Team Cherry has confirmed it’s still working on new content for Hollow Knight: Silksong, but won’t say when it’s coming out.
The long-awaited adventure was finally released in September to huge fanfare. And it would seem the developers aren’t done with it yet.
“We didn’t plan seven years for Silksong,” Team Cherry co-founder Ari Gibson told Bloomberg. “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.”
Silksong, infamously, began life as DLC for the original Hollow Knight game before ballooning into a full standalone game.
It’s unclear exactly what the studio is working on, and if that too has the potential to balloon in size.
Bloomberg has speculated a DLC focused on Steel Assassin Sharpe may be in the works. This character was teased in a studio blog post years ago, but wasn’t included in the final game.
“Just waiting in the wings,” said Gibson of the character. “Waiting to arrive is probably the best way to say it. One of those enemies, a little suite of Sharpe and their companions, they got tucked away for a while because the game had so much in it. And all of these pieces need polish, and polish takes time. We’re excited to reintroduce Sharpe. We just have to get to them.”
Gibson added: “We will make sure to deliver on all of our obligations. One, because they’re going to be very fun to do. But even alongside those tasks we had our own ideas for extra things that could be added to the world. We’re trying to juggle when that could potentially be.”
Bloomberg also asked Team Cherry if they wish to shorten the time for their next game.
“At the start of Silksong, and at the start of Hollow Knight, we had no conception it would take as long as it did for either game,” said co-founder William Pellen. “We started to work on the basic idea of it, and allowed it to grow as much as we wanted it to. We could’ve stopped that from growing if we’d wanted to. I imagine we’ll go on to the next game, again with that core idea and begin exploring it and start to suss out what the boundaries will end up being.”
Gibson added: “We’re clearly not concerned if it ends up taking a long period of time.”
For now, the pair are “certainly happy with where [Silksong] is sitting right now, and we’re not planning anything dramatic at this point,” said Gibson, following multiple balance tweaks and updates.
He continued: “We’re also quite happy where technically it’s sitting, noting that we will continue to do small fixes of course. And we are looking at what else can we do, what else can be brought to the experience and how that world can expand. I don’t know how much we can really speak about it. We’re playing a little coy again. But that’s also because this stuff is in flux.”
The pair are considering different sizes of updates too, similar to the smaller Lifeblood or larger Godmaster and Grimm Troupe from Hollow Knight.
Said Pellen: “We were talking about the next project in general. We’re not thinking about the size. We just started making new stuff and working on bits and pieces. We’re still in this world, thinking about stuff to present to people.”
Information will come “soon”, but the pair wouldn’t be drawn to a timeframe and said they’ll have a more frequent cadence of communication as there’s more to discuss.
Gibson surmised: “Yes, we’re continuing to work on the game, we’re pursuing the things that excite us.”
This will certainly be exciting news for Silksong fans, too. “Pretty and charmingly mean-spirited, this is a game filled with revelations and genuine personality,” reads our five star Hollow Knight: Silksong review.
In the same interview, the pair also discussed Silksong’s imposing challenge and the use of mods to alter the difficulty.