Like its predecessors, Splatoon 3 is a third-person shooter game focused on online multiplayer battles, in which eight players are divided into two teams of four. The player's character is an Inkling recruited by the New Squidbeak Splatoon (specifically the Squid Sisters and the Captain) as the new Agent 3 the former Agent 3 from the previous games is now the captain of the group following Cuttlefish's retirement.
It also contains a rocket ship and portable research lab (where Callie, Marie, Craig Cuttlefish, and the captain appear), a dark, mirrored city, and a neon-lit area with traditional Japanese items floating around in the background.
The story takes place in a new location called Alterna, a large, snowy area littered with Fuzzy Ooze.
However, other Octarians do make an appearance, such as Octopods and DJ Octavio. This includes some kind of mutated Octotrooper with brown fur. The Splatoon 3 single-player story mode is called "Return of the Mammalians", and it is implied that mammals besides Judd and Li'l Judd will appear. The outcome of the Final Fest/Splatocalypse is likely the reason the game’s design is seemingly themed around chaos. Splatville's development increased rapidly as more Inklings and Octolings started to move to the city. It is located far away from Inkopolis, the main setting of the first two games in the Splatoon series. Splatoon 3 takes place about one and a half years after the events of the Splatocalypse, in a city named Splatsville (also known as the "city of chaos"), stationed within a region called the Splatlands. It was also revealed that the game will support cloud saves and that there will not be separate regional versions, meaning that all language options will be available to every player. On April 22nd, 2022, the release date for Splatoon 3 was revealed to be September 9th 2022. It was also confirmed that the game will be released in the summer of 2022. In a Nintendo Direct on February 9th 2022, Salmon Run Next Wave, a successor to Salmon Run from Splatoon 2, was revealed to be a mode in Splatoon 3, introducing new Boss Salmonids, Egg Throwing, and the King Salmonid. On January 27, 2022, Volume 16 of the Splatoon manga was released with a teaser of Agent 3 arriving in Splatsville. This revealed the return of the brush main weapon class, marking the final returning weapon class revealed. The post included a video with an Inkling performing a victory pose along with a jingle while 2022 is written in ink.
On January 1st, 2022, the SplatoonJP Twitter account posted a Tweet for the arrival of 2022.
On September 24th, 2021, more information was revealed about Splatoon 3 in a Nintendo Direct, including new special weapons, stages, and music, as well as the reveal of the single-player mode Return of the Mammalians.
It will be the first game in the series to be localized into Korean and Chinese. The game was first announced in a Nintendo Direct on February 17th, 2021, with a planned release in 2022. This is quite different compared to the timing of the development of Splatoon 2, which started immediately after Splatoon was released. This means that Splatoon 3 development had not started as of July 2019 and presumably started after the release of Version 5.0.0 on July 31, 2019. In an interview with the weekly Famitsu magazine from around July 2019, Splatoon series producer Hisashi Nogami said that after completing Splatoon 2, the team focused on the Octo Expansion DLC as well as updates and would not think about the future until completing version 5.0.0 of the game. Splatoon 3 is developed and published by Nintendo.