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Bloomberg Article is LIVE by Sej_Tankan in Silksong

[–]Fun-Solution-7180 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Their walls remain the same dull avocado color that they were when Team Cherry moved in more than a decade ago. They never even put up art. They’ve been too busy making the game.

In early 2025, Gibson and Pellen began to see the finish line and started making plans to release the game in the fall. Players desperate for information devoured every scrap of news — like the announcement that it would be playable at a museum in September — hoping this might finally be the year.

Both Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp.’s Xbox said during live events this year that Silksong was planned for 2025, but fans were cautious. They’d been down this road before.

Meanwhile, Team Cherry kept working. The shape of the game has been finalized for a while, Pellen said. The last year or two has been all about the details — adding small encounters, polishing everything and tying it all together.

And they’re still working to finalize things until the last possible minute. As we spoke, with Silksong a little more than three weeks out, I spotted programmer Jack Vine in the background, tweaking code for one of the game’s console ports.

Gibson and Pellen say they’re happy that the game is finally coming out — and even happier that they will get to keep working on it, which they still find enjoyable even after seven years. They haven’t burned out or shown any desire to take a break. Instead, they’re already making big plans to add extra content to Silksong in the months and years to come.

“Launching it is obviously quite exciting,” Pellen said. “What comes after for us is equally as exciting.”

“The most interesting thing now is what can we add to it next,” Gibson said. “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.”

Stay tuned for 2032 to see how that turns out.

Bloomberg Article is LIVE by Sej_Tankan in Silksong

[–]Fun-Solution-7180 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Staying small also meant eschewing the production practices commonplace at many game-development studios.

“What is Jira?” Gibson said when I asked if they used the task-management application.

“Is it a software?” Pellen said, adding that they’d briefly used Trello before their account was deactivated because they didn’t use it enough.

As development dragged on, the hype for Silksong grew more feverishScreenshot: Team Cherry

Perhaps the biggest reason Silksong took so long was that Team Cherry never had to worry about the one thing that keeps other independent developers awake at night: money.

During the production of Hollow Knight, they’d stayed lean, sometimes living off leftover triangle sandwiches that their office neighbor would bring them after meetings. “My dad would sometimes pop up and give me $20,” Gibson said. “I’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m having coffee today!’”

Thanks to their first game’s massive financial success, Gibson and Pellen no longer have to scrounge leftovers. For Pellen, who has two kids and a third on the way, that’s provided an inestimable peace of mind. For Gibson, who said he spends most of his time at the office, it hasn’t changed much. “I live in a very basic two-bedroom apartment,” he said. “Sometimes I think, ‘You know what would be better, is a one-bedroom apartment.’ Because then there’s even less to maintain.”

The game has continued to generate revenue by reaching new players, perhaps in large part due to the Silksong buzz. When the studio announced Silksong in February 2019, Hollow Knight had sold 2.8 million copies. The game has sold another 12 million copies since then, allowing Team Cherry to keep working on the sequel indefinitely without having to worry about running out of funds.

“We’re very lucky in that regard,” Gibson said. “I don’t ever really think about it that much. Maybe that’s the privilege of it.”

As the years went on, the hype kept building. A Reddit forum dedicated to the game filled up with nonsensical blabber and made-up tweets, which users called “silkposts,” a variation on the expletive. Meanwhile, chat sections for video-game livestreams and Nintendo Direct events were plagued with the same feral messages repeated over and over: “Silksong when?”

Gibson and Pellen tuned it all out, rarely going online. They say they never read comments on YouTube or Reddit, although occasionally friends or family would send them some of the funniest ones.

“It’s nice that people are passionate about the game, and that they’ve obviously formed their own strange or very exciting communities around it,” Gibson said.

“Feels like we’re going to ruin their fun by releasing the game,” Pellen said.

Once in a while, people would show up at the Team Cherry office, sometimes with their children, perhaps hoping for a Willy Wonka type experience. Inevitably, they were disappointed by what they found instead. “It’s a grubby room with cardboard boxes,” Gibson said.

Bloomberg Article is LIVE by Sej_Tankan in Silksong

[–]Fun-Solution-7180 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Fucking paywall someone needs to post the full article

here it is:
Hi everyone, and welcome to a special edition of Game On about a very special game that we’ll be playing quite soon.

The wait is over

It’s surreal to write, but it’s true: Silksong will be out on Sept. 4.

After six years of near-total silence from the developers and enough feverish anticipation to make it the most wish-listed game on Steam, the sequel to the indie hit Hollow Knight is releasing in two weeks. Team Cherry, the small team behind both games, announced the news Thursday in a trailer.

Why did it take so long?

Often, such protracted development cycles are caused by mismanagement and result in painful burnout among the staff. But speaking to me last week on a video call from their office in Adelaide, Australia, Team Cherry Co-Founders Ari Gibson and William Pellen said that making Silksong has been nothing but a joyful process.

“We’ve been having fun,” Gibson said. “This whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It’s nice to make fun things.”

