After a six-year delay, the debut of "Hollow Knight: Silksong" crashed the Steam servers | Discover Great Games

Text by: Dried Fruit, Cherry Blossom Tunnel

At 22:00 last night, "Hollow Knight: Silksong", which had been "postponed" for 6 years, finally launched, fulfilling the long - held wishes of many players. After all, this game has made players wait for far too many years, and it has a "record" of multiple post - ponements after setting release dates. It's no wonder that it has given many people a sort of "PTSD", and players respectfully call it "Silk Pigeon".

Hollow Knight: Silksong

Even now that the game has actually launched, there are still quite a few players making jokes about it.

Players' joking comments

Of course, this kind of joking basically stems from players' high recognition of "Hollow Knight". Before the launch, the confirmed release date of "Silksong" forced many game manufacturers to adjust their promotion schedules to avoid its edge. After the launch, "Silksong" truly showed how popular it was. Since the game didn't have pre - orders, players bought and played it right away. This directly caused Steam's servers to crash yesterday due to a large number of players flooding in to place orders. Similarly, the servers of console platforms such as Switch and Xbox were not spared either, and many players got stuck on the payment page.

Players who couldn't buy the game right away didn't forget to keep making jokes: The servers that prevented them from successfully purchasing the game became the first "Boss" that many "Silksong" players had to face.

Steam servers crashed due to Silksong

There's no way around it. "Hollow Knight" is truly in a league of its own when it comes to indie games. As of now, the global sales of "Hollow Knight" have exceeded 15 million copies, with cumulative revenues of over 1 billion RMB. However, its development team, Team Cherry, only has 3 members. At many game release exhibitions in the past, the calls for the sequel "Silksong" were even louder than those for many well - known AAA blockbusters.

Of course, the fact that it still retains players' trust and expectations after so many post - ponements is mainly because Team Cherry has built up a solid reputation in the past.

"Hollow Knight" first became popular under the name "Hungry Knight" in a game competition. After starting a crowdfunding campaign and officially entering development, it was postponed from the originally planned 2015 all the way to 2017. Although they explained at the time that it was to polish the game, many people probably worried that the developers would "run away with the money". It wasn't until the game finally launched that it proved itself with high - quality and high - completion.

The appearance of "Silksong" later also has a similar element of fate and accident. In the original plan, "Silksong" was just a DLC for "Hollow Knight", where players would play as "Hornet" to explore a new map. But as the development went deeper, Team Cherry had more and more ideas, and the game grew bigger and bigger. So, "Silksong" was postponed again and again, and finally appeared as a sequel after 6 years.

After its release, "Silksong" unsurprisingly topped the global best - selling list, with over 500,000 concurrent players globally.

Trend chart of online players of Silksong

In terms of product performance, "Silksong" has made many changes compared to the previous work. For example, the charm system has been removed, and more emphasis is placed on the forgeable and upgradable equipment and item systems. The map style has also become brighter and more vibrant, emphasizing the use of multi - layered colors to create a sense of space. In terms of combat, the game also places more emphasis on rhythm and operation techniques. The protagonist's healing skill is more difficult to accumulate, and the single - use healing amount has increased. Players can easily switch between the "near - death" and "full - health" states.

New equipment and item systems in Silksong

Combat screen of Silksong

Scene screen of Silksong

However, "Silksong" hasn't had a smooth journey in the past two days. For example, the quality of the Chinese translation of the game has been criticized by many players. It uses a lot of awkward and hard - to - understand expressions, which are neither modern nor classical. Some people even think that "it's better to let an AI machine - translate it".

Simplified Chinese translation of Silksong

Steam players left negative reviews due to the simplified Chinese translation

Considering that the core members of the team are only 3 people, this might not be Team Cherry's fault. It's just that they didn't find a good localization team. After all, similar problems are often seen in the Chinese texts of many foreign indie games. However, for a work of "Silksong"'s scale, such localization problems really shouldn't occur.

Combined with the server crash problem that occurred yesterday, "Silksong" has received "mixed" reviews at the beginning. Although the game's ratings will probably improve in a few days, quickly solving the specific problems is essentially the attitude that the production team needs to show to the players.

Silksong received "mixed" reviews

This article is from the WeChat official account "36Kr Games". Author: Dried Fruit. Published by 36Kr with authorization.