Splatoon has always been an odd series—a competitive, third-person shooter produced by Nintendo, which stars children who can turn into squids and octopi. Upon the first game’s release, it felt like a real experiment by Nintendo. It was putting the full weight of its company behind a gyroscope aiming third person shooter, designed to be played on the bulkiest controller-handheld hybrid in the history of console gaming. It, in spite of everything, was a huge success.

Nintendo has previously prided itself on innovation and experimentation—a pride which, on its worst days, resembles an obsession with gimmicks. The DS’ eponymous dual screens, the 3DS’ eponymous 3D, the Wii’s signature motion controls, and the WiiU’s tablet controller. The Nintendo Switch, a hybrid between handhelds and a home console, is perhaps one of the more comparatively normal devices Nintendo released in the last two decades. But this experimentation is always rooted in form, but never the content itself. Nowhere is that more true than in Splatoon 3—the latest entry in an innovative series that has been utterly uninterested in developing beyond its, admittedly excellent, central conceit.

One could make the argument that Splatoon’s core innovation, its hybrid between gyroscopic aiming and traditional stick aim, is itself a gimmick—but this undersells how completely it changes console shooter combat and affects the series’ design. The general imprecision of stick aim (which can be minimized by playing with very high sensitivity) has relegated most competitive shooters to PC, where keyboard and mouse allow players to more quickly maximize their reaction speed and accuracy. Gyroscopic aim, despite how awkward it can be at first, allows for that same level of precision. This facilitates Splatoon’s surprisingly quick time-to-kill, and allows for high accuracy, reflex driven play with a high competitive skill ceiling.

The series compliments this high skill ceiling with immediately readable, objective driven play. Getting kills in Splatoon is important, sure, but the game, like virtually all competitive shooters, is all about controlling space. Splatoon’s signature objective driven game mode, Turf War, makes this explicit. It doesn’t matter how many kills you get, all that matters is that you cover the maximum amount of territory with your team’s ink.

However, even in the game’s more traditional objective modes, the ability to visualize who has control over what parts of the map allows Splatoon to immediately surface its competitive depth. Games like Valorant or Counter-Strike are all about controlling sight lines and angles, but how space is taken and controlled is rarely readable to an audience. Splatoon makes it extremely clear. If your enemy’s ink is on the ground in front of you, then they can see you. If you are surrounded by it, they can kill you. The ink trails left by a charger will tell you where a sniper has eyes, which gives you a way of playing around your opponents and their particular weapons.

This focus on space control allows support players to really shine, while their deadly allies can protect them, create openings, and maintain the space they’ve fought for. This allows Splatoon to walk the extremely narrow line between casual joy, and competitive depth. A line which virtually every other competitive shooter has utterly failed to walk. This gives Splatoon a tremendous amount of potential, a potential which Nintendo has seemed to consistently squander.

Splatoon was released on the WiiU, a platform which failed to take off. Splatoon 2 managed to course correct by bringing the series to the more powerful, portable, and better suited to motion controls Switch—but failed to bring essential quality of life improvements to the series, causing the overall experience to fall short. Splatoon 3 manages to improve upon 2’s foundation, but leaves the series where it should’ve been on its first outing: as a truly unique shooter with a functional online system. It feels like an update to the second game, one which it should’ve gotten several years ago.

Where Splatoon 3 fails is its disinterest in doing anything new with this finally stable foundation. Unlike Splatoon 2, which added the Salmon Run co-op horde mode, Splatoon 3 doesn’t introduce anything to the series. Its single player campaign is good and frequently creative, but at no point does it do anything beyond what the prior games have attempted. Even its new weapons, the Stringer and Splatana feel like minor additions to the game. Both weapons are high damage, charge focused, and long range. They are faster, more interesting alternatives to the Charger weapon class, but they do not feel like they actually change anything about how Splatoon is played.

This extends all the way to the series’ signature fashion, which is focused on hypebeast, techwear aesthetics. Splatoon excels at this, and the game’s clothing options remain excellent. However, they fail to experiment or develop beyond that simple foundation. The game’s new brands are so similar to the old that I could barely distinguish them without the game’s companion app, where the brand is more clearly listed.

Splatoon 3 is a good video game, excluding its utterly inexplicable online interface. It feels like an iteration on the previous titles, but so gradual an iteration as to feel totally inconsequential. Nintedo’s willingness to commit to the core identities of its franchises would be commendable, if it did not so frequently hold them back. If there is a Splatoon 4, I hope it has even a fragment of the ambition the series began with.

A Final Fantasy XIV “pimp” said that he was temporarily banned from the game for standing up for one of his in-game sex workers. 

