Silksong news I never covered until now (Script)

 I am 100% confident there will be Silksong news at the Game Awards tomorrow. My uncle, who’s name and likeness must be kept completely hidden for his own safety, is actually an employee at the Game Awards, and he mentioned that Silksong news was definitely coming. So I figured it was time to go back and cover some of the random bits of Silksong news we received since my last video that I didn’t cover at the time.

The main piece of news happened back in September, when Silksong was officially announced for release on the Sony PlayStations 4 and 5. [Source] So if you’re one of those arugula eating fat cats that can afford to buy a scalped PlayStation 5 off eBay, well aren’t you lucky? While we always expected that Silksong would come to Sony consoles eventually, for most of Silksong’s development, the only official console it was confirmed for was the Nintendo Switch. Team Cherry talked about this all the way back in the distant past of 2019.

Ari: We should just say we haven't confirmed other consoles. That's just because it's just the three of us. It's just myself and William and Jack and we don't want to just start diving into things that are probably more than our bandwidth really allows.

 

William: Yeah I think, basically we can't confirm any other platforms at launch but we'd love more platforms. Whether that's at launch or not, we're not sure so we'll just keep talking about it as we go, basically.

Ari: Exactly. [Source]

Team Cherry hasn’t officially confirmed if all the console releases will be happening at the same time. But it seems pretty likely that this will be the case, mainly because we were told the Xbox release of the game will happen within 12 months from June 12th, 2022, which isn’t too far away at this point. [Source] Now, this information came from Microsoft, not Team Cherry, which led some people to doubt its validity. But the June 12th, 2023 deadline was confirmed by the admins of the Hollow Knight Discord Server, who are actual Silksong playtesters. So unless something goes horribly wrong with development, the June 12th release date deadline is accurate.

Regardless, we can assume that Team Cherry’s decision to release Silksong for Xbox and PlayStation has likely slowed down the game’s initial planned release a fair bit. It’s unavoidable given that Team Cherry is such a small team, and porting to additional consoles will always take more time, even if they require less game optimizations than the potato that is the Nintendo Switch. Of course, it’s possible Team Cherry hired a different studio to handle porting, considering they hired Shark Jump to help them port Hollow Knight to the Switch back in 2018. But even then, these things take time.

Another exciting aspect of the PlayStation port announcement are six new Silksong screenshots which were posted on the PlayStation website. Except, they aren’t on the actual website. You can only see them if you use the mobile app. Yeah, everything has to have an app these days, And they trick you into downloading them with enticing offers like free food and video game screenshots. That said, I found out I can use the app to turn on my scalped PlayStation 5 I bought off eBay without even picking up the controller. Neat!

Not only are these images in stunning 4K resolution, but they also give us a few glimpses at a new crest Hornet can unlock. It looks like some kind of bow and arrow, leading me to believe it gives Hornet some kind of ranged attack related to her silk meter. We can also see a new tool on the HUD.

It appears to be some kind of yellow bobbin that exists separate from the default one. Perhaps this tool gives Hornet some free silk when resting at a bench. sort of like the charms in Hollow Knight that give you extra Lifeblood Masks. We’ve seen a few of these tools that augment Hornet’s health and silk, such as this green bead and giant mask, but the exact specifics of how they work are difficult to parse just through screenshots.

What’s also interesting about these screenshots is that they give us another look at scenes we first saw all the way back when Silksong was announced. Some areas like the golem arena and the bell tunnels seem to have been toned down a bit in terms of color. And this guy’s boss arena looks completely different now, although it’s possible that this fight might have multiple phases or encounters, or they just moved the fight to a different room. The pointy red rocks we see on the ceiling are reminiscent of the rocks we saw in the Xbox trailer, implying that these regions might not be that far apart. This screenshot of the Moss Grotto appears to be in the same room as another screenshot we got from the Edge magazine interview. And this screenshot includes a glimpse of a new flying lily pad enemy. Now some people find this “thing” cute. But personally, I think it’s very unsettling to look at so I’m going to cover it up with something more palatable. 

That’s it for PlayStation related news, but as it turns out, there was actually some Silksong information over on the Xbox website that nobody in the community noticed until October. Remember all those screenshots we got back in June? As it turns out, these image files actually have names that tell us a little bit about them. [Source] This first image is called “citadel-entrance”. This pretty much confirms that this area we’ve been seeing in trailers and screenshots is in fact the Citadel and this area that looks somewhat like an entrance is actually an entrance. Next we have “crest-reaper”. This confirms that Hornet obtains the Reaper Crest upgrade from this event, which was speculated back in June due to the effect that appears as Hornet performs open heart surgery on the guy who fell asleep first at the sleepover. 

