Topic: Splatoon 2 offline multiplayer

How do we play Splatoon 2 with two or more people (not online)? We don't see a way for anyone but one of us to play at a time....are we missing something?

Have you entered the arcade to the right of your starting position in the right? You know, by those arcade games and the dancing Inkling?

@nattyville First of all, you need to have one Switch per person. Split screen doesn't exist on Splatoon 2 unfortunately (That bummed me a lot as I loved playing with my friends on the Wii U) so this is the only way you can play offline multiplayer. To do so, go to 'The Shoal' and there you'll be able to play with friends.

@Yasaal This is a total bummer. I was really looking forward to playing this with my daughter. It never even crossed my mind that there wouldn't be splitscreen play. I went from "definitely buying soon" to a soft maybe when I heard it isn't in the game.

Thanks for the responses. Shocked you need to have 1 Switch per player. That should have been made clear on the game packaging. My kids wanted to play together but I'm not buying yet another Switch!

@nattyville I'm shocked, shocked I tell you, to hear that you aren't willing to fork over a mere $360 per child for the pleasure of playing a family game together as a family.

😉

It's funny, I've staunchly defended every oddball decision Nintendo has made since the Switch launch, but now I'm just flabbergasted about how they could have done something this spectacularly clueless.

@JasmineDragon @nattyville True. I think Nintendo is doing this because they're wanting to push over more units per family. Sort of like a handheld, which does make sense because Switch is a handheld first and foremost (No matter what Nintendo says). Sadly we'll have to manage by ourselves and buy multiple Switches just for playing with your family

Lol! Yup we won't be buying more than one Switch, that's for sure! We'll just have to take turns. And we just won't buy any other games that require multiple Switches to play together, glad I'm aware of this now. I appreciate your responses!!

I think it has more to do with processing power on split screen. Personally I tend to prefer playing multiplayer with multiple screens, so I'm always more glad when it supports this mode than split screen, but split screen REALLY strains the GPU (rendering two targets at once). I recall the Halo games on X360 in Split screen dumbed the graphics down to PS2 level to make it work, but unfortunately in that game it made it hard to distinguish objects a lot. In game like Splatoon where objects are kind of samey to begin with...that could be a problem.

Personally the thing I hate about local multi is there's no way to add AI's to make the rest of the teams. If you don't have 4-8 players it's just not workable. 1v1 is kind of a joke. That and you can't earn G to buy weapons so if you're playing mostly offline you're stuck with a darned Jr.

I did give Salmon run a go.....that's.....really hard...even on 5% difficulty! Failed to clear 3 waves with a 2 player team....

I don't think the lack of splitscreen is at all unreasonable. Processing power is indeed a big issue, plus I imagine it would make aiming and map usage awkward (would you prefer your map to obcure everyone's screen, or be too small to view comfortably?). They definitely don't want to encourage playing with too few people either, because the balancing does not hold up at all. Really, even if they put the work in, splitscreen would be a decidedly suboptimal experience that most players probably wouldn't be interested in anyway. Just not a worthwhile endeavour, I'm afraid.

@Zyrac @NEStalgia Your arguments make perfect sense. But they won't stop me from feeling cheated and sulking in the corner.

Luckily, I have a lot of other games to sulk with, so it will not be too bad a sulk.

I will still probably buy S2, but it's gone way down in my wish list. I wanted this mostly for family play. Perhaps unreasonably!

EDIT: gotta go, the kid wants to play Street Fighter... 😀

@nattyville You're welcome!

@NEStalgia I main the Jr. so I don't have much of a problem

@Yasaal Hah, well I can't hate the Jr mains as much now that it's not a freaking bubble spammer

@NEStalgia Ya I really miss the bubbler because it gave you the upper hand almost everytime. Now the ink armor (it's replacement) is just a piece of junk. I mean, it rarely ever works if you're in a pinch. The bubbler helped if you're being mowed down by like 2 or 3 people but the ink armor doesn't help at all smh

@Yasaal The Jr was entirely broken before...it's high ink rate and invincibility special were a bad mix, allowing for a weapon to make the player invincible too often. Bubbler itself wasn't so bad coupled with, say, a blaster, but with Jr, it was the wrong weapon for it. I don't think they envisioned as competitive a game as it became.

Ink Armor I suspect isn't about avoiding someone with duelies so much as a sniper protection for the team to counter those eagle-eye ace snipers. I see it having a very different use from bubbler, not really a replacement.

I understand the problem with split screen but it wasn't spilt on the WII U, one would use the TV and the other would use the screen on the controller. So why couldn't they follow this motto? Is it because there is no stand alone system this time?