Report: Splatoon 2 New Modes May Be Coming According to Datamine

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A new ranked gamemode may be coming to Splatoon 2, according to a datamine of the game.

The datamine comes courtesy of OatmealDome on Reddit from a team known as Wii Sports team. They previously datamined the existence of new weapons and evidence of playable Octolings.

Note: The content found may change at any time or might be abandoned completely. That being said, possible DLC spoilers below.

A new ranked gamemode called “Rocket” has been found. They known it’s a ranked gamemode because its file name starts with a V for Victory, one of the internal names for ranked gamemodes and is included in the file names for all the other ranked gamemodes.

It involves a player equipping a “VictoryRocketNozzle” like the Rainmaker weapon, with bullets that are of the same arc type as the Sting Ray special. The rocket nozzle loads the same model of the Rainmaker, but this might be just temporary. The rocket can also take damage, as evidenced by the fact that there is an entry for the rocket in a file that defines damage rates for objects. This is just speculation by the team, but the “VictoryRocketNode” object may be used to navigate an actor/object through the stage, much like how the AI for the Salmonids in Salmon Run works.

The team also found a test version of The Reef map which contains all the necessary objects for the mode to run (highlighted in blue).

This map shows the rocket floating in the air.

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These maps show the VictoryRocketNode objects placed throughout the map, with one placed far below the playable area by mistake.

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The team also found evidence of a scrapped game mode. They found another object in the testing map for The Reef known as Obj_VictoryBall as well as other objects known as TestObj_Lft_VBallGoal placed in one team’s spawn area. The team could not find code referencing the gamemode. This may point to a rejected soccer-like ranked gamemode where players push a ball to the other team’s goal.

Here’s an image of the Victory Ball object on top of the bridge in the middle of the map:

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Further evidence of playable Octolings was found. They previously found the word “Oct” in the game’s executable file but it turns out that it was actually “OctGirl” but compressed. This comes with the previously found “OctBoy.” Since Octolings are players controlled by AI, they have their own types beginning with Rival to distinguish them from others.

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Someone also found the model for Octoling hair, though the team could not verify where they got it from.

There’s also an unused icon found in the game’s files that would’ve been used of the Octolings you fought in the single player campaign had any dialogue.

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While this does not confirm that playable Octolings are coming to the game, it does imply that Nintendo was working on it at one point in time.

The team also found evidence of a possibly scrapped special weapon with the internal name of “Bazooka,” which isn’t referenced anywhere else in the game’s code. This isn’t the Inkzooka from the original Splatoon as that had an internal name of “SuperShot.”

They also have a list of viewable Salmonid models.