...For what it's worth, I don't think that the decision to not have voice chat is so much about the standard excuse of "protect the children!" or the straight-up profanity that seem to be the common targets. I don't believe it's so much the developers thinking about children so much as...the developers thinking about themselves. It's a process of thinking that was brought up in the Xenoblade X Iwata Asks, as a matter of fact, with one of the designers talking about the "loosely connected" online aspect of the game.
Iwata Asks said:
Yokota: Right. So, to make the atmosphere of the world livelier, we thought that it would be better to add an online mode so players can feel connected. However, we had to take into consideration that there might be players who are scared to communicate with other players. I'm actually afraid to do so myself! (laughs)
Takeda: Actually, me too! (laughs) I'm afraid of other players scolding me if I play poorly.
[...]
Iwata: (laughs) Many people play online, so there is also a small number of players who enjoy harassing other people. To avoid these kinds of players, there are people who don't play online games at all.
Kojima: That's right. It's unpleasant to meet mean players online, but on the other hand, there are times it feels too troublesome to communicate with players with good intentions, too.
Iwata: Even if the player has good intentions, it can still feel overbearing. Every player has a different feeling towards how they want to interact with others.
Kojima: But even if you play alone to avoid the trouble, it can still feel very lonely. (laughs)
Iwata: It's a pain to communicate with others, but it's lonely to play alone...I guess people can't decide one or the other. (laughs)
Like seemingly a lot of their game design philosophies, Nintendo doesn't approach things with the expectation of just doing them the same way everyone else does. It's not really about just throwing all possible options at the player. Putting voice chat into something like Animal Crossing isn't a big deal, because the nature of the game is already relaxed as-is. In that game it's also not the "stranger danger" concern, communication and sharing are at the heart of the experience. Splatoon, though, is unlike anything they've really made before. It's a shooter, primarily a competitive multiplayer experience, and on top of that a competitive
team-based multiplayer experience. Again, the first time they've really had something quite like this within their own development houses on this scale.
A large part of Splatoon's focus in the first place was in finding a way to make a multiplayer shooter that they could use to appeal to the crowd that normally wouldn't be interested in the genre. It's how the whole turf war idea came to be in the first place, since it takes the primary objective away from directly engaging opponents and more about painting territory, allowing players who aren't well versed in PvP to still contribute to team success, at least in theory. But, with that being said, matches are fast, can get very tight, and does indeed require full team cooperation and execution to really get things right (people in the Test-fire demo certainly saw the impact that losing one player has on a match). This means that things can get heated, not just from the opposition, but from your own teammates, who may criticize those on their own side if they don't believe someone is playing "properly" or not pulling their weight. A lot of the toxicity from MOBAs stems from this same issue, as again, one teammate missing out can have disastrous results for the whole team. This is the interaction that they're afraid of. For someone to pick up Splatoon, child or adult alike, start to play the game, and be immediately told by the people who are supposed to be
on their side that they are no good and don't know what they're doing. That's discouraging, even moreso than if you were to hear it from an opponent, and it seems Nintendo is imagining that to be the real biggest threat to the player base. Limiting chat to friends-only is a way to work around that...except, at least until the custom rooms are released in August, there's no guarantee which of your friends will end up on your side, or the enemy's, so application of voice would be totally inconsistent anyway. For the time being at least, it seems that they'd rather neuter part of the game's highest-level play in order to ensure that on the broad-level, people's experience playing the game isn't negatively colored by other players.
Please note that I'm not saying that I personally
agree with that decision. I'd love to have system-wide party chat, but they just never built the system to do that. I'd love the option for chat within the game, too, but I'm willing to look at their perspective on it and at least understand some of the reasoning. All of the talk about how much of an impact voice chat would or wouldn't have on the strategic impact on a game is nice and all, but I believe it's a moot point in the face of the overall feeling Nintendo wants people to have while playing. Disagree with the decision if you want, but it sure seems like people are getting awfully bent out of shape over something that, ultimately, shouldn't be all that surprising.