This third image is called “far-fields”, finally giving us a name to this region we saw extensively back in June. This implies that this area might be pretty far away, towards the far end of the world map, which is exactly where I put it on my map from the last video, which means that map is probably 100% accurate. Maybe 120?

This image is called “hall-battle”, implying that this portion of the Citadel is known as the halls. This image is called “moorwing-garmond-battle”, which implies this creature is called a Moorwing. This image is called “last-judge-battle”. I honestly have no idea what this could mean. However, this image has a pretty interesting name: “shellwood-barb-trap”. I assume that “barb trap” refers to the weapon Hornet is using, but the phrase “shellwood” is a bit more mysterious. It could be referring to the region this takes place in. Perhaps this area is called the Shellwood Swamp? Shellwood is mentioned a grand total of two times in Hollow Knight, both in reference to Zote’s nail, Life Ender, so it’s nice to see Team Cherry incorporating this into Silksong as well. I know lots of people in the Hollow Knight community have been hungry for more wood lore.

Finally, we have the image “steps-judge-enemy-battle”. The word “judge” implies that this enemy is indeed linked to the Last Judge in some way, which makes sense considering how similar their designs are. “Steps” might imply that this area is leading somewhere higher up, perhaps to some structure of significance. Honestly, this one has me scratching my head a bit so let me know in the comments if you have any ideas.

This isn’t really a screenshot, but there’s also this image, which appears to be the title screen for Silksong. But I want to go back to one of these images, Far Fields. This image actually caused a bit of a discussion among those of us who do nothing but stare at Silksong screenshots all day. This screenshot appears to be from an exact location we saw in the Xbox trailer, but there’s something noticeably different. Hopefully the difference can still be seen through YouTube’s horrible compression, but the shot from the trailer actually has a more blurry background than the screenshot. And if we look at the other new Silksong screenshots, we can see that they tend to have a stronger blur placed on them versus the screenshots we saw back in 2019 and 2020. Worst of all, the Lace fight in the flower filled room. Look how blurry it is compared to the original. It’s even worse when you compare it to this non-blurry image of my new PlayStation 5. What exactly is going on here?

While Hollow Knight consists of a lot of hand drawn sprites and animations, there is additional post processing that happens which alters the final image shown on screen. Ever notice how the Knight is just always glowing like it’s a pile of radioactive waste? That’s the result of a bloom effect that helps draw attention to the character and give the game some appearance of lighting. There’s also a vignette filter placed over the game as well, which darkens the corners of the screen. The developers also add a very subtle film grain effect which adds random noise to the final image. And then, of course, there’s a blur effect which is applied to elements in the background.

Even though we play Hollow Knight in two dimensions, the rooms in the game are actually set in a 3D environment, with all the different assets for the game layered in front of each other. This allows Team Cherry to create a parallax scrolling effect, where objects in the background move more slowly than objects in the foreground as the camera moves through the space. Of course, you can program parallax scrolling in a 2D environment, but according to Team Cherry, this method is way easier. [Source] The end result is a collection of rooms with potentially hundreds of 2D images strategically placed within a 3D space to give the illusion of a filled out room.

From here, the backgrounds can be blurred, creating a depth of field effect which imitates how our eyes actually work, and helps make the backgrounds appear further away. Another benefit of this effect is that it helps the player focus on the part of the image that actually matters, the place where all the interactable terrain and enemies are.

The obvious downside to all this is that we can’t see all of Hollow Knight’s environments and architecture. All of that beautiful Ari Gibson artwork is hidden away from us forever. With this recent revelation surrounding Silksong’s backgrounds, some members in the community are hoping that there will be some kind of toggle or slider that reduces the blur. In Hollow Knight, there is a setting that adjusts blur quality. But that’s not exactly the same thing as decreasing blur and there’s no way to turn this effect off entirely. And there’s a very good reason for this.

In reality, the blur is actually hiding something. Let’s take a look at the Pale King statue in the Queen’s Garden. I’ve always wanted to see this thing up close and personal. Turn off the blur and… it just looks off. Same thing with the Teacher’s Archive. Turn off the blur, and you’ll realize it looks quite pixelated. Keep looking around and you’ll notice tons of weird looking backgrounds. You’ll see more detailed things appearing behind less detailed things, which doesn’t really make sense. Everything just looks less cohesive.

This makes sense, as the player is never supposed to see these assets clearly. And you don’t really want to spend time and resources loading in giant pictures if they are just going to be blurred anyway. So Team Cherry compressed these images when putting them into Hollow Knight to save on resources. To change the game so that these assