Reset the clock – after previously hinting at it, Team Cherry has confirmed that Hollow Knight: Silksong will indeed receive new content. When is it coming? Therein lies the rub – studio founders Ari Gibson and William Penn don’t know.
Speaking to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, Gibson said, “We didn’t plan seven years for Silksong. Not that we expect to take an excessive amount of time, but we still are pursuing the same development philosophy, which sometimes can expand our timeframe.”
The fact that Silksong is getting new content isn’t all that surprising. After all, Hollow Knight also received DLC – fairly quickly at that, with Hidden Dreams arriving a mere six months after. However, as Gibson notes, “The nature of some of that DLC was quite small.
“In the way we think about these little expansions, or even the elements of the main game, now there might be more of a sense that we want story structures around them that weren’t present in some of the Hollow Knight expansions. We added a few extra bosses, but the framing around it was all fairly simplistic,” he continued.
“If we add stuff now, because Hornet has this voice and mind, we want to find out what she thinks about this stuff. Once you start having her think about this stuff, story starts to happen, and then that could increase the scale of any expansion we did.”
Of course, it’s no secret that Silksong began as DLC for Hollow Knight before eventually blossoming into a full-fledged title. Whether the cycle will repeat itself remains to be seen, but at the very least, Team Cherry is enjoying what it does.
When asked if they spent a specific amount of time adding to a title before moving on, Penn said, “We haven’t thought that much about the time, but we’ve thought about the ideas that we have, the stuff we want to make and put in there.”
“And then we do have other games that we plan to make,” added Penn. The only time concern really is — and we’ve talked about this before — death. It’s not that far off if you spend seven years per project, and potentially add another two. So it’d be nice to do a few more games. Apparently, our timeframe still allows us to fit a few more in. Short of an unexpected tragedy.”
Hollow Knight: Silksong is available for Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PS4, PS5, PC, Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2. It reportedly crossed five million players in three days, and while Team Cherry didn’t share sales numbers, Schreier noted that “millions” of copies were sold.
