Silksong Real I guess lmfao
On September 4th, Ragebait youtubers will need a new target
Hollow Knight devs Team Cherry announced earlier today that the highly anticipated sequel Silksong is being released in two weeks, September 4th. They also did a lighthearted interview with Bloomberg news (Archive) which like
Listen. I've got no snail in this race because I didn't really enjoy the moment to moment with Hollow Knight (sacrilegious I know) and my interest here only falls into "more games in this genre are always welcome" "it's been high profile vaporware for like half a decade" "I want to see more indie devs succeed" and "gamers have been totally normal about this game for years"
...but reading through this interview feels WEIRD. If you haven't seen any of this in the background over the years (first of all good for you), Hollow Knight 'fans' got SO rabid over the lack of updates about this game they started issuing death threats over purported leaks, brigading console events comment sections for having the audacity to [checks notes] exist and not announce Silksong, and an entire youtuber ecosystem of ragebait farmers profiting off "X days since Team Cherry said anything".
“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.”
To be clear I don't think Team Cherry is personally responsible for the actions of unhinged gamers or youtube dramamongers but there's no way they didn't know this was going on, and to see seven years of an absolute shitshow end with an interview where they laughingly joke about how they just kept adding things, "game dev is a blast" etc - man that's pretty fuckin wild!!!
“Feels like we’re going to ruin their fun by releasing the game,” Pellen said.
Paired with the section of the interview where when asked about Jira they had no idea what it was and said their Trello account got deactivated from disuse this paragraph is just bonkers:
Hollow Knight had been massive, and their plan at the outset was to build a smaller world for Silksong. To ensure that the game felt just as deep, they’d implement an elaborate quest system that would offer the player reasons to backtrack and revisit old locations. In contrast to Hollow Knight, which had a single town full of shops and characters to meet, there would also be multiple towns, each serving as a hub for quests.
The final sentence's scope of the game contradicts the first and it feels like that kind of sums up the entire experience of the dev cycle. And like
maybe this IS the ideal form of game development?
Small team of creatives making a thing they care about a lot and NOT fucking about with planning, marketing, social media, number crunching, worrying about hitting KPIs and appeasing investors; and they have the resources to do this without starving to death given the first game's sales safety net.
I would love to have more people in this industry in this position! but MAN what a strange interview to read given the material realities of this game's hype cycle and all the harassment and rage surrounding it.
Anyway, I'm excited to play the game! They'll make millions of dollars regardless, all the gamers and rage junkies will move back to waiting for Half Life 3 or whatever else falls in that category these days (unless they pivot to disappointment rage 'WE WAITED SEVEN YEARS FOR THIS??' or 'IS FEMALE BUG PROTAGONIST A SIGN THAT TEAM CHERRY WENT WOKE?') About 10 years ago it was Half Life 3, Last Guardian, FF7 Remake and Starfield, right? Only HL3 is still nonexistent but maybe I'm also missing other big hype things that just never hit my radar.
Oh well. Two weeks to go, right on!