Where’s Silksong?
Silksong was first announced on February 14th, 2019: 929 days ago.
Since then, there has been a lot of discussion on when Silksong will be released.
Late 2019.
June 2020.
Sometime in 2021…
Possibly 2028…
The wait has been so long, there’s now an entire channel dedicated to providing you
with Daily Silksong News updates.
In fact, the very world in which we live now is very different from the world of February
14th, 2019.
Things really have changed drastically since early 2020, when Sonic the Hedgehog came out
in theaters.
So where does that leave Silksong?
How much longer will we have to wait?
Are Team Cherry even still alive?
We have some information from an interview Leth did with the Indie Gamer back in May
of this year.
Leth said two particular things in this interview that stick out.
First, he mentioned that for Hollow Knight’s development, he didn’t actually play the
game until it was basically done.
That way he could provide good feedback to the developers.
Second, he mentioned that he hasn’t actually played Silksong since the E3 2019 demo.
So we know that the game wasn’t going into any kind of playtesting or polish back in
May.
Also, earlier this month Leth asked a Team Cherry parody Twitter account to stop posting,
because their account was confusing and concerning fans, who in turn, were reaching out to Team
Cherry, and distracting them from finishing Silksong.
Finally a reddit user named “ultimate_dad_bod” actually bumped into Ari Gibson last week
at a coffee shop.
According to him, Ari Gibson said that lockdown restrictions didn’t hinder their development
at all, but that the scope for Silksong ended up being way bigger than they initially anticipated.
In other words… the game is not done yet.
On top of this, Team Cherry has provided us with very few details on the development of
Silksong.
Leth mentioned in his recent interview that he is encouraging Team Cherry to make more
blog posts, especially since they recently changed web hosts so their website would stop
crashing anytime more than twenty people tried to access it.
But ultimately it’s up to William and Ari to put these posts together, as it’s the
best way for William and Ari to directly talk to their fans.
The last time Team Cherry made an official blog post was December 2019.
In the summer of 2020, we got riddles released through Discord, which were basically a blog
post of their own.
And then in December, we got Silksong news through an article in Edge magazine.
We also got a comment from Team Cherry themselves in the comments section of the Hollow Knight
Kickstarter about nine months ago.
They said that they’ve been meaning to do a proper update, but that they haven’t had
a moment to since they’ve been finishing Silksong.
And that’s perfectly reasonable.
But despite that, it can certainly be frustrating.
Personally, I don’t really care if Team Cherry shows us new areas or bosses or NPCs.
I would prefer they didn’t, really.
I want to know as little going into Silksong as possible.
And if they show anything, I’m contractually obligated to make a forty minute video discussing
it.
But I would be lying if I said I don’t miss seeing new blog posts every so often.
Even if it’s just to say that they aren’t dead, or that they have new merch available,
or that Australia hasn’t sunk into the ocean.
But if Team Cherry aren’t going to update us themselves, we can always just speculate
wildly anyway.
Let’s start off by talking about how different things are for Team Cherry now, than they
were back during the development of Hollow Knight.
For one thing, they actually have money.
Things got pretty rough during Hollow Knight’s development.
William Pellen was buying assorted meat ends from the local market place to save money,
and someone in their building would bring Team Cherry leftover sandwiches from their
meetings.
And they used other tactics as well.
Have a girlfriend that will basically pay for everything, I guess.
This frugal lifestyle kept them from going into debt while making Hollow Knight.
And their design philosophy for Hollow Knight was to allow the game’s size to creep out
further and further, but doing so in a way that they could stop adding stuff at any point
and just polish and release the game.
We aimed to make a very small game, a small Metroidvania.
And then we had enough energy and budget and we were enjoying it enough to allow it to
expand.
But at any time, we could have stopped that development, packaged it up, and have a complete
game.
Team Cherry kept this up as long as they could, eventually getting $30,000 from Indie Fund
to add even more bits of content to the game.
And even after Hollow Knight came out, Team Cherry kept adding even more to the game.
I’m guessing if Team Cherry had the money they do now, Hollow Knight would have released
with everything we saw in the content pack updates, and maybe even more.
And now with Silksong, Team Cherry no longer has to worry about running out of money.
They can let Silksong grow as big as they want.
