After eight years, Silksong is here, and it’s tough. Very tough, actually, to the point where some players believe it’s much harder than its 2017 predecessor, Hollow Knight. That difficulty increase is exactly by design, though, according to Team Cherry in a new interview.
As spotted by Dexerto while attending Melbourne’s ACMI Game Worlds exhibition, Team Cherry co-director Ari Gibson and developer William Pellen spoke to the exhibition’s co-curator Jini Maxwell for a new book. In the book, the ACMI Guide: Hollow Knight Silksong, Gibson and Pellen contextualize why the sequel is harder than the original, and it’s actually because of Hornet.
When designing the game with Hornet as the playable character, Team Cherry had to buff the enemies she faced. The team’s overall philosophy was to “bring everyone else up to match [Hornet’s] level.”
“Hornet is inherently faster and more skillful than the Knight–so even the base-level enemy had to be more complicated, more intelligent,” Gibson said.
“The basic ant warrior is built from the same move-set as the original Hornet boss,” Pellen added. “The same core set of dashing, jumping, and dashing down at you, plus we added the ability to evade and check you. In contrast to the Knight’s enemies, Hornet’s enemies had to have more ways of catching her as she tries to move away.”
That explains why you may find some regular grunts impenetrable in Silksong as you flip over and dive into their skulls. But what about bosses, like the Savage Beastfly or Sister Splinter? Team Cherry doesn’t have as neat an answer here, but Gibson believes that the myriad “choices” at your disposal should alleviate the pain.
“The important thing for us is that we allow you to go way off the path,” Gibson said. “So one player may choose to follow it directly to its conclusion, and then another may choose to constantly divert from it and find all the other things that are waiting and all the other ways and routes. Silksong has some moments of steep difficulty–but part of allowing a higher level of freedom within the world means that you have choices all the time about where you’re going and what you’re doing.”
And if, say, the Widow is kicking your face in? Team Cherry isn’t too worried about you. Because of the “choices” the metroidvania genre inherently offers you, Gibson explained, there are more options than simply banging your head against a particularly tough boss.
“That’s fine,” he said. “[Players] have ways to mitigate the difficulty via exploration, or learning, or even circumventing the challenge entirely, rather than getting stonewalled.”
Still, there’s no denying that the sequel is punishing. So much so that players have created mods to ease the difficulty, and Team Cherry has patched the game to be easier while working on another one to address bugs (not the ones you fight against). Suffice to say, the studio is aware of how hard its sequel is. Despite this, Silksong has reportedly sold more than four million copies since its September 4 launch. Hard games sell.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is out now on Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, PC, PS4 and 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S.
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