Team Cherry has finally lifted the lid on Hollow Knight: Silksong's release date. It's 4th September, if you missed it, and Bloomberg's Jason Schreier has sat down with the devs to find out why it has taken so long to make.
The short answer, as detailed in Schreier's feature (paywalled), is that the team has simply been having a nice time making it. The ideas kept piling up, and a pesky little global pandemic pushed things back somewhat, but it sounds like Team Cherry has been maintaining a healthy attitude to the whole thing for the past seven years — which, in the grand scheme of high-profile development stories, is rather lovely to hear.
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Despite spending this much time with the massively-hyped sequel, it seems that Team Cherry already has ideas for more content to add to the game. "Launching it is obviously quite exciting," the studio's co-founder William Pellen told Bloomberg, “What comes after for us is equally as exciting”.
"The most interesting thing now is what we can add to it next," Team Cherry's other co-founder, Ari Gibson, agreed, even teasing that the team has "got a plan" for what these additions might look like. "Admittedly, some of the plans for that stuff are kind of ambitious as well," Gibson continued, "but hopefully we can achieve some of it”.
And it sounds like the team could have kept going for many more years than the six it's been since Silksong was announced. "It’s for the sake of just completing the game that we’re stopping," Pellen commented, "We could have kept going”. Gibson even stated that he "had to stop sketching" at some point, to avoid a situation where that game takes "15 years to finish". Heh, it makes six years of waiting sound like child's play, no?
The devs also shared with Bloomberg why their updates have been so few and far between in recent years, with Gibson stating that “We felt like continued updates were just going to sour people on the whole thing, because all we could really say is, ‘We’re still working on it’”. Pellen sang to the same tune, affirming, “Instead of popping up and bugging people for the sake of it, it felt like our actual responsibility was just to work on the game” — not that they expected things to take this long, of course.
The Bloomberg feature is full of other details about the game's development besides those mentioned above, and is well worth a read if, like us, you've been wondering what's been happening over at Team Cherry in recent years.
There are just two weeks to go now until we all finally get our hands on Hollow Knight: Silksong, and based on our Gamescom hands-on preview, it's looking extremely promising.