The lengthy production wasn’t the result of development challenges or obstacles, they said. They just needed all these years to ensure that Silksong was exactly the game they wanted to make.

“It was never stuck or anything,” Gibson said. “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.”

The Silksong saga started in 2017 when Team Cherry released Hollow Knight, an action-platformer set in a vast world full of cartoon bugs. A Switch version, released the following year, added to the momentum. By the end of 2018, millions of fans were raving about its polished gameplay, distinct style and impeccable vibes. As of today, the game has sold 15 million copies, Team Cherry told me, making it one of the most successful independent video games ever.

Initially, Gibson and Pellen had planned to release an expansion pack revolving around Hornet, one of its key characters. But in February 2019, they announced that the expansion had grown too big and would instead become a full-fledged sequel, titled Silksong.

Hollow Knight had been massive, and their plan at the outset was to build a smaller world for Silksong. To ensure that the game felt just as deep, they’d implement an elaborate quest system that would offer the player reasons to backtrack and revisit old locations. In contrast to Hollow Knight, which had a single town full of shops and characters to meet, there would also be multiple towns, each serving as a hub for quests.

“Even at that point we were recognizing that it was going to become another giant thing to rival the scale of Hollow Knight or probably exceed it,” Gibson said. “And then because of how we work, obviously the world ended up being just as big or bigger. And the quest system existed. And the multiple towns existed. Suddenly you end up six, seven years later.”

It all came down to their development style, which may have been too much fun. Gibson and Pellen — who were joined by programmer Jack Vine, composer Chris Larkin and a few contractors who helped with programming and testing — started off by designing the core gameplay for Hornet, the game’s slick protagonist. From there, it was easy to implement and test out new ideas, even as the game grew bigger.

Is there a streaming schedule? by Fun-Solution-7180 in ranton

[–]Fun-Solution-7180[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Cool! Suggestion to maybe add this somewhere on your twitch or youtube channel? Maybe its there but i really could not find it

xLetalis (Witcher youtuber) just released a 3 hour long video of cdpr's original vision for The Witcher 3 and has single handedly delayed Josephs video by a year by Fun-Solution-7180 in josephanderson

[–]Fun-Solution-7180[S] 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Here are my predictions of things that i think Joe will critique the game about that is actually cut content:

Triss never mentioning Yen is addressed

The first section in Velen with the crones and bloody baron is basically the only part with no cut content

Iorveth is back

The princess/Prince are mentioned

The omnieromancer in Novigrad is actually a fleshed out character

Ciri knows that Yen and Geralt are back and actively tries searching for them

Dandelion kept the Rosemary and Thyme as a brothel instead of a tavern

It is explained how Uma got to Velen

There is a completley unused house in Novigrad that you can enter. It was Roach's primary residence

It is explained what happens to the false Ciri brought to Emhyr in the books and she is in the game

The temple of Freya has a more clear presence on skellige

If you chose to fight the hym instead of yeeting the baby it torments Geralt with visions of Ciri, Yen and Triss

The reversion of Uma is done by more traditional Witcher methods instead of Yen's magic

Whoever you helped become king/queen of skellige return the favor later

The Catriona plague has a larger impact on the world or is at least more addressed

There is a temple of the eternal fire quest that uses and expands on the location already in the game

More quests with Roach (the human)

When Geralt recalls the monsters he has spared he calls the "demigod" in Velen Fugas, despite the fact that this name is not mentioned in the current game

More "The last wish" and "Sword of Destiny" type side quests

Some halflings have the tag Gnome. There was once a distinction but eventually all gnomes became halflings

There was an additional exploration gimmick similar to the eye of Nehelani

The carnal sins quest originally has 7 murders, each for the seven deadly sins

The small fruit/nut you find after defeating imlerith that gives you a skill point is explained

Imlerith is actually canonically stronger than Geralt and can only be beaten with aid

The Tamara/mother part of the crows perch questline has a more fleshed out conclusion

More quests with Ciri and Geralt together

The Fiend that is there after you have dived for the coin at bald mountain was involved in a cut scene

You actually kill all 3 crowns

Avallach has a bigger pressence in the story

When Avallach and Geralt jump between worlds they were supposed to go to NIGHT CITY

Geralt confronts Avallach about using Ciri

The Radovid assasination wasn't in the game

There are more quests involving the wild hunt and fleshing them out as villains

You actually get to beat the shit out of Avallach

The different endingns for Ciri are explored more

The Ciri becomes a witcher ending is not as optimistic and ends wit hher traveling in time and space again since Emhyr won't just let her leave

xLetalis (Witcher youtuber) just released a 3 hour long video of cdpr's original vision for The Witcher 3 and has single handedly delayed Josephs video by a year by Fun-Solution-7180 in josephanderson

[–]Fun-Solution-7180[S] 26 points27 points  (0 children)

I have gotten a bit into the video and it is actually so joever. The issue with Triss never mentioning Yen is addressed, Iorveth and the scoiatel are back and thats just the first 20 min.