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Hollow Knight: Silksong has ignited the level of capital-D Discourse over game difficulty typically reserved for a new FromSoftware game. But for Team Cherry, the difficulty was just a natural outcome of Hornet being so darn cool – and anyway, you can just use the same logic the world applied to Elden Ring to avoid getting frustrated.
"Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight – so even the base level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent," Team Cherry's Ari Gibson says in a book accompanying Silksong's exhibit at the ACMI museum in Melbourne, Australia. Quotes from the book were recently shared by Dexerto.
"The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss," according to William Pellen. "The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away." So rather than nerf Hornet's powers, the devs buffed everyone else.
"The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path," Gibson says. "So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes. Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty – but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing."
While the devs don't explicitly evoke Elden Ring here, it's tough not to think of FromSoftware's foray into open world design as following a similar ethos. If you get stuck on a hard boss in Elden Ring, you can simply go someplace else, discover some new skills, level up your character, and get better at the combat before coming back and trying again.
It's similar in Silksong, as Team Cherry sees it, since players "have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled," as Gibson explains.