Let’s back up for a minute and explain how the above statement is even possible: FFXIV is a massively multiplayer online game (like World of Warcraft) based on the mega popular Final Fantasy role-playing game series. Like most successful MMOs, FFXIV has found a dedicated audience that is just as interested in its emergent social aspects as it is in slaying monsters, leveling up, or collecting gear. 

One of these emergent social activities is erotic role-playing, where players act out sex with others using their characters, text, or voice chat. All forms of role-playing are more intense on dedicated “role-playing servers,” where players do their best not to break character. Balmung is a notoriously rowdy role-playing server, and in late June, it held an erotic role-playing event. 

It was during this event that a player who goes by the name Danny Rant-Mateus got in trouble. Rant-Mateus, who described himself as kind of “ERP [erotic role-play] pimp,” role-plays that job, though seemingly without the negative connotations. Rant-Mateus runs a business within the game managing sex workers who dance and perform other services for paying clients. He’ll broker deals with “Joes,” or clients, who want to pay for time with one of his over 100 contractors. Sex work is fairly common in FFXIV, and players start up their own small businesses, like brothels, to earn in-game currency. Rant-Mateus negotiates what happens between his contractors and their clients ahead of their meeting.

When one of his contractors came to him with a problem in the middle of the big erotic role-playing event on Balmung, Rant-Mateus had to step in to defend him—and it got him banned for more than a week.  

In a now-deleted Reddit post after the ban, Rant-Mateus said he was ”Banned [for] 10 days for being a pimp.” Rant-Mateus wrote that for this party, he brought “a stable of 20, mostly bun bois, miqos, and 2 burly roe males. At the ERP event, things were going well and I made sure my people are comfortable and in appropriate situations. Well, eventually there was a problem. Daddy Rant doesn’t like problems.” “Bun bois” refers to the often-sexualized Viera race, “miqos” are Miqo'te, better known as catgirls and boys, and “roes” are Roegadyn, a vaguely bear-like race in the game.  

Usually, big events are simply a good time. But at this event, one of the clients tried to push a non-consensual sexual assault role playing scenario onto the worker mid-session, according to Rant-Mateus. “This was followed by harassment from his friends calling my contractor horrible homophobic names (it was one of my male contractors), which resulted in me being called in,” Rant-Mateus told me. He confronted the client privately, and when the client told Rant-Mateus to “fuck off,” he said, he took it to the public chat, a chat room that anyone in the game can read.

“Then I started ripping him a new one and calling him out for what he wanted,” he said. “It got pretty bad on my end because I get really personal.” The client and his friends left, but not before reporting Rant-Mateus for harassment, he said. “After that, we finished the night and a day or so later I got banned.” Rant-Mateus was banned from the game for 10 days, according to the email notification he received from the game’s developer Square Enix, viewed by Motherboard. The email said he was banned for violating the game’s rules against profanity and offensive language.

Erotic role playing is a way for people to express themselves sexually within many MMOs. Square Enix has previously said that sexual activity is allowed in FFXIV as long as it’s private and consensual. As in many massive multiplayer online role playing games, there’s a thriving community of people engaged in ERP, and events are a way to bring them all together. “These events are awesome, and everyone normally has a good time!” Rant-Mateus said. “I’d encourage people to go to any of these events when they have time; it’s a blast even if you’re not being sexual.” 

Erotic play gets a bad reputation in the role-playing community, Rant-Mateus said, with people calling participants degenerates, perverts, or other demeaning things. “Dehumanizing people for having a kink or fetish is just disgusting and I do my best to provide a positive image for this community,” he said. “My contractors and customers have a good time and then they have great conversations; people in this community want to connect with one another so they have a safe place to be themselves. Which is something everybody wants in life... ERP isn’t disgusting, its humans connecting with one another.” 

In its current state, Overwatch 2 does not feel like a sequel to Overwatch. So far, the player-versus-player beta feels like a very significant patch, filled with character reworks in line with the seasonal patches of dozens of other video games. It is also an extension of every single thing that frustrated me about the latter half of the original game’s lifespan.

Overwatch was announced as a 6v6 team-based hero shooter with a small but significant 12 hero roster, which increased to 21 by the time of its release. These 21 heroes fulfilled three general roles: tanks, who soak damage in place of their teammates, DPS (damage per second) who do the killing, and supports who provide healing and general utility, albeit with a lot of overlap and character specificity which allowed some characters to fulfill multiple positions on their teams. Team compositions shifted constantly over the course of the match, as players adjusted their teams to better counter their opponents, though players' love for playing DPS roles often meant that teams were stuck with inefficient compositions as players helped themselves to Overwatch's ample menu of DPS heroes. There were often as many as four or five DPS heroes on a given team, supported by a single put-upon tank, support, or tank-support duo. This was a real source of frustration in the game, but also closely tied to the things that made it fun.

