A Year Later | Splatoon 2 | How Much New Content Is There?

What better game is there to take a post-launch look at than Splatoon 2? The developers promised steady content updates for the game, including new weapons, maps, and gear. Did they deliver? Well, yes and no. Splatoon 2 received plenty of new gear pieces, a satisfying amount of new stages, and many weapons, but there are some caveats to each of these new additions.

I originally gave the game the benefit of the doubt for it's lack of weapons, but my faith doesn't feel entirely well placed. Nearly two-thirds of the "new" weapons added were weapons that were in the first Splatoon. Sure, some of the more recent weapons have been interesting new additions, but it's such a shame we had to sit through months of re-runs to get to the new episodes. What I find so egregious about this is that any one of these "new" weapons - actually new or not - can be locked behind your online level. Does that Tenta Brella look cool? Too bad, you need to be level 23 to buy it, so it might be a while before you'll be able to see if you're any good with it in a real combat scenario. This is a really dumb decision to make considering how absolutely slowly one levels up. You'd have to player for hours upon hours to level up.

Sure, Ranked modes give you far more experience per battle and you can use multipliers, but there still comes a point where it takes a full day of play to gain a single level - and that point comes well before the level cap. I can't imagine how slowly one progresses from level 99 to level 100 if level 40 is the point where it starts taking a whole day. While it's true that the first Splatoon also level-locked new weapons, that doesn't make it any better a decision to make. The first Splatoon also frequently released weapons in sets of two rather than one at a time, and never locked any weapon behind any level higher than 20 - which was where the level system changes and experience comes in slower. The same cannot be said for Splatoon 2.

Stages are a similar, but less egregious, story. About half of the stages added were returning from the first Splatoon; however, most of them have had their terrain tweaked at least a tiny bit to rebalance them. I don't find this as frustrating as weapons since stages are not level-locked nor does one have to purchase them to use them; they're simply there. The more, the better. It could be argued that returning stages should've been in the game at launch just as returning weapons should've, but no one mains a map; a map's absence means less than a weapon's absence. Gear is also a rather similar story. As far as I can tell, a good chunk of the Gear items added were returning from the first game. However, I don't find it as disappointing as returning weapons since they're mostly cosmetic - compared to pieces with the same abilities, that is - and they're released in fairly large batches rather than one at a time.

Speaking of fashion: new hairstyles were added, which is great, except for the fact that it was only two hairstyles per in-game gender. Honestly, I feel like we should have way more hairstyles by now. I mean, they can't be that much harder to create than new pieces of Gear, so I'm sure we could've had four or five new hairstyles per gender by now. Although, Octolings became playable for those who purchased and finished the DLC campaign, Octo Expansion, so they are technically more hairstyles to choose from if you're still not satisfied with Inkling hair choices. However, they only get two hairstyles per gender period, and they both feel rather basic, so they're not really much of an addition. Personally, I still play as an Inkling because I don't like the Octoling's hair options. Though, to be fair, Octolings have different facial features and animation sets than Inklings, so they're not just a couple of new hairstyles.

Oh, but excuse me for glancing over the Octo Expansion like that. Indeed, Splatoon 2 received paid DLC in the form of the Octo Expansion, which adds a full new single player campaign. In this new campaign, the player takes control over Agent 8 as they search for the four "Thangs" throughout a mysterious subway system. It starts off rather linear, but after a while, paths start to branch so much that it starts to become even more open than the vanilla campaign - which was world-to-world, allowing the player to do the levels in any order up to a certain point. Overall, it's a quite fun and very challenging campaign. I definitely recommend it to anyone who thought the base game was too easy or lacked story.

