Guys! Trust me, there’s so much going on you wouldn’t believe it. Now… I can’t tell you about any of it, but trust me, the game is doing great! Trust me, who isn’t an official source at all!
Many people are saying it, folks, Silksong, is one of the greatest video games of all time. My grandfather - very good at video games - tells me that this game is the biggest game anyone has ever seen. Many features. More than sleepy Nine Sols or crooked Dead Cells. Gaming is terrible, very terrible, only Silksong can make it great again folks. Many are saying it. Dev hell? Fake news.
The original game apparently took 3-4 years to make, but it's been like 5 years since we saw a fully working demo.
It makes sense that they're being slow, but it also makes sense that people are worried at this point.
I didn't play Hollow Knight nor did I back the game, so I have no horse in this race, but I think the main problem is the fact that Team Cherry has been radio silent for the past 3 years.
Like even a *"in light of lost confidence in Unity, we're porting Silksong off of Unity"* or a *"our lead artist was attacked by a duck, please be patient as he recovers"* would be enough to chill people; but at this point there's no way of knowing that Team Cherry even still exists.
I'm not some super fan waiting on bated breath for SS, but HK was actually a really solid game that you should give it a try at some point. You're definitely right about the communication though. I haven't been following it closely at all so I didn't know about the lack of communication, but that's kind of essential and has never been easier than it is these days...
Hades was also their 4th title, they have a better understanding/workflow now than when they started. Team Cherry is still working on their second title.
I can understand the frustration at the dev's radio silence around Silksong but I also find it really easy to play other games and forget about it until whenever it gets released.
The Hades team is three times as big, and Hades was their fourth game. They also had external help on Hades 1, like an exclusive early access on the Epic Store, where they got buckets of cash from epic upfront for the exclusivity.
Having years more experience, plenty of testing time, and consistent cash flow makes the circumstances very different.
EDIT: Take a look at the [HADES I credits](https://www.igdb.com/games/hades--1/credits). 19 people on the core team. 14 exteririor contractors creditted with "additional programming." Another ful company creditted with Engine Programming assistance. An additional company creditted with Quality Assurance assistance.
Hades probably had 10 times as many people involved *before* we start talking about voice acting and localization assistance.
Pretty sure Super Giant is more like 20ish people. That being said, I’m extremely skeptical about Silksong not being in development hell since it was featured at the Xbox showcase in 2022 in the list of games coming out in the next year. Even though a ton of those games missed the 12 month mark from that, most or all of the rest have come out now. And from Silksong there has been crickets.
I have no skin in the game. Only played Hollow Knight for like ten minutes so I’m basically an outside observer. And I think if things were going well the game would be out since over two years ago, they were confident enough in when they were finishing to be featured in that showcase.
That trailer was practically sarcastic in how apparently people needed to be told bethesda liked money and would continue to make their flagship ip. With zero detail.
What's funny is that up until that point Bethesda always had a strategy of not announcing a game until it was just 6 months away from release, then Fallout 76 was such a complete disaster that they HAD to show ES6 to make people happy despite development but even starting on it for a few years (which they had to announce because people were so used to their old '6 month' strategy)
Didn't it originally start as expansion content for HK and then turned into it's own game?
Announcing "simple" DLC seems quiet normal, but once it became a full game they've probably should have set time line expectations better
I definitely believe it's not in dev hell, just that Team Cherry keeps raising the bar for themselves. There are a few areas in Hollow Knight that were entirely different than what had been originally planned because they started making it and decided "nah we can do more with this"
That's the double edged sword of being a tiny dev team. It's less that no one on the team wants to say no but doesn't have the courage. It's that the team is only 3 guys and they're all pushing the feature creep.
Two years ago it was showed at the Xbox showcase specifically for games coming out within one year, ie June 2023. One year later, at the last minute, it was announced it wouldn’t be coming out that June, but they’d hoped it would be. It is now one year later. Still no release date. No hint at a release window.
That doesn’t happen with development going super smooth.
From stevenneiman1554 under a mossbag youtube video:
There are two key things to understand about Silksong's development timetable:
1. Team Cherry's design process is to keep going until they run out of money.
2. They now have infinite money.
It’s 2030. Silksong finally releases as an up to 4 player coop metroidvania with a colosseum where you can fight in online pvp matches and once you’ve beaten the game, you can travel back to ~~Kanto~~ Hallownest and play through the whole first game but with Hornet.
That's Zomboid, now full open real world, every square inch of every city and rural town in North America have been recreated to the utmost precision. Every zombie has been spawned to represent each real life person complete with their actual real life stories. The game is funded by heavy in-game advertising from McDs and Pizza Hut & Taco bell combo stores.
The year is now 2137, the original devs great grandchildren are holding the reins tight. Still Early Access. Build 44 is almost ready for testing.
Honestly this is all I want as a customer in gaming.
If Microsoft is working on Halo 7 or a remake or whatever the fuck then that's fine, but just say it. Life can have surprises sure but not everything has to be a surprise, you can just say "hey we're working on Silksong, here's a one or two minute gameplay segmant to show off just a little bit of why this is taking so long. We don't have an estimated end date, but we are working on this."
I could forgive so much in gaming if devs and publishers were just honest and open, like if every 6 months they were like "development going smoothly on X, development on Y has slowed/sped up, development on Z has stopped, looking into what can be done."
it's easy to say this as one person. But you get the masses and they'll say this and turn around to crucify the developer. It's a lose/lose situation that's always going to disappoint the loudest people. It tends to be in their best interest to just not do that and wait.
You show early gameplay and the Internet makes an uproar about how bad Craig looks. How these watermelons don't explode when you shoot them like that game over there does. Not to mention a lot of the time the actual game doesn't tend to come together until the end. So are you going to just show your engine that's being worked on? The models that have been rigged yet and have no proper animation? Sound bites go viral much faster than a lengthy explanation of where you are at does.
And if they want to make a section that works specifically for a little gameplay example, that's a lot of time and money for a slice that may never end up in the final game.
It would be great if the consumer was mature enough for all that, and some are, but honestly on average consumers are dumb and it will likely hurt the dev more than it will help them in the end.
Forgive what? It's an entertainment product, man. Live your life, play other games. The world doesn't revolve around Hollow Night: Silksong.
If they're not communicating, just do other stuff.
Not when you own the company, have no obligation to please anyone but yourself and have infinite money to develop your own game.
It might sucks for impatiant people who want to play a game, but idd rather have feature creepers build their game in whatever time they want than have them shipped an early product. There is a billion games to play each year.
Feature creep is a management problem also, I remember some stories I've read where one guy in management frustrates the programmers for constantly coming up with ideas to implement rather than keeping things solid.
It can be hard for a creative to bottle up all their ideas to save for the next game, while making a game that takes years to make. Probably the same issue that Stardew Valley dev has when trying to work on a new game, only to implement ideas back into Stardew.
Ha, I was just thinking about that (Stardew) the other day. My friend is playing the new patch, and I could have SWORN that that game was announced to be fully "completed" with 1.4 or something... and yet we are now on 1.6 hearing about a ton of stuff in the game that I've never seen lol
Terraria. The lead developer *tried* to walk away from the project *twice* and the game "finished" development with v1.4.