And… that seems to be what’s happening.
I mean, I get on a call with them periodically…
most of the time, it’s just so everyone can update what they’ve been doing.
But then they’ll still just start going off on an idea.
And I’m like “wow, this is”...
I mean, I love hearing it, because that’s the fun part of the creative process.
But it’s also kinda like “We haven’t figured that out yet?
Or are we just gonna keep adding stuff?”
You know?
Yeah, absolutely
One nice thing about Team Cherry’s workflow is how quickly they can add all these ideas.
According to Ari:
No fancy concept art – no time!
No long iterative processes.
Our boss design discussions go for about 10-15mins max, then we’re off and making!
And just like before, Team Cherry has probably designed Silksong in a way that the core game
was probably finished a while ago, but now they are adding all the bits and pieces to
the game they think will help make Pharloom more excited to explore.
And there might be another reason for them to just keep shoving more and more content
into Silksong.
And that’s so that Team Cherry can deliver a game that lives up to the hype.
With Hollow Knight, all they had to do was make enough money to keep making games.
With Silksong, they now have to worry about how everyone is going to react to it as the
sequel to their insanely popular debut title.
The hype surrounding Silksong has only grown in the last two years, increasing expectations
for the game to be even bigger and better.
Now, full disclosure, I’m not a mind reader.
But I think Team Cherry’s game development process has probably changed because of all
of this.
For one, it has probably encouraged them to shut themselves off from the insanity that
is the internet, so they can focus solely on game development.
This might be contributing to why they haven’t been posting blog updates.
Second, all the hype and expectations revolving around Silksong might be pushing them to just
keep cramming more and more stuff into the game.
And it might be like a snowball effect in that regard, causing Silksong to inflate larger
than anything ever before seen, even on DeviantArt.
This larger audience will also require Team Cherry to make sure Silksong is more polished
on release than Hollow Knight was, resulting in longer development time.
According to William in an interview with A Profound Waste of Time, the quiet release
of Hollow Knight was actually a good thing for them.
Because of Team Cherry’s small size, their playtesting wasn’t as extensive as it needed
to be, but the smaller launch audience helped them patch up the bugs before too many people
started playing the game.
That’s probably not gonna fly with Silksong, since the hype surrounding it will most likely
cause the game to have tens of thousands of players within the first fourteen minutes.
And while that’s definitely a great thing, let’s keep in mind that hyping a game up
too much isn’t good for anyone involved.
It’s really easy to get carried away in this crazy internet world of ours.
And while I don’t expect people to stop spamming about Silksong in the Nintendo Indie
Directs, I hope we can all remain chill as the wait for Silksong continues.
And I hope Team Cherry is handling the pressure on their end as well.
And besides, while Team Cherry has been working on their game, people in the Hollow Knight
community have been doing all sorts of crazy projects.
The modding community for Hollow Knight keeps churning out new and exciting mods such as
randomizers, multiplayer mods, and kaizo mods.
There are also larger scope fan games such as Pale Court, The Sanctuary, and Maskbearer
as well.
These mods plan to actually add brand new bosses and areas to Hollow Knight.
There’s also a group of insanely talented linguists working to create Hallowspeak, which
is basically a fan language built on top of the gibberish used in Hollow Knight.
So you can finally order Starbucks while honoring the legacy of Team Cherry’s masterpiece.
Not only that, but there’s also a project that’s attempting to add full English voice
acting into Hollow Knight called Hallownest Vocalized.
And then there’s the Embraced One, who's working on a huge project to create a complete
interactive map of Hallownest in all its glory.
And then there’s tons of amazing remixes of Hollow Knight’s score from channels like
MAT, who makes synthwave covers of Hollow Knight’s music.
And don’t forget about the fan art and fan animations constantly being created as well,
like this amazing Hornet animation by 3D Print Guy.
It’s honestly insane how much Hollow Knight fan content there is to enjoy right now.
There’s even literally a person who has been poorly drawing Hollow Knight everyday
for the last 600 days.
I do believe we’ve peaked as a fandom.
As for a release date for Silksong.
I’m sorry but I really don’t know.
People keep accusing me of knowing the true release date.
As if Team Cherry would ever tell me.
Like, why would they?
What would they have to gain from telling me the release date is January 19th 2009.