The Hollow Knight: Silksong release date is real at last – and pretty darn close at September 4 – but even developer Team Cherry sounds a little surprised that it took so long.
Speaking with Bloomberg, studio co-founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen stress that the sequel's protracted development, which spring-boarded off initial plans for a simpler DLC for Hollow Knight and turned into a seven-year saga, has been nothing but enjoyable.
Fans have long speculated that Silksong may have seen internal reboots, redrafts, engine shifts, or similar design overhauls that extended its development time, but no; Team Cherry says it just made that big of a game and put that much time into polishing it as a small team.
"It was never stuck or anything," Gibson said. "It was always progressing. It's just the case that we're a small team, and games take a lot of time. There wasn't any big controversial moment behind it."
Effortlessly dispelling worries of development hell, Gibson added, "we've been having fun," and "it's nice to make fun things."
Reflecting on the small studio's development process, which sees ideas become actionable or playable pretty quickly compared to many dev pipelines, Pellen says they're still full of ideas, and "it's for the sake of just completing the game that we're stopping. We could have kept going."
Gibson says he "just had to stop sketching" because "you realize, 'If I don't stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.'"
In addition to the sheer length of the production process, Silksong has come to be defined by immovable silence from the developers. At most, stray and infrequent Discord messages would briefly placate and then, inevitably, redouble fan curiosity. This, too, stoked unhinged community debates: are the devs marketing geniuses playing us all like fiddles, or simply quiet and somewhat overwhelmed designers who care more about making a game than marketing one?
Gibson tells Bloomberg that they kept quiet because they didn't want to "sour people on the whole thing" when "all we could really say is, 'We're still working on it.'"
Indeed, Pellen says "it felt like our actual responsibility was just to work on the game."
Team Cherry's vision, even after it had gone beyond the scope of Hollow Knight DLC, also snowballed. At one point, Pellen reckoned "we'd go quiet for a year or two" and then, bam, video game ready.
In particular, around 2022, when Xbox famously teased that Hollow Knight: Silksong was part of a slate of games scheduled to release over the next 12 months, Pellen says "we did genuinely believe that was the case."
"There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year," he adds.
But as quests and bosses and towns and areas piled up, Gibson says "suddenly you end up six, seven years later."
Somewhat terrifyingly, the two devs say they do have plans to build on Silksong after launch, for months or likely even years according to Bloomberg's story.
Hollow Knight ended up receiving three massive, sterling DLCs that introduced new challenges, areas, abilities, and the best and hardest boss fights in the game. Gibson teases "ambitious" ideas for Silksong add-ons or DLCs and hopes "we can achieve some of it." Now we just have to see if that will snowball into Hollow Knight 3.
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