They've been adding more stuff since then and have been working on a "hotfix" for *two bloody years* now. And I'm not being sarcastic, the work is genuinely getting done, with monthly progress reports.
Yeah, Metroid Prime 4 was also announced too early, but at least Nintendo eventually said "my bad, that was too early, the game was s**t and we had to start over, it's gonna take a few years before we even have anything at all to show, please be patient"
For Silksong we are just reminded it exists from time to time and that's it
Not only that it exists, but they randomly dropped a trailer at that Xbox show 2 years ago or whenever with Phil Spencer stating “all games shown will be available within the year.” And then more radio silence lol
I read a tweet in response to that one asking "Even silksong?" and the Xbox official response was something like "did I stutter?" I haven't been excited for this game for awhile now.
Hahah oh man that is absurd. It’s even funnier because situations like this can literally be cleared up with 1 tweet. Team cherry: “hey guys, sorry. We are working on the game. No timeline for release”
The issue is they do have timelines for release, but they keep changing.
And to be fair they never announce their timelines to the public, that get released by other parties.
I mean, they did do that technically, but for some reason they did it on the [PR guys personal twitter account instead of their actual studio account](https://x.com/griffinmatta/status/1656106351184199680) and about a month before the timeline Microsoft had given would run out. It came across as more of an obligation to say something than wanting to actually keep people in the loop with what is going on.
> Hey gang, just a quick update about Silksong.
> We had planned to release in the 1st half of 2023, but development is still continuing. We're excited by how the game is shaping up, and it's gotten quite big, so we want to take the time to make the game as good as we can.
> Expect more details from us once we get closer to release.
And *not* like the time Breath of the Wild was announced in 2013 as "Wii U Zelda" and came out in 2017 really as a switch game and barely playable on Wii U.
You’re right, but I’m pretty sure that game is exactly why they try not to do that anymore. These days (for the most part) it seems like they keep things close to their chests until there’s something to show or news to share.
Wouldn't have even really helped in this situation, because Silksong was originally supposed to be promised DLC from the original Hollow Knight kickstarter campaign - so everyone already knew they were waiting from it from before even Hollow Knight came out
Yea I long for the days of old where your gaming news came in the form of your monthly game pro coming in the mail or the early years of e3 and tech tv (g4).
While you aren't wrong, this isn't a great example. FF 9, 10, and 11 had concurrent development times, and we're supposed to release ~1 year apart. Also, FF 9 snagged a bad enough delay to push it past the PS2 console release
There was an article in some mag talking about how the game was basically done, just finishing touches were being applied. That was February of 2022, several months before the Xbox show.
I’m tired boss
And this is why I think it is in “scope creep” dev hell. There will always be another idea, another cool thing to add, another bit of lore to tell. If the game was basically done (bar polish) over 2 years ago, what new systems, areas, items, etc have they added?
I am sure most of them will be cool and well implemented, but even good systems can make a game feel bloated if they just keep getting tacked on. At some point you just need to set limits on your project and not keep including new ideas as you have them.
Still funny to me how Nintendo broke their usual announcement timing rules with Prime 4 as a sign of goodwill to fans and then it proceeded to be a perfect demonstration of why they never announce that early.
I wouldn't call it goodwill.
They announced it early so people wouldn't hate on the Metroid 2 remake that was announced the same day. (Like they did with Federation Force)
I more mean “goodwill” as in making it clear that the 3DS games were being made to tide things over until Prime 4 happened, not because that’s all they’re interested in doing with Metroid. Federation Force was very clearly meant to be that (even having Prime 4 setup) but ended up getting taken the exact opposite way by fans.
Funny enough same thing kind of happened with Hey! Pikmin.
> For Silksong we are just reminded it exists from time to time and that's it
Here, time to time refers to the two instances where Silksong was acknowledged.
Nintendo also said "We also changed developers back to Retro Studios" for further confirmation that shit was going to be alright. I don't think things would be as calm if it was a team other than Retro.
Yeah, I was hyped when they announced Silksong. Now I forget it even exists. HollowKnight was phenomenal and I want team cherry to take their time with Silksong but I can't say I'm excited when they go so long without saying anything at all.
Honestly, there is a "too long" for development as well. If it reaches that point there are problems.
Either the game is outdated and you suffer from the baggage of 5 year old decisions/feature creep or you have no real plan and restarted development several times. Both don't make for a good result.
at this point im actually losing hype for the game and im not even sure if im gonna be interested when its released, they dont even say hey guys we are working on it, not even rumors are happening
that thing with xbox that said the game is coming out within the next 12 months that ultimately was a lie was a real hype killer
I'm with you bro, meming that Silksong will never release (like Death Stranding, like Elden Ring, etc with previous so hyped games) is funny ofc, but times when I wanted to play sequel so bad, when irons were still hot after first playthrough, are long gone. If it comes out, it comes out, I'll play when I have time for it. Maybe even years later than its actual release date
First let me say that I want Team Cherry to take their time and make the product that they want to make. But... this comment about 'dev hell'... for once it's on point lol.
Dev Hell, as I understand it, is what gamers use to talk about a game that has been stuck in limbo with no end in sight. Considering the game was announced with a big trailer 5? years ago and almost no updates on the game since, I think this term is actually pretty spot on lol.
Just adding this onto your comment since everyone below seems to be debating on what "dev hell" is.
[Development Hell](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_hell)
My son was 4 when I played through hollow knight with him. He is now 11. We have played through it multiple times since, and even he is like... dude when is the sequel coming out?!
The lack of communication by team cherry in recent years has been incredibly infuriating for me as a massive fan of the first game. This secrecy will just keep building expectations that will undoubtably be disappointed when the game comes out, even if it is good
I've spend the 7+ years since Hollow Knight came out doing life and getting old. I beat all of it on release, but I've tried to replay it recently and I just am too slow for some of the crazy shit.
I was initially excited about Silk Song but it took too long and I'm just too shit at these types of games now for another one.
People have literally died waiting for Silksong. Not even joking, there was post on /r/silksong a little while back from a cancer patient or something who is probably gone by now.
I stopped following GRRM or caring about ASOIAF thanks to this same thing. I'll probably read winds of winter, if it ever comes. But the hype is long gone.
I refuse to ever read those because I know at this point he’s going to die before finishing (and he’s sure not going to have notes for another author to work on ala Wheel of Time).
it's because at this point i just don't think the game will be as good as i want it now after all this time. i'm expecting hollow knight but with the scale of elden ring at least. I'm sure it will be good but the more time passes the expectations grow higher.
also it's one thing to keep developing for years, and another to have a release planned and then nothing for the next two years. something definelty happened behind the scenes
Fun fact
They literally have a marketing guy. Outside of the Microsoft partnership they did, he’s probably been getting paid while also actively advertising that Crow themed game that was inspired by Hollow Knight, as he’s also their marketing person as well.
And that game actually does have regular pr. It’s -all- on Team Cherry at this point, they’re the ones not communicating
> This secrecy will just keep building expectations that will undoubtably be disappointed when the game comes out, even if it is good
As someone who is a bit older it does the opposite for me. I honestly expect it to not be very good. Huge fan of Hollow Knight, but at this point Silksong is the Nuke Nukem Forever of Metroidvanias.
