Ever since the first game released back in 2015, it’s been known that the Splatoon series is set in a post-apocalyptic Earth where rising seas led to mankind’s extinction and aquatic life evolving to becoming the dominant land-dwellers. There’s actually an impressive amount of lore behind the basic “squid kids shoot ink at each other for sport” premise, and with Splatoon 3 only two weeks away from launch, dataminers believe they’ve uncovered a new piece of it: a map of the game’s version of the world.Fans will be able to get their first proper taste of Splatoon 3’s gameplay tomorrow courtesy of the Splatfest World Premiere Demo. With the demo now available to download, dataminers have been digging around to see what interesting tidbits they can find, and apparently they’ve managed to discover texture files that include a full-on world map.Said map was shared by rassicas on Twitter, who credited RAMDRAGONS with extracting the Splatoon 3 map file. It depicts landmasses that can be identified as Earth’s continents, but with several major differences and distortions from the real versions. For instance, South America and Australia are broken up into multiple pieces, Africa and most of Europe have merged together, and Antarctica is nowhere to be seen. Some text can also be seen marking the different landmasses and oceans, but rassicas said they can't be deciphered, unfortunately.
Although rassicas declares it to be the “official” map of Splatoon’s world, it’s not yet known if that’s the case. A world map can be seen currently in Splatoon 3’s Splatfest demo, seen hanging on the back wall in Sheldon's Ammo Knights shop, but looking closely at it shows continents that more closely resemble their real-world counterparts than they do in rassicas’ version. Whether that disproves the legitimacy of the datamined map is a question that likely won’t be answered until Splatoon 3 launches next month and fans see for themselves if it shows up anywhere.
While they won’t be able to hop into online battles until tomorrow, August 27, players can download the Splatfest World Premiere Demo and play through the opening section right now. Currently, they’re able to customize their playable Inkling or Octoling as shown in Splatoon 3’s original announcement, play through a quick tutorial, explore the Splatsville hub area, and pick which team they’ll be on in tomorrow’s three-team Splatfest. As for the Splatfest itself, that will run for twelve hours, with the first half consisting of regular Turf War battles between two teams and the second focusing on the new Tricolor Turf War matches that will pit three teams against each other.
Splatoon 3 launches September 9 for Nintendo Switch.
Source: Nintendo Life
