Evie Wada

In 2019, Team Cherry–the game developer company of the critically acclaimed indie game “Hollow Knight”–announced the start of production on a continuation of the previous game, “Hollow Knight: Silksong.” Since the announcement, Team Cherry’s release goal was the first half of 2023. Since then, it has been delayed several times, with no current release date set. Now, many fans are wondering where the game is going.

This is due to multiple reasons. For one, “Silksong” was originally meant to be an add on to “Hollow Knight.” The game was meant to add another player character, Hornet, one of the main antagonists of “Hollow Knight.” However, as Team Cherry began development, they decided to switch to a full sequel instead of an expansion of the original world. The new game will take place in a completely different kingdom known as Pharloom instead of the original kingdom of Hallownest. This added more delays to the release, as Team Cherry originally had the padding of an almost finished map, meaning they only had to add the expanded areas. The introduction of Pharloom meant that Team Cherry would have to design, code and test a huge part of the new game.

 To make matters worse, as the team began development of the new map, they realized they wanted to make it much bigger than they had originally planned. This probably wouldn’t have been such a big deal to other developers, but Team Cherry has quite a small team as an independent, indie developer; the team consists of three people, with Ari Gibson and Willaim Pellin as Co-Directors, and Jack Vine as coder. The team has limited resources as an indie game company, fully creating “Hollow Knight” in one of the team’s basements.

However, “Hollow Knight: Silksong” isn’t the only game that’s suffered from release date changes or delays due to game developers, but that might not be all that bad. Several popular video games such as “Undertale” by Toby Fox and “Cuphead” by Studio MDHR were released years after the developers announced their initial release date due to unexpected bugs, wanting to add more content, or other reasons. While fans were displeased with the delays at first, the quality on release made up for it, and overall the games were well received.

On the flip side, you have games that force themselves to honor their deadlines; this results in a rushed, poorly made game and a worse user experience. Nintendo’s “Pokémon: Scarlet/Violet” was initially released on Nov. 18, 2022, and was the franchise’s second attempt at an open world game. Upon the successful release of their first attempt in, “Pokémon: Legends of Arceus,” Nintendo rushed “Scarlet/Violet,” leading to a laggy experience full of glitches and poor graphics. 

In a society where most people work 8 hours a day, 40 hours a week, it’s easy to look at developers who may be only working half of those hours and write them off as lazy or only in it for the money. However, this usually isn’t the case. Game development is an art, and if developers aren’t extremely passionate about what they are making, then chances are they won’t be able to produce a good game.

 As a result, when developers feel burnt out after working on the same project for years, their best course of action is to take a break or slow down, even if it means delaying the game’s release. Playing a complete game that a developer truly enjoyed making will be a significantly better experience than playing a game that a developer forced themselves to finish, even if it means waiting an extra year or two.

Furthermore, the lack of game delays and frequent updates to current games aren’t always enough to please all fans. The hit Sandbox game “Minecraft” has continually received backlash from the fanbase, despite giving fans yearly content updates with minimal delays. Players are upset at the amount of game data being wasted by Mojang–the game’s developer– because of their use of mob votes, which only allow one of the proposed three mobs to be added to the game despite the company having coded most aspects of all three options into the game for demonstrations. Fans were also upset about the company changing some parts of promised updates, like the removal of fireflies, as well as the lack of a promised update to the Birch Forest biome.

Overall, we think game developers get too much hate. They pour their heart into the games they make that fans will enjoy playing and creators will enjoy developing, all while trying to navigate the social stereotypes towards them and fans’ ever changing expectations. While it may be frustrating having to wait through delays for updates or even game releases, it’s important to understand why these delays occur, and that they usually lead to a better final product.