In competitive play, however, it was generally accepted that there should almost always be two tanks, two DPS, and two supports. Tanks would draw enemy attention through AOE (area of effect) damage and crowd control abilities (stuns, slows, and knockback), while being bolstered by supports who they directly protected with their bulky bodies and defensive abilities. One DPS would focus on general damage, while the other would focus on flanking to kill supports. This was a popular and reliable team composition, and in September of 2019, it was formalized through the “role queue” system. 

Role queue forced teams to adopt this composition by forcing players to matchmake via a selected role and not by open player slots within a game. While a solid idea in theory, particularly in the game’s competitive mode, role queue came with a host of frustrations. There were suddenly far more people who wanted to play the DPS role than there were open DPS slots, and so their queue times ballooned.  Many DPS players switched into support and tank roles just for the sake of getting into games. On paper, this is a success. In practice, this led to an abundance of tanks and supports who didn’t know what they were doing, or were trying to force DPS tactics on heroes that couldn't execute them well.  

Sojourn's character design is great, but feels wasted on her fun, but totally average, abilities. Screenshot by Blizzard Entertainment.

Overwatch 2 not only kept the role queue, but has exacerbated the problem by reducing the number of tanks on any given team from two, to one. Overwatch 2’s 5v5 structure has led to massive tank queue times in the beta, as thousands of players attempt to fill half the available slots from the previous game. The removal of a second tank also contributes to the shift towards a faster time to kill, and accelerates the ongoing DPS-ification of Overwatch’s meta, which refers to the standard strategies and optimal playstyles of competitive play.

In the months following Overwatch’s release, Blizzard added Ana, a supportive sniper who could deal as much if not more damage than she healed. From that point forward, the support role was filled with these types of characters . Ana, Moira, Baptiste, and Brigette, were all post-release supports with ridiculous damage potential. 

From a design perspective, this is an easy answer to a difficult question. “How do you make supports feel active?” Well, just make them shoot a lot and put numbers on the board in addition to their healing. The problem becomes that every character begins to fill an extremely homogeneous role on their team. It is everyone’s job to kill, all the time. Sometimes supports take a break from the murder to do some healing, or to buff their allies.

Damage heavy supports were accompanied by an ever decreasing “time to kill” (TTK) metric across the entire cast. “Time to kill” refers to the amount of time it takes to defeat an enemy in a perfect interaction. The higher a game’s time to kill is, the longer the average character survives in a gunfight. Overwatch’s time to kill began relatively high, with the majority of heroes being able to tank a few shots in any given fight barring a fully-charged Widowmaker headshot. This made healers essential for keeping your team alive during any given fight. The lower your TTK gets, the less opportunities healers have to heal. This further muddled their role.

The Overwatch 2 beta’s time to kill is significantly lower than the first game. The lack of another tank to soak damage, the increase in damage capabilities across the board, and the overwhelming dominance of hit-scan weapons, has made the game feel extremely scrappy. That scrappiness makes it a headshot fest, where strategy begins to collapse under the weight of all the people trying to kill you at any given moment.

Orisa is significantly stronger than she used to be, but with that utility comes significantly more boring play. Image by Blizzard Interactive.

This problem is further exacerbated by a series of character reworks, which somehow manage to feel both totally insignificant and absolutely game changing. Crowd control abilities have been taken away from DPS and support heroes, and offloaded almost exclusively onto tanks. Mei and Sojourn do have abilities which slow their enemies' movement speed, but as far as DPS crowd control goes that’s about it. Orisa, who sees some of the game’s most significant reworks, has become a powerful dive tank, who can almost solo entire teams if played correctly. Despite how powerful her abilities are, they are tremendously boring. She, like all reworked Overwatch 2 characters, has been made better at damage to the detriment of everything else. Oh, and Bastion is obscenely overpowered again.

Overwatch, and now by extension Overwatch 2, when confronted with the question of how to make their characters unique, chose to make their guns feel different from one another instead of encouraging a wide range of unique playstyles. When compared to other character driven, team composition heavy games like the MOBAs that inspired it, and the hero shooters which have followed in its wake, its failure of imagination is staggering. Overwatch 2 had an opportunity to stop its slide into generic team deathmatch, and it chose not to take it. 

While the game is still in beta, and by definition has an opportunity to course correct, years of patches and the current state of this sequel don't allow for much confidence that Blizzard will even identify the problem, much less correct for it.

Overwatch felt like a revelation. With a cast of bright, unique characters, objective based gameplay, and the promise of a narrative that would grow alongside its players, it all but spawned a new genre, populated by other games which it voraciously devoured. Battleborn and Paladins didn’t have a chance against Overwatch, which cast a brilliant shadow over everything that came after it—apparently including its own sequel. 

Despite the brightness of its characters, and the potential it once had, Overwatch 2 is not currently a shout. It is barely a whimper.