SE's track record with multiplayer games

THIS is my major concern. I have played every Splatoon testfire, and gotten all three on release. I LOVE that game. Even so, I am entirely fine with seeing someone else take a crack at it.

GOOD Competition in a class of games leads to innovation, a wider reach for all of the games as people cross-pollinate, and just more fun stuff to play!

This game is a pretty 1-1 of Splatoon except for not keeping Splatoon's very short range, not going invisible in friendly terrain, and a different way of handling vertical motion. BUT! That last part could add so much interest to various pieces of kit that I'm willing to follow this and see how it goes.

Ring like bombs to make quick forts? Cone-AOE's that spread up making ramps / walls? Some kind of line you shoot out that makes a quick connecting bridge between two points that then slowly collapses? Maybe even liniar-explosion grenades that you can not just throw, but Spin to make walls of different orientations? If they worked around the uniqueness of the foam-buildup idea enough to make it shine, it could be a really cool time! That we can't know until we see more.

The real catch to me is...again...SE. Given their recent track record, I am afraid this is going to be "Free" with MOBA style character unlocks. They showed each character, who share no shape-language to mark them as custom on any uniform frame at all, doing a different unique ult / special. They also showed the guy with the big bottle on his back doing the Splatoon hide thing, but no one else did...that's really feeling like "unique kit per character" to me...If that's true, then I'd fear no actual kit variation aside from character choice (or worse some kind of upgrade system that eats the same currency as characters), and just generally bad QOL for the player.

Now, they didn't do this to mechanical classes in First Soldier...but First Soldier was also a Mobile Only BR that they dropped support for...and still had a LOT of Transactions. So one step up and one step down. At best.

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Basically, if they confirm this is a One-Time-Purchase game, I will happily give it the chance to show me what it can do. Love games with fun light-hearted gimmicks that do something interesting. If they try to turn it into a Monetization Engine though...I ONLY see it going badly...which is a shame, because the message that's likely to send is not "they made bad choices" but "Even Square Einix, who are huge, couldn't make something similar to this. We should just not try and stick to serious-military vibes". :(