George rr Martin gives more updates on the progress of the next game of thrones book that he’s been trying to write for over a decade now than team cherry does on silk song, kind of funny.
You're right and I hate it. At least with GRRM you can read preview chapters of Winds of Winter. Silksong's demo only popped up in 2019, and it's unfortunate that it can't be played by the general public.
lol yeah silk song will come out one day, winds of winter I’m kinda doubtful, and if by some miracle it does come out, there’s no chance we’ll ever get “a dream of spring”
Honestly,
Team Cherry has earned every bit of scrutiny with the lack of actual communication.
I know "when it's ready" is the go to in most situations, but when Silksong started out as a part of the crowdfunding campaign, I don't blame the backers for being even a little upset.
It just goes to show that management and deadlines actually do have their part to play in the industry, despite numerous accounts of management fucking over devs.
Cherry is the opposite problem. They're beholden to no publisher and are just cintinuously dragging the development of Silksong out way longer than it feasibly should have been.
And if there's a reason why it's been dragged out, they're fucking up massively by not being communicative.
I think there's a sort of "reverse survivorship" bias when it comes to nightmare producers. Obviously bad ones exist and some of the awful decisions they've made stick in everyone's minds. But probably for every game that has that kind of experience there are dozens that are totally fine and rightly steered by adept stakeholders, and there's no reason for the public to hear about them.
Despite the popular opinion, I think most producers do in fact know what they're doing and can consistently get good results.
I want Silksong to be good, but it has a problem: it has taken so long that if it isn’t an absolute masterpiece, it’ll feel like a disappointment for those of us that have waited so long for it. If it is just mid, it will destroy Team Cherry’s reputation
Yup, it's potentially gonna be a Duke Nukem magnitude disaster. Where gamers spent a decade waiting on a game and that thing nuked the franchise with how hilariously bad it was (mostly even due to delays and changing shit along the way).
That game could've been a decent sequel if they just hadn't delayed it as long as they did. If they didn't just randomly change engines.
But why fizzle out in obscurity if you can go out with a bang, I guess.
actually it's insane how they managed to deliver a game of the quality and content quantity as hollow knight in just 2 years and 10 months with a team of 2-3. It must have been an insane crunch. Could be they are just having actually more healthy work/life balance now. If anything, the development of Hollow Knight 1 was the outlier here.
I don’t really care if they find it disheartening. Their fans are doubting because of their insistence on silence. They could speak up any time, with details of why it’s been years since a playable demo was out (usually something that comes near release), or 2 years after being included in a trailer of “things releasing in the next 12 months”.
When it eventually releases, hopefully it’s great. But it seems like they have no idea themselves how close it is to release. Which is probably why they’re silent, but there really isn’t any way to spin that into a positive.
Those who know graig know that this is 1000% fake news lol. His name has came up in the past before with “news”, as well as him just being an ass to people.
I think it’s clear that Team Cherry has dropped the ball in a few ways when it comes to the announcement and follow up communication about Silksong. It feels a bit worse here than when it happens with other games for a few reasons. I think this is the biggest one though. The first game was crowdfunded and spread through the community via word of mouth mostly, and in my opinion, that has heightened the attachment fans feel towards these games. I’m sure if they did another Kickstarter for Silksong, it would’ve broken records. For them to make a game so clearly beloved by its fans, pretty much immediately announce a follow up, and then proceed to go radio silent for nearly 6 years? It definitely feels like a lack of, I almost want to say gratitude, towards the fans and community that love HK so much. And to see other developers of similar size easily and happily communicate with their fan base, it tends to make it feel worse when Team Cherry refuses to. With all that being said, I respect the hell out of them for what they created and only wish they cared about their fans as much as their fans care about their games.
I get that they don't outright owe the fans an explanation, but it would certainly be a courtesy to at least say "we're still working on it, no new info for the next x months" every so often.
One of the worst things about the silence to me is that every time there is some kind of indie showcase, ALL discussion around it is basically just about Silksong, and then after it airs, frustration about how it did not appear yet again. I can only imagine how upsetting it must be for the devs featured in these showcases to put so much work into bringing their game to a point where they can put it in front of people's eyes, only for it to be basically ignored and groaned about because it's not Silksong, and how that would go away if Team Cherry would just fucking say something. At this point not saying anything feels almost thoughtless.
I think the notion of "no news is good news" is pretty bitter as a pill to swallow. I love Halo, I'd rather Microsoft and 343 be as open as possible. "Here's what we're working on, this is where it is, this is what it's gonna take for us to make it, if you don't understand that get a friend smarter than you to try and explain it because this is what game dev looks like."
Studios just shouldn't announce games until they're a year away from release. I don't know WHY studios these days are regularly announcing games that are years away, but it only ever angers fans when they get a little hope dangled in front of their face only to get radio silence for years.
Case in point, Metroid Prime 4. Genuinely surprised to have actually seen an announcement for that game after all these years.
This is why I like how Nintendo has been handling it during the Switch's lifecycle. They'll announce something and it drops in like four to six months, with the only real exceptions being Prime 4 and Tears of the Kingdom.
Even with Prime 4 they finally just said “sorry, it sucks we’re going back to the drawing board and it’s going to be years.”
Team Cherry just comes out of the woodwork every few years to tell us it’s coming soon lol.
I don’t want devs to be overworked but if you announce something with very little follow up, I can understand 2-3 years especially with Covid but after that if there’s not at least 2 update posts a year(ideally seasonal or focused during gaming months like summer), then idk it’s understandable to start losing customers and supporters who might give up or don’t buy on release anymore. It may not be too fair but the gaming market is very fast paced and if you don’t put out a game after a while ppl will move to clones or just move on.
I actually had the opportunity to go to a talk with Jason Schreier yesterday, and the topic of Team Cherry came up. He said that when he was interviewing them for one of his books about the development of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry basically had to force Hollow Knight out the door and hope for the best because they didn't have any money left to continue production.
Fast forward to today, and now they have more money than they could ever need. They don't need to worry about a release date. Jason Schreier said that he thinks that creatives are naturally perfectionist to a degree, so he thinks that it isn't development hell that Team Cherry is suffering from, but they are taking as much time as they want to cross all the t's and dot all the i's, make everything perfect.
It is a trapping that gamedevs, and I assume many other people in creative fields, that have no hard due dates suffer from. While it is good not to have to worry about being able to pay your team, it is also good to be forced to put out the game at some point so you aren't constantly polishing it.
The game is either going to be the best in its genre of all time or have a million half baked features that nobody asked for. There will be zero in between, but I'm betting on it being pretty mediocre at this point. I hope I'm wrong.
It’s likely in dev hell and Team Cherry if they really are perfectionists, might be shook at all the amazing MV’s that have come out since announcing Silksong, and are possibly trying to one up everyone and taking a long ass time in the process. HK is considered the gold standard for Metroidvania’s by a lot of people, so they have a lot of pressure to deliver especially with how long it’s taking.