As for new multiplayer modes, only a single new multiplayer mode was added (for free, to be clear): Clam Blitz. In essence, it's a more frantic version of the already-existing mode, Rainmaker, but it is distinctly fun on its own right. Two teams of four run around the map collecting clams. When a player collects ten clams, they turn into a ball, which can then be thrown at the opposing team's goal to score points and open it up to throwing in clams on their own for a lesser amount of points per clam. I quite like this mode; the scattered placement of clams makes use of a stage's given space; the clams themselves allow players to contribute to victory in even small ways; and the ball-and-goal mechanic allows for individual players to score while simultaneously making teamwork rewarding.

Tenta Brella

Ballpoint Splatling

New Albacore Hotel

Octo Expansion Level

Clam Blitz

Though that's all there is to say about new modes, I do have some choice words for one of the pre-existing multiplayer modes, Salmon Run. First thing's first: Salmon Run's scheduling is way more reasonable now than it was at launch. The mode is no longer ever inaccessible for days at a time like it used to be. It's not open absolutely all the time, which would be ideal, but it's never closed for too long. From what I understand, it's open for 30 hours - longer on weekends - and then closed for 12. Personally, Salmon Run open most of the time I feel like playing, so the periods of unavailability are not much of a problem to me.

One reflection, I don't think Salmon Run is absolutely perfect or even that outstanding. Now that I've spent more time with the game, I've realized Salmon Run's flaws. For one thing, the weapon rotation concept combined with the relentless spawning of multiple bosses at once is a recipe for disaster. Well, it's the recipe, but that doesn't mean it always has the ingredients - or in other words, more than one niche or awkward weapon. That said, the mode does appear to frequently rotate in those awkward weapons over the more normal ones, which really makes the lack of player choice frustrating. On top of that, there is no ink stealth at all, which makes it hard to recover Ink, so weapons that use up Ink quickly are much harder to use in Salmon Run than they are in PvP. The lack of stealth makes sense for some enemies - like the Steel Eel, who locks on to and chases a given player - but even the weakest of Salmonids can see you no matter what.

Further still, the given subweapon for Salmon Run, the Splat Bomb, takes up three-quarter the Ink Tank on it's own. This is ridiculous when you consider not only how little breathing room you get to refill your Ink but also the frequency that Flyfish, an enemy that is only defeated by using Splat Bombs, spawns at. One might think to counteract this desperate need for Ink with Ink-saving Gear, but Gear is not permitted in Salmon Run whatsoever. Let's go over that again: Salmon Run throws boss upon boss at you, each of which requires a specific tactic to be taken out, and asks you to do this with no ink stealth, random weapons, a subweapon that takes most of your Ink, and no Gear to compensate for any of that. Can it get worse? Yes! Yes it can! Your Specials are also randomized and are limited to two uses for the entire round. Salmon Run effectively strips the gameplay of any sort of reward and throws you into the fray.

I mean, of course, Salmon Run itself does pay out when you win, but as insult to injury, you had to go outside of Salmon Run's lobby to collect them, Until a recent update, whenever you left the lobby, you were put back at the center of Splatoon 2's main hub, leaving you to walk back over to Grizco to collect your hard-earned rewards. This is but one of the few quality-of-life updates that Splatoon 2 needed and didn't get for quite some time; the others being the ability to change your loadout while in matchmaking, which was added, and the ability to skip the stage announcements that occur at the start of every play session - which has been a common complaint since the first game and indeed remained since the launch of Splatoon 2 - which still has yet to be addressed. Is this slow pace to quality of life updates a tragedy? No, but it shows that the developers don't have their ear to the community as much as it once seemed.

In all honesty, I don't stand by my 5 out of 5 I originally gave Splatoon 2. I don't think the drip-feed of content was not handled as well as it was with the first game, mostly due to how many of the "new" weapons are merely returning weapons or slight variants. This is made worse by the fact that there are level requirements on all of them, which can make it seem to some players that little to no weapons were ever added at all. If I were to give it a new score to reflect how I feel about the game today, it would be a 4 out of 5. The game is certainly great, don't get me wrong, but it's rather far from the perfection that a 5 out of 5 implies.

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Unofficial Splatoon Wiki: https://splatoonwiki.org/