Silksong Developers Were Never Stuck, Have Big Plans for DLC

Team Cherry has finally emerged from its cave, and now we’ll have Hollow Knight: Silksong on September 4, eight years after the first game. Players have been wondering if the game was going to come out at all after all this time, and the developers’ silence didn’t help the matter.

But now, they are ready to talk, and, despite fans fearing Silksong went through development hell, Team Cherry says this is not true.

“It was never stuck or anything,” co-founder Ari Gibson told Bloomberg. “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.”

In fact, the team enjoyed the journey quite a lot: “We’ve been having fun,” Gibson continued. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

It seems Team Cherry found some kind of productive zen: they still have so many ideas that they “could have kept going.”  

“I remember at some point I just had to stop sketching,” Gibson said. “Because I went, ‘Everything I’m drawing here has to end up in the game. That’s a cool idea, that’s in. That’s a cool idea, that’s in.’ You realize, ‘If I don’t stop drawing, this is going to take 15 years to finish.'”

Don’t worry, we’ll likely see these ideas in the DLCs the developers are planning to release. 

“The most interesting thing now is what can we add to it next,” Gibson shared. “We got a plan. Admittedly, some of the plans for that stuff are kind of ambitious as well, but hopefully we can achieve some of it.”

Team Cherry

Team Cherry is infamous for its lack of communication, making players think Silksong would never come out. However, the devs chose this way for a reason:

“We felt like continued updates were just going to sour people on the whole thing,” Gibson said. “Because all we could really say is, ‘We’re still working on it.'”

“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,” co-founder William Pellen added. “Probably at the time we thought we’d go quiet for a year or two, then the game would come out.”

Perhaps this way is actually better than the constant delays we see from studios that spoke too soon. 

In 2022, a Silksong trailer appeared at the Xbox event, and an Xbox tweet claimed that it would be released in 12 months, and even Team Cherry thought it was true at the time.

“We did genuinely believe that was the case,” Pellen said. “There was a period of two to three years when I thought it was going to come out within a year.”

But the game kept growing, and the problem was not in constant reworks but in the fun the devs had shaping Silksong.

“I think we’re always underestimating the amount of time and effort it’ll take us to achieve things,” Gibson commented. “It’s also that problem where, because we’re having fun doing it, it’s not like, ‘It’s taking longer, this is awful, we really need to get past this phase.’ It’s, ‘This is a very enjoyable space to be in. Let’s perpetuate this with some new ideas.'”

But we will finally see the result of their work after all these years: we’ll just have to wait a couple of weeks.

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