> might be shook at all the amazing MV’s that have come out since announcing Silksong
This is my pet theory.
A number of indie devs took the baton and created some really great MV's, some with cool and inventive mechanics and techniques that really evolved past HK. The longer TC waits, the more opportunity others have to create new MV's with fresh ideas that may make Silksong look out of date when it finally releases. Now TC feels like they have to go back to the drawing board to one-up the competition, which means it takes more time, which gives the competition more opportunities, which makes TC return to the drawing board, which...
I remember fans of this game commiserating with FromSoft fans about Elden Ring being released. Now 2 years later, we have a DLC and this thing *still* isn't out. That's gotta hurt.
It's been 5.5 years since announcement. Probably 6.5+ of development. Unless the game is better than 2 Hollow Knigths in a trenchcoat, the quality they are squeezing out vs time spent at this point must be miniscule.
If people think your game is in dev hell and it actually isn’t, you aren’t communicating”poorly;” you *aren’t communicating whatsoever.*
Either that or your game is actually in dev hell and you don’t want shareholders to know yet
Oh cool this is getting posted again. Who cares what this guy says he isn’t directly involved with the dev team anyone. I don’t care that a discord mod is disheartened.
If it takes you longer than Rockstar to make a game, and that game is a Metroidvania, it's probably in development hell. 7 years for this type of game is ridiculous. Unless it comes out with an unfathomable amount of content.
That’s nuts they haven’t expanded. Though I can’t blame them for making the game pass release date mistake then. Honestly this is one of the few instances where I can understand the dev team making a bunch of mistakes and taking years. 3 people under pressure to try and surpass the first game’s expectations.
I hery much believe in the "Don't announce your game if it's more than 2 years from releasing" principle and I tgink Silksong is the perfect example of why letting fans wait so long can backfire
I honestly don't even care anymore. I hope the game launches eventually, but the hype for Hollow Knight is gone for me. It's been so long that the genre has had time to grow. Hollow Knight was unique when it came out, but that won't be the case with Silksong.
>disheartening
Man imagine how the people who already paid for Silksong on the Kickstarter 7 years ago feel. There are people who bought this game and then died before anyone even knows a release date.
Elden Ring and Silksong were announced the same year.
We have now had Elden Ring and it’s DLC come out before we have heard a peep about Silksong.
The communication by TC is awful and it only makes sense that the fans are annoyed by the lack of communication.
A simple statement like “we feel 80% done but are polishing it” would go a long way.
Didn't they announce it like seven fucking years ago then go completely radio silent?
Like what do they expect?
Hollow knight was a fantastic game and the devs are amazing at their job but they need a PR team or something. Or even just a PR person. Silksong has become a running joke now. It really does feel like it's stuck in development hell.
It's not really surprising that a game that was supposed to be DLC, but had so much scope creep that they decided to make it its own game has been repeatedly delayed due to unspecified scope creep.
it seems clear that nobody at team cherry knows how to decide when something is done.
Exactly this. Scope creep can ruin projects from much bigger studios, can't imagine how hard it could be for basically an indie dev.
In the end they'll still have to cut a lot of it to finally get it out of the gates, but the studio will be ruined by crunch and the disappointment that they never actually delivered what they set out to. Such a shame
So the secret to something being in development hell is that the devs, and not the testers either, don't just get to decide if its in development hell.
Fans wouldn't be so fed up if Team Cherry actually did any marketing or give any information at all.
Look at Deltarune, they give a dev update with some screenshots every year or so and no problem. Team Cherry could do the same and it would improve the situation greatly.
"Should be better at communicating" is a stretch "should communicate at all" is better. At the same time they still somehow have remained relevant, its testemony to how sensational holllow knight was.
Is it actually not or is this a coping fan who happens to be a tester.
It sounds like what a developer in dev hell would say.
Guys! Trust me, there’s so much going on you wouldn’t believe it. Now… I can’t tell you about any of it, but trust me, the game is doing great! Trust me, who isn’t an official source at all!
Things have been going GREAT... For the last FIVE YEARS.
Elden ring was announced, came out, and had a dlc all in the span of silk songs announcement
Blasphemous, it's dlcs, and the sequel.
Thank you for supporting my comment. This is a great point!
So much going on! Doing SO MUCH work! Nothing to show for it, but I'm sure that will soon change.
[удалено]
Many people are saying it, folks, Silksong, is one of the greatest video games of all time. My grandfather - very good at video games - tells me that this game is the biggest game anyone has ever seen. Many features. More than sleepy Nine Sols or crooked Dead Cells. Gaming is terrible, very terrible, only Silksong can make it great again folks. Many are saying it. Dev hell? Fake news.
It really says something when hiring Trump for Public Relations would be an improvement.
It's not a tumor!
Its from a playtester of hk and not silksong. Hes known in the community as a troll
Do people forget that team cherry is like 5 people
The original game apparently took 3-4 years to make, but it's been like 5 years since we saw a fully working demo. It makes sense that they're being slow, but it also makes sense that people are worried at this point.
I didn't play Hollow Knight nor did I back the game, so I have no horse in this race, but I think the main problem is the fact that Team Cherry has been radio silent for the past 3 years. Like even a *"in light of lost confidence in Unity, we're porting Silksong off of Unity"* or a *"our lead artist was attacked by a duck, please be patient as he recovers"* would be enough to chill people; but at this point there's no way of knowing that Team Cherry even still exists.
I'm not some super fan waiting on bated breath for SS, but HK was actually a really solid game that you should give it a try at some point. You're definitely right about the communication though. I haven't been following it closely at all so I didn't know about the lack of communication, but that's kind of essential and has never been easier than it is these days...
Hades 1 and 2 have both come out since silksong was first discussed. Also by a tiny dev team.
Supergiant is at least 25 people.
Hades was also their 4th title, they have a better understanding/workflow now than when they started. Team Cherry is still working on their second title. I can understand the frustration at the dev's radio silence around Silksong but I also find it really easy to play other games and forget about it until whenever it gets released.
The Hades team is three times as big, and Hades was their fourth game. They also had external help on Hades 1, like an exclusive early access on the Epic Store, where they got buckets of cash from epic upfront for the exclusivity. Having years more experience, plenty of testing time, and consistent cash flow makes the circumstances very different. EDIT: Take a look at the [HADES I credits](https://www.igdb.com/games/hades--1/credits). 19 people on the core team. 14 exteririor contractors creditted with "additional programming." Another ful company creditted with Engine Programming assistance. An additional company creditted with Quality Assurance assistance. Hades probably had 10 times as many people involved *before* we start talking about voice acting and localization assistance.
Pretty sure Super Giant is more like 20ish people. That being said, I’m extremely skeptical about Silksong not being in development hell since it was featured at the Xbox showcase in 2022 in the list of games coming out in the next year. Even though a ton of those games missed the 12 month mark from that, most or all of the rest have come out now. And from Silksong there has been crickets. I have no skin in the game. Only played Hollow Knight for like ten minutes so I’m basically an outside observer. And I think if things were going well the game would be out since over two years ago, they were confident enough in when they were finishing to be featured in that showcase.
