Why did Hollow Knight: Silksong take so long to make?

If you haven't played the original, you're missing out (whether you need to before Silksong is another question). Many people have, of course, which makes the long wait for the sequel quite baffling.

But why did Silksong take so long to make? It's complicated, which is why we've put together a quick explainer to tell you what you need to know.

Why did Silksong take so long to make?

There are a few reasons, so strap in. First things first, let's go through how Silksong came about.

Initially, Silksong was meant to be a DLC for the original Hollow Knight game. Eventually, as Team Cherry added more and more content, the scope of the project became too big.

At this point, the decision was made to dump the DLC idea, and to turn Silksong into its own fully-fledged game.

After that, we didn't learn much about the development process until a recent interview with Bloomberg in which the developers shared some of the reasons for the game's now infamously long development cycle.

First up, the team were simply having too much fun working on the project. "We've been having fun. The whole thing is just a vehicle for our creativity anyway. It's nice to make fun things," explained Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson.

Second, the team wanted to make sure that Silksong lived up to the hype, and with such a small team, that couldn’t happen quickly.

"It was never stuck or anything. 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," Gibson said.

The third main reason for it taking so long is simply that, similar to why it moved from a DLC to its own game, the project just kept growing.

Despite "a period of two to three years when [co-founder William Pellen] thought it was going to come out within a year," the team continued to add more content, which caused the development time to continue spiralling.

More content also means more aspects of the game that require polishing.

"There's a level of finish that has to be met throughout the entire game. All the ways the systems interact, all the hidden work that pops up later on. It's multiplicative. As you add stuff, the process of tying it all back together just increases," Pellen explained.

So, that's the gist of it! A small team having fun making a huge game that grew incessantly, who wanted to ensure that the game was of the quality their devoted fanbase was expecting.

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