You won't be able to play Splatoon 1 online soon: here's what you need to do to continue playing
If you own a Wii U (or a 3DS), online services will be stopping soon.
I will admit that when I woke up today, I wasn't expecting to hear the terrible news we've heard today. Not at all.
Anyways, Nintendo has announced today that multiple online services for the Wii U and 3DS (such as the Nintendo Network system and SpotPass) will be shutting down in April 2024, or even earlier.
This is incredibly unfortunate for fans of the original Splatoon, since as we all know, Splatoon is intended for people to play online. There’s no real way to play local multiplayer, since I refuse to count the Battle Dojo.
However, we do have a solution. It’s called Pretendo Network. Pretendo has been available for a while, but recently, they’ve been making some huge leaps to support the Wii U and 3DS.
Unfortunately though, to use Pretendo Network, you have to get modded. I’m going to leave some relevant links below for you to get started today.
A quick warning by the way, I am not responsible for any damage you may do to your consoles by installing modifications which are not officially supported by Nintendo.
Follow the guide for installing PayloadLoader (you don’t have to install anything past that, but I’d recommend installing the Tiramisu environment in case you need it for something): https://wiiu.hacks.guide/
Follow the Aroma installation guide: https://wiiu.hacks.guide/#/aroma/getting-started
And finally, follow Pretendo’s guide for installing on a Wii U using Aroma: https://pretendo.network/docs/install/wiiu
Once you’ve done all that, you should be finally connected to Pretendo Network!
Depending on whether you have done some work on modding the Wii U part of your Wii U, you should be able to skip the first step, but if you are unsure of anything, it might be best joining the Nintendo Homebrew Discord which can provide you with support.
You are now modded with Pretendo, and you’re going to run straight away to play Splatoon, but before you do that, I need to let you know of a few things.
First of all, public battles do not work currently on Pretendo. However, Pretendo is actively updating, and you may find that they do support it within the future.
Next, you will be able to potentially play Splatfests on Pretendo in the future, they did a test of this a while ago. I’m hoping this comes soon though.
Another thing is that you should be able to see Miiverse posts again, I wonder how wacky that is lol.
And finally, if you just want to play private battles, you’ll be able to play them like usual.
Either way, I’m going to end off for now, this situation is very unfortunate but it just shows how you can’t trust a gaming company with having access to stuff forever if you haven’t already realised. I’m probably going to cry in a corner now.
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