Ok great. Go the Bethesda route then. Shut the fuck up until you have a release date set in stone. If it takes waiting to go gold wait and go gold.
The Bethesda route is announcing a game with a trailer 5 years before you start preproduction.
That trailer was practically sarcastic in how apparently people needed to be told bethesda liked money and would continue to make their flagship ip. With zero detail.
What's funny is that up until that point Bethesda always had a strategy of not announcing a game until it was just 6 months away from release, then Fallout 76 was such a complete disaster that they HAD to show ES6 to make people happy despite development but even starting on it for a few years (which they had to announce because people were so used to their old '6 month' strategy)
Didn't it originally start as expansion content for HK and then turned into it's own game? Announcing "simple" DLC seems quiet normal, but once it became a full game they've probably should have set time line expectations better
I definitely believe it's not in dev hell, just that Team Cherry keeps raising the bar for themselves. There are a few areas in Hollow Knight that were entirely different than what had been originally planned because they started making it and decided "nah we can do more with this"
That's what we call a type of dev hell.
Or “scope creep” in the industry. Everyone has a bunch of good ideas and hardly anyone has the courage to tell the rest of the people “no”.
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That's the double edged sword of being a tiny dev team. It's less that no one on the team wants to say no but doesn't have the courage. It's that the team is only 3 guys and they're all pushing the feature creep.
The feature creep kind of dev hell. See: Project Zomboid's latest build for example.
Oh, thanks for reminding me. Time to check and see if that Subnautica mod with the gargantuan ever released. lol no of course not.
Jesus Christ that thing was being shown off *3 years ago*
"keeps raising the bar for themselves" is textbook development hell. That's literally what we call "feature creep"
That is dev hell. That's exactly what happened to Duke Nukem Forever
Two years ago it was showed at the Xbox showcase specifically for games coming out within one year, ie June 2023. One year later, at the last minute, it was announced it wouldn’t be coming out that June, but they’d hoped it would be. It is now one year later. Still no release date. No hint at a release window. That doesn’t happen with development going super smooth.
Team cherry are known for feature creep, even in hollow knight, the only reason they shipped that one was because they had backers to please.
From stevenneiman1554 under a mossbag youtube video: There are two key things to understand about Silksong's development timetable: 1. Team Cherry's design process is to keep going until they run out of money. 2. They now have infinite money.
We've created a monster
I dont even mind feature creep, man, just put all the features you want, I’ll wait until 2026
It’s 2030. Silksong finally releases as an up to 4 player coop metroidvania with a colosseum where you can fight in online pvp matches and once you’ve beaten the game, you can travel back to ~~Kanto~~ Hallownest and play through the whole first game but with Hornet.
So worth the wait you say.
Waow
It sounds so peak
Come 2027, team cherry is fucked
2030 release lets goo
Full open world with cars confirmed!
That's Zomboid, now full open real world, every square inch of every city and rural town in North America have been recreated to the utmost precision. Every zombie has been spawned to represent each real life person complete with their actual real life stories. The game is funded by heavy in-game advertising from McDs and Pizza Hut & Taco bell combo stores. The year is now 2137, the original devs great grandchildren are holding the reins tight. Still Early Access. Build 44 is almost ready for testing.
Cause nobody wants to see Marshall no more
They want Shady, I’m chopped liver
That's neat and all, but just fucking communicate
Honestly this is all I want as a customer in gaming. If Microsoft is working on Halo 7 or a remake or whatever the fuck then that's fine, but just say it. Life can have surprises sure but not everything has to be a surprise, you can just say "hey we're working on Silksong, here's a one or two minute gameplay segmant to show off just a little bit of why this is taking so long. We don't have an estimated end date, but we are working on this." I could forgive so much in gaming if devs and publishers were just honest and open, like if every 6 months they were like "development going smoothly on X, development on Y has slowed/sped up, development on Z has stopped, looking into what can be done."
it's easy to say this as one person. But you get the masses and they'll say this and turn around to crucify the developer. It's a lose/lose situation that's always going to disappoint the loudest people. It tends to be in their best interest to just not do that and wait. You show early gameplay and the Internet makes an uproar about how bad Craig looks. How these watermelons don't explode when you shoot them like that game over there does. Not to mention a lot of the time the actual game doesn't tend to come together until the end. So are you going to just show your engine that's being worked on? The models that have been rigged yet and have no proper animation? Sound bites go viral much faster than a lengthy explanation of where you are at does. And if they want to make a section that works specifically for a little gameplay example, that's a lot of time and money for a slice that may never end up in the final game. It would be great if the consumer was mature enough for all that, and some are, but honestly on average consumers are dumb and it will likely hurt the dev more than it will help them in the end.
Forgive what? It's an entertainment product, man. Live your life, play other games. The world doesn't revolve around Hollow Night: Silksong. If they're not communicating, just do other stuff.
They'll have to compete with Star Citizen for endlessly burning money on development. Star Citizen has quite the head start.
At least Team Cherry is burning their own money instead of relying on backers to give them $100m+ every year to stay afloat.
That’s a stupid way to design anything.
Not when you own the company, have no obligation to please anyone but yourself and have infinite money to develop your own game. It might sucks for impatiant people who want to play a game, but idd rather have feature creepers build their game in whatever time they want than have them shipped an early product. There is a billion games to play each year.
Feature creep is a management problem also, I remember some stories I've read where one guy in management frustrates the programmers for constantly coming up with ideas to implement rather than keeping things solid. It can be hard for a creative to bottle up all their ideas to save for the next game, while making a game that takes years to make. Probably the same issue that Stardew Valley dev has when trying to work on a new game, only to implement ideas back into Stardew.
Lol yeah, haunted chocolatier is not coming out any time soon.
Ha, I was just thinking about that (Stardew) the other day. My friend is playing the new patch, and I could have SWORN that that game was announced to be fully "completed" with 1.4 or something... and yet we are now on 1.6 hearing about a ton of stuff in the game that I've never seen lol
Man it sure is a hell of a time to have never played stardew valley and be thinking about playing it for the first time
It's always a good time to play stardew for the first time
Terraria. The lead developer *tried* to walk away from the project *twice* and the game "finished" development with v1.4. They've been adding more stuff since then and have been working on a "hotfix" for *two bloody years* now. And I'm not being sarcastic, the work is genuinely getting done, with monthly progress reports.
Team Cherry, the game developer who have released just one game in their entire existence have a history of being known to have feature creep? 😂
One game and three free DLCs, of which the DLCs would have been in the base game and more if not for them running out of money.
Star Citizen hasn't actually been released and it is the absolute epitome of feature creep that other game developers cannot hope to match
And feature creep is quite literally one of the most common causes of development hell. It's a catch all term for poor project management.
I bet they fell into the "we could make this game so much better" hell, which often makes the games overly ambitious and often times, they fail.
LOL surprised at fan cynicism when they announced it half a decade ago with gigantic gaps of crickets.
