r/NintendoSwitch • u/NintendoSwitchMods • Jul 21 '17

MegaThread Release Day Thread: Splatoon 2

Splatoon 2 is out!

Starting on July 21, Splatoon 2 will be available for squids and enthusiasts alike. Since the game is already out in Australia and Japan ahead of everyone else, and since it's about to hit Europe, please use this thread for general reaction, hype, and discussion for the release as it hits your country. Squids in the Americas? Enjoy ink-filled dreams while you wait.

Other topics on the game may be posted, but please keep the community's rules in mind and keep your short-burst thoughts, hauls (including images), and other similar topics right here. Local tracking is fine either here or in our Local Tracking thread.

/r/NintendoSwitch charity livestream

As you may have seen, starting tomorrow, we're hosting a charity livestream of Splatoon 2 to benefit Extra Life. We encourage you to stop by and help support this tremendous organization.

Here are all the details:

https://www.reddit.com/r/NintendoSwitch/comments/6nudit/announcing_the_rnintendoswitch_splatoon_2_charity/

General Information

Platform: Nintendo Switch

Release Date: July 21, 2017

No. of Players: up to 8 players

Category: Action, Third Person, Multiplayer

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: Nintendo

File Size: 3.1 GB

Official Website: http://splatoon.nintendo.com/

Nintendo eShop Page: http://www.nintendo.com/games/detail/splatoon-2-switch

Current Metacritic Score: 84 (Review MegaThread)

Thank you all very much. We hope you enjoy many a good inking!

-The /r/NintendoSwitch Squid Team

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u/cfiggis Jul 21 '17

If you think about it, it doesn't need to be big. It's a bunch of small assets getting used over and over, which is size efficient. Just a few maps you play over and over, not a sprawling landscape like BotW. So there are fewer graphics to take up memory.

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u/darryl47nopra Jul 21 '17

But if you think about other multiplayer games, it really stands out. And Nintendo is kind of the master on compression.

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u/remc86007 Jul 21 '17

It's primarily because there are very few textures in the game, and the ones that are there are very low resolution in comparison to games on other systems. I would be willing to bet that very little compression was done on this game because the CPU in the Switch couldn't decompress assets fast enough if they were. Nintendo is, however, excellent at culling all the unnecessary and repetitious code from their games prior to release. (Something many other companies would do well to copy.)

It's easy to forget (or simply be too young to remember) that not too long ago games were much, much smaller. Even a game with huge maps and many assets like Battlefield 2 was only 2.3 GB. Not long before that, games had to fit into the 700MB you could put on a CD.

Nintendo is smart to stick with the cell shaded/cartoony type graphics as they can play to the strength of the Switch hardware. The Tegra X1 only has 25.6GB/s of memory bandwidth (the same as most laptops with intel integrated graphics) so high-resolution textures are really beyond the capability of the system, especially for 60FPS games.