Hollow Knight: Silksong is real and coming out... in two weeks already! Today's "special announcement" by Team Cherry was actually the launch trailer for the game, where at the end they give the release date, surrounded by droning void. I was expecting more, to be honest, like Ari and William talking about the game a bit, but at least they didn't shadow-drop it on us, so we get some time to prepare. I won't be able to take vacation for this one, however.
There is an interview with Bloomberg, where they talk about what has been taking them so long. I had speculated about the state of Silksong over a year ago and I wasn't all too worried back then, saying that they have the luxury to take all the time the they need. And this happens to have been exactly the case. With such a small development team things take longer, of course, but they were also having fun, always coming up with new ideas and being able to quickly implement them into the game. Thanks to the success of Hollow Knight they also had the financial means to polish the game for as long as they wanted. They kept their team small and that money together, so they didn't have to rush things.
However, I was completely wrong about one thing. I thought that they might go the route of Tears of the Kingdom, where once the game is shipped, this will have been it. It will be everything they sought it to be. But this isn't the case. They had to make a cut eventually to get the game finished, but they are already having ambitious ideas for add-ons. So, the story of Silksong might continue for quite some time and we're in for a ride.
And according to the trailer, we're already looking at a meaty meal. 40 bosses are about as many as Hollow Knight had at the end with all its expansions, including the ridiculous boss fest, Godmaster. There are many more normal foes as well, over 200. And we're actually getting multiple towns this time, an elaborate quest system and much more sophisticated game mechanics, which also added a lot to the development time.
The demo featured at gamescom is actually quite similar to the one from 2019, featuring the same "levels", only running in a more recent version of the game. But it's a testament to how much more polish the games has received in those six years. The devil is in the details.