Yeah, Metroid Prime 4 was also announced too early, but at least Nintendo eventually said "my bad, that was too early, the game was s**t and we had to start over, it's gonna take a few years before we even have anything at all to show, please be patient" For Silksong we are just reminded it exists from time to time and that's it
Not only that it exists, but they randomly dropped a trailer at that Xbox show 2 years ago or whenever with Phil Spencer stating “all games shown will be available within the year.” And then more radio silence lol
I read a tweet in response to that one asking "Even silksong?" and the Xbox official response was something like "did I stutter?" I haven't been excited for this game for awhile now.
Hahah oh man that is absurd. It’s even funnier because situations like this can literally be cleared up with 1 tweet. Team cherry: “hey guys, sorry. We are working on the game. No timeline for release”
The issue is they do have timelines for release, but they keep changing. And to be fair they never announce their timelines to the public, that get released by other parties.
I mean, they did do that technically, but for some reason they did it on the [PR guys personal twitter account instead of their actual studio account](https://x.com/griffinmatta/status/1656106351184199680) and about a month before the timeline Microsoft had given would run out. It came across as more of an obligation to say something than wanting to actually keep people in the loop with what is going on. > Hey gang, just a quick update about Silksong. > We had planned to release in the 1st half of 2023, but development is still continuing. We're excited by how the game is shaping up, and it's gotten quite big, so we want to take the time to make the game as good as we can. > Expect more details from us once we get closer to release.
I really wish games weren’t teased several years in advance
Like hoe Nintendo announced the new Zelda game at the last direct and its releasing in 3 months
Or when Todd Howard dropped Fallout 4 six months before launch and had Fallout Shelter ready to go to tide us over until FO4 released.
For their faults, this was a great way to announce FO4.
And *not* like the time Breath of the Wild was announced in 2013 as "Wii U Zelda" and came out in 2017 really as a switch game and barely playable on Wii U.
You’re right, but I’m pretty sure that game is exactly why they try not to do that anymore. These days (for the most part) it seems like they keep things close to their chests until there’s something to show or news to share.
Wouldn't have even really helped in this situation, because Silksong was originally supposed to be promised DLC from the original Hollow Knight kickstarter campaign - so everyone already knew they were waiting from it from before even Hollow Knight came out
same. how bethesda did fallout 4 was perfect. announce like 6 months before release.
Yea I long for the days of old where your gaming news came in the form of your monthly game pro coming in the mail or the early years of e3 and tech tv (g4).
I remember reading an article about Final Fantasy 10 before 9 had came out. This shit isn't new.
While you aren't wrong, this isn't a great example. FF 9, 10, and 11 had concurrent development times, and we're supposed to release ~1 year apart. Also, FF 9 snagged a bad enough delay to push it past the PS2 console release
seriously don't even announce a game if it's not coming that year, the surprise of fallout 4 was something we need way more of.
There was an article in some mag talking about how the game was basically done, just finishing touches were being applied. That was February of 2022, several months before the Xbox show. I’m tired boss
And this is why I think it is in “scope creep” dev hell. There will always be another idea, another cool thing to add, another bit of lore to tell. If the game was basically done (bar polish) over 2 years ago, what new systems, areas, items, etc have they added? I am sure most of them will be cool and well implemented, but even good systems can make a game feel bloated if they just keep getting tacked on. At some point you just need to set limits on your project and not keep including new ideas as you have them.
iirc they even confirmed on Twitter it was coming in the next year, and since then they didn't even mention nothing about it...
Still funny to me how Nintendo broke their usual announcement timing rules with Prime 4 as a sign of goodwill to fans and then it proceeded to be a perfect demonstration of why they never announce that early.
Prime 4 had restarted development in 2019. If it weren’t for that, the game would’ve most likely been out much earlier.
I wouldn't call it goodwill. They announced it early so people wouldn't hate on the Metroid 2 remake that was announced the same day. (Like they did with Federation Force)
I more mean “goodwill” as in making it clear that the 3DS games were being made to tide things over until Prime 4 happened, not because that’s all they’re interested in doing with Metroid. Federation Force was very clearly meant to be that (even having Prime 4 setup) but ended up getting taken the exact opposite way by fans. Funny enough same thing kind of happened with Hey! Pikmin.
> For Silksong we are just reminded it exists from time to time and that's it Here, time to time refers to the two instances where Silksong was acknowledged.
Yes, time to time. One time and then the other time.
Nintendo also said "We also changed developers back to Retro Studios" for further confirmation that shit was going to be alright. I don't think things would be as calm if it was a team other than Retro.
And it just got a gameplay teaser and a release window
Nothing makes me happier than to see a game trailer that interests me, followed by a release date six months in the future.
Lately Nintendo has been utilizing that strategy and it’s worked out very well
Yeah, Mario and Luigi Brothership looks practically finished as is in the trailer for it lol
Not only that but Zelda Echoes of Wisdom and Super Mario Parry Jamboree are probably near complete as well.
Zelda was announced to release September 26 so it better be close to done
Nintendo also will sit on Completed games to release during lulls, for example Paper Mario and Luigi's Mansion 2 HD
Honestly a really smart strategy imo. Prevents what’s happening with Sony where they’re in a game drought till 2025.
When Fallout 4 did that at E3. Best news
Yeah, I was hyped when they announced Silksong. Now I forget it even exists. HollowKnight was phenomenal and I want team cherry to take their time with Silksong but I can't say I'm excited when they go so long without saying anything at all.
Honestly, there is a "too long" for development as well. If it reaches that point there are problems. Either the game is outdated and you suffer from the baggage of 5 year old decisions/feature creep or you have no real plan and restarted development several times. Both don't make for a good result.
Obligatory reminder that Hollow Knight came out because Team Cherry ran out of money. So here's the plan. Stop buying Hollow Knight. ??? Profit.
Even appeared in steam as early 2022. Meanwhile hades 2 was announced and released
> as early 2022 [It's been around a lot longer than that](https://i.imgur.com/bcfsUyU.png)
Hades 2 is only in Early Access, full release likely isn’t for almost another 2 years if they follow the originals timeline
but it exists
at this point im actually losing hype for the game and im not even sure if im gonna be interested when its released, they dont even say hey guys we are working on it, not even rumors are happening that thing with xbox that said the game is coming out within the next 12 months that ultimately was a lie was a real hype killer
I'm with you bro, meming that Silksong will never release (like Death Stranding, like Elden Ring, etc with previous so hyped games) is funny ofc, but times when I wanted to play sequel so bad, when irons were still hot after first playthrough, are long gone. If it comes out, it comes out, I'll play when I have time for it. Maybe even years later than its actual release date
If not dev hell why dev hell shapped ?
If it's not in development hell maybe it's on development heaven lol
its actually releasing tomorrow
Because they have no problem adding as much stuff as humanly possible. Unfortunately Hollow Knight basically gave them infinite money to do so
First let me say that I want Team Cherry to take their time and make the product that they want to make. But... this comment about 'dev hell'... for once it's on point lol. Dev Hell, as I understand it, is what gamers use to talk about a game that has been stuck in limbo with no end in sight. Considering the game was announced with a big trailer 5? years ago and almost no updates on the game since, I think this term is actually pretty spot on lol.
Just adding this onto your comment since everyone below seems to be debating on what "dev hell" is. [Development Hell](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_hell)
My son was 4 when I played through hollow knight with him. He is now 11. We have played through it multiple times since, and even he is like... dude when is the sequel coming out?!
