It’s been a long time since I’ve talked about this game, and I was actually starting to think that I might never talk about it again. The wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong has been a long one, with release dates coming and going and only the briefest updates going out evvery couple of years.

Honestly, when Team Cherry went radio silent again after Xbox announced that the game would be coming in 2023, I kind of just wrote it off as just another victim of development hell and moved on. Yet, here we are two years later and not only does Silksong have a release date, it’s supposed to come out just a little over a week from now!

A little while ago, I included Hollow Knight as one of my top ten games of the 2010s, so I was, for a good while, really looking forward to playing Hollow Knight: Silksong whenever it eventually released. As I mentioned above, though, I eventually came to a point where I just wanted to move on after years of waiting without any substantial news or updates. I was even feeling a little salty still when this trailer released a few days ago, saying to my friends that I might pick it up for a while.

Then I read an interview with Team Cherry published by Bloomberg and Jason Schrier, wherein Team Cherry said that the reason that the game took so long was that they were just having a ton of fun developing it. They apparently just wanted to keep on adding stuff and didn’t really seem to care (or notice) how much time was passing. In other words, development took so long not because there were any major problems, but rather that it was just that smooth and fun of a process.

That got me thinking a little bit. Perhaps we, as fans and gamers, actually do get a little entitled sometimes. Not so much in a way that we’ve been largely accused of (demanding less predatory monetization and that games being largely finished upon release isn’t being “entitled” as far as I’m concerned), but rather that we seem to think that there’s an “acceptable” period of time between announcement and release. And, once that period passes, it becomes acceptable to get upset at game developers for getting our collective hopes up, so to speak.

Perhaps there’s something to be said for trying not to announce new games too early, but I’m guessing there are often unavoidable circumstances that turn what should have been an appropriate time to announce into something that’s entirely too early.

In Team Cherry’s case, perhaps Silksong was in the state they were initially going for back in 2023, but they knew they could make it even better and decided not to string us along with more release windows and such and just focus on the work instead. That’s passion, and it should be admired. In other words, I don’t think any of us have any grounds to be upset. What we’re getting in a couple of weeks will almost certainly be leagues better than what we would have gotten in 2023, meaning that the wait will have been worrth it.

I don’t know if I’m going to be there Day 1 or not (gotta be careful with when I buy stuff these days), but I’m definitely looking forward to seeing what Team Cherry was so enjoying developing for these past seven years. How about you?

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Are you excited for Silksong? Do you think gamers are entitled to information once a game has been announced or should we just be patient like we had to be in the old magazine days?

Image from the Steam page