoon make it admittedly seem less fun though.

I don't care about this "lack of content", but obviously Nintendo is going to regret the voice chat decision.

I`d agree with some of the others, in that these design choices were likely made by the developers, and not due to time constraints,which is pretty dumb... T.T At least communication is quite important for these kinds of games...

No voice chat in random matches? Boo!!

I love this idea..

If what you said if true, then it will end up being a decent multiplayer game at best. This game reminds me PVZ GW and that game support 16 vs 16 and it was a lot of fun.

I just want to declare that my love for Nintendo has never been as great as it is right now.


And no, I am not sarcastic.