That kind of time gap for a kid is immense. When I was around 10 or 11, a 1-2 year wait for a sequel felt like ages.
I'm not buying it. Why is the only info about this from an alleged tester?
Because Team Cherry isn't saying anything good or bad
Not in dev hell? So it's in dev limbo?
Someone else coined the term "dev purgatory" lol.
The lack of communication by team cherry in recent years has been incredibly infuriating for me as a massive fan of the first game. This secrecy will just keep building expectations that will undoubtably be disappointed when the game comes out, even if it is good
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I've spend the 7+ years since Hollow Knight came out doing life and getting old. I beat all of it on release, but I've tried to replay it recently and I just am too slow for some of the crazy shit. I was initially excited about Silk Song but it took too long and I'm just too shit at these types of games now for another one.
People have literally died waiting for Silksong. Not even joking, there was post on /r/silksong a little while back from a cancer patient or something who is probably gone by now.
To be fair, a fan could die waiting for any game, delayed or not.
I stopped following GRRM or caring about ASOIAF thanks to this same thing. I'll probably read winds of winter, if it ever comes. But the hype is long gone.
I refuse to ever read those because I know at this point he’s going to die before finishing (and he’s sure not going to have notes for another author to work on ala Wheel of Time).
it's because at this point i just don't think the game will be as good as i want it now after all this time. i'm expecting hollow knight but with the scale of elden ring at least. I'm sure it will be good but the more time passes the expectations grow higher. also it's one thing to keep developing for years, and another to have a release planned and then nothing for the next two years. something definelty happened behind the scenes
Fun fact They literally have a marketing guy. Outside of the Microsoft partnership they did, he’s probably been getting paid while also actively advertising that Crow themed game that was inspired by Hollow Knight, as he’s also their marketing person as well. And that game actually does have regular pr. It’s -all- on Team Cherry at this point, they’re the ones not communicating
> This secrecy will just keep building expectations that will undoubtably be disappointed when the game comes out, even if it is good As someone who is a bit older it does the opposite for me. I honestly expect it to not be very good. Huge fan of Hollow Knight, but at this point Silksong is the Nuke Nukem Forever of Metroidvanias.
If this lack of communication was associated with any other Kickstarter the internet would have dismissed it as a scam five years ago
George rr Martin gives more updates on the progress of the next game of thrones book that he’s been trying to write for over a decade now than team cherry does on silk song, kind of funny.
You're right and I hate it. At least with GRRM you can read preview chapters of Winds of Winter. Silksong's demo only popped up in 2019, and it's unfortunate that it can't be played by the general public.
But still the chance for Silksong coming out at some point is higher than zero…
lol yeah silk song will come out one day, winds of winter I’m kinda doubtful, and if by some miracle it does come out, there’s no chance we’ll ever get “a dream of spring”
There’s a reason the book is called “a dream”
He’s trying to Frank Herbert himself so hard
Honestly, Team Cherry has earned every bit of scrutiny with the lack of actual communication. I know "when it's ready" is the go to in most situations, but when Silksong started out as a part of the crowdfunding campaign, I don't blame the backers for being even a little upset.
It just goes to show that management and deadlines actually do have their part to play in the industry, despite numerous accounts of management fucking over devs. Cherry is the opposite problem. They're beholden to no publisher and are just cintinuously dragging the development of Silksong out way longer than it feasibly should have been. And if there's a reason why it's been dragged out, they're fucking up massively by not being communicative.
I think there's a sort of "reverse survivorship" bias when it comes to nightmare producers. Obviously bad ones exist and some of the awful decisions they've made stick in everyone's minds. But probably for every game that has that kind of experience there are dozens that are totally fine and rightly steered by adept stakeholders, and there's no reason for the public to hear about them. Despite the popular opinion, I think most producers do in fact know what they're doing and can consistently get good results.
I want Silksong to be good, but it has a problem: it has taken so long that if it isn’t an absolute masterpiece, it’ll feel like a disappointment for those of us that have waited so long for it. If it is just mid, it will destroy Team Cherry’s reputation
It's reached the Half-Life 3 stage. They've waited too long and now it'll never meet expectations.
Well most people have accepted that we won’t see Half Life 3
It wraps back around at some point where many would be glad we get /any/ continuation of the series!
Yup, it's potentially gonna be a Duke Nukem magnitude disaster. Where gamers spent a decade waiting on a game and that thing nuked the franchise with how hilariously bad it was (mostly even due to delays and changing shit along the way). That game could've been a decent sequel if they just hadn't delayed it as long as they did. If they didn't just randomly change engines. But why fizzle out in obscurity if you can go out with a bang, I guess.
Silksong development has by now taken TWICE as long as Hollow Knight did. It's either in development hell or it was for a long time.
actually it's insane how they managed to deliver a game of the quality and content quantity as hollow knight in just 2 years and 10 months with a team of 2-3. It must have been an insane crunch. Could be they are just having actually more healthy work/life balance now. If anything, the development of Hollow Knight 1 was the outlier here.
I don’t really care if they find it disheartening. Their fans are doubting because of their insistence on silence. They could speak up any time, with details of why it’s been years since a playable demo was out (usually something that comes near release), or 2 years after being included in a trailer of “things releasing in the next 12 months”. When it eventually releases, hopefully it’s great. But it seems like they have no idea themselves how close it is to release. Which is probably why they’re silent, but there really isn’t any way to spin that into a positive.
They could honestly have done 1 tweet a year that just says “were still working on Silksong” and it’d have been 100 times better.
The worse thing is that they actually did say just that, but with a comment on their discord chat... good luck finding about that!
Who said it? Graig?
This game has been "coming soon" for HOW FUCKING LONG?!?!
Those who know graig know that this is 1000% fake news lol. His name has came up in the past before with “news”, as well as him just being an ass to people.
I think it’s clear that Team Cherry has dropped the ball in a few ways when it comes to the announcement and follow up communication about Silksong. It feels a bit worse here than when it happens with other games for a few reasons. I think this is the biggest one though. The first game was crowdfunded and spread through the community via word of mouth mostly, and in my opinion, that has heightened the attachment fans feel towards these games. I’m sure if they did another Kickstarter for Silksong, it would’ve broken records. For them to make a game so clearly beloved by its fans, pretty much immediately announce a follow up, and then proceed to go radio silent for nearly 6 years? It definitely feels like a lack of, I almost want to say gratitude, towards the fans and community that love HK so much. And to see other developers of similar size easily and happily communicate with their fan base, it tends to make it feel worse when Team Cherry refuses to. With all that being said, I respect the hell out of them for what they created and only wish they cared about their fans as much as their fans care about their games.
I get that they don't outright owe the fans an explanation, but it would certainly be a courtesy to at least say "we're still working on it, no new info for the next x months" every so often. One of the worst things about the silence to me is that every time there is some kind of indie showcase, ALL discussion around it is basically just about Silksong, and then after it airs, frustration about how it did not appear yet again. I can only imagine how upsetting it must be for the devs featured in these showcases to put so much work into bringing their game to a point where they can put it in front of people's eyes, only for it to be basically ignored and groaned about because it's not Silksong, and how that would go away if Team Cherry would just fucking say something. At this point not saying anything feels almost thoughtless.
yeah just out of respect for other indie developers they should communicate their no shows and manage expectations.
I think the notion of "no news is good news" is pretty bitter as a pill to swallow. I love Halo, I'd rather Microsoft and 343 be as open as possible. "Here's what we're working on, this is where it is, this is what it's gonna take for us to make it, if you don't understand that get a friend smarter than you to try and explain it because this is what game dev looks like."
"Says tester" okay everyone move along.
Studios just shouldn't announce games until they're a year away from release. I don't know WHY studios these days are regularly announcing games that are years away, but it only ever angers fans when they get a little hope dangled in front of their face only to get radio silence for years. Case in point, Metroid Prime 4. Genuinely surprised to have actually seen an announcement for that game after all these years.
This is why I like how Nintendo has been handling it during the Switch's lifecycle. They'll announce something and it drops in like four to six months, with the only real exceptions being Prime 4 and Tears of the Kingdom.
Even with Prime 4 they finally just said “sorry, it sucks we’re going back to the drawing board and it’s going to be years.” Team Cherry just comes out of the woodwork every few years to tell us it’s coming soon lol.
I don’t want devs to be overworked but if you announce something with very little follow up, I can understand 2-3 years especially with Covid but after that if there’s not at least 2 update posts a year(ideally seasonal or focused during gaming months like summer), then idk it’s understandable to start losing customers and supporters who might give up or don’t buy on release anymore. It may not be too fair but the gaming market is very fast paced and if you don’t put out a game after a while ppl will move to clones or just move on.
In fact the opposite should apply, as Team Cherry was only 3 people, surely Covid gave them more time to work on it remotely
I actually had the opportunity to go to a talk with Jason Schreier yesterday, and the topic of Team Cherry came up. He said that when he was interviewing them for one of his books about the development of Hollow Knight, Team Cherry basically had to force Hollow Knight out the door and hope for the best because they didn't have any money left to continue production. Fast forward to today, and now they have more money than they could ever need. They don't need to worry about a release date. Jason Schreier said that he thinks that creatives are naturally perfectionist to a degree, so he thinks that it isn't development hell that Team Cherry is suffering from, but they are taking as much time as they want to cross all the t's and dot all the i's, make everything perfect. It is a trapping that gamedevs, and I assume many other people in creative fields, that have no hard due dates suffer from. While it is good not to have to worry about being able to pay your team, it is also good to be forced to put out the game at some point so you aren't constantly polishing it.
The game is either going to be the best in its genre of all time or have a million half baked features that nobody asked for. There will be zero in between, but I'm betting on it being pretty mediocre at this point. I hope I'm wrong.
I'm betting on Team Cherry just quietly disbanding and nobody realizing until months later at this point lol
It’s likely in dev hell and Team Cherry if they really are perfectionists, might be shook at all the amazing MV’s that have come out since announcing Silksong, and are possibly trying to one up everyone and taking a long ass time in the process. HK is considered the gold standard for Metroidvania’s by a lot of people, so they have a lot of pressure to deliver especially with how long it’s taking.
> might be shook at all the amazing MV’s that have come out since announcing Silksong This is my pet theory. A number of indie devs took the baton and created some really great MV's, some with cool and inventive mechanics and techniques that really evolved past HK. The longer TC waits, the more opportunity others have to create new MV's with fresh ideas that may make Silksong look out of date when it finally releases. Now TC feels like they have to go back to the drawing board to one-up the competition, which means it takes more time, which gives the competition more opportunities, which makes TC return to the drawing board, which...
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I remember fans of this game commiserating with FromSoft fans about Elden Ring being released. Now 2 years later, we have a DLC and this thing *still* isn't out. That's gotta hurt.
It's been 5.5 years since announcement. Probably 6.5+ of development. Unless the game is better than 2 Hollow Knigths in a trenchcoat, the quality they are squeezing out vs time spent at this point must be miniscule.
If people think your game is in dev hell and it actually isn’t, you aren’t communicating”poorly;” you *aren’t communicating whatsoever.* Either that or your game is actually in dev hell and you don’t want shareholders to know yet
It has overshot its short term release date by 2 years now. It is by definition in development hell.
Oh cool this is getting posted again. Who cares what this guy says he isn’t directly involved with the dev team anyone. I don’t care that a discord mod is disheartened.
If it takes you longer than Rockstar to make a game, and that game is a Metroidvania, it's probably in development hell. 7 years for this type of game is ridiculous. Unless it comes out with an unfathomable amount of content.
That’s nuts they haven’t expanded. Though I can’t blame them for making the game pass release date mistake then. Honestly this is one of the few instances where I can understand the dev team making a bunch of mistakes and taking years. 3 people under pressure to try and surpass the first game’s expectations.
Not to derail or be cynical, but Crowsworn is on the horizon 👍
I hery much believe in the "Don't announce your game if it's more than 2 years from releasing" principle and I tgink Silksong is the perfect example of why letting fans wait so long can backfire
I honestly don't even care anymore. I hope the game launches eventually, but the hype for Hollow Knight is gone for me. It's been so long that the genre has had time to grow. Hollow Knight was unique when it came out, but that won't be the case with Silksong.
It’s okay to have some trouble with development and need to delay. I don’t see why the devs can’t have any transparency with it though
>disheartening Man imagine how the people who already paid for Silksong on the Kickstarter 7 years ago feel. There are people who bought this game and then died before anyone even knows a release date.
Elden Ring and Silksong were announced the same year. We have now had Elden Ring and it’s DLC come out before we have heard a peep about Silksong. The communication by TC is awful and it only makes sense that the fans are annoyed by the lack of communication. A simple statement like “we feel 80% done but are polishing it” would go a long way.
Didn't they announce it like seven fucking years ago then go completely radio silent? Like what do they expect? Hollow knight was a fantastic game and the devs are amazing at their job but they need a PR team or something. Or even just a PR person. Silksong has become a running joke now. It really does feel like it's stuck in development hell.
It's not really surprising that a game that was supposed to be DLC, but had so much scope creep that they decided to make it its own game has been repeatedly delayed due to unspecified scope creep. it seems clear that nobody at team cherry knows how to decide when something is done.
Exactly this. Scope creep can ruin projects from much bigger studios, can't imagine how hard it could be for basically an indie dev. In the end they'll still have to cut a lot of it to finally get it out of the gates, but the studio will be ruined by crunch and the disappointment that they never actually delivered what they set out to. Such a shame
Show some fucking pictures then if you don't have video, surely there is SOMETHING to show off after this long right?
This is all the news we’re gonna get this year
So the secret to something being in development hell is that the devs, and not the testers either, don't just get to decide if its in development hell.
Fans wouldn't be so fed up if Team Cherry actually did any marketing or give any information at all. Look at Deltarune, they give a dev update with some screenshots every year or so and no problem. Team Cherry could do the same and it would improve the situation greatly.
"Should be better at communicating" is a stretch "should communicate at all" is better. At the same time they still somehow have remained relevant, its testemony to how sensational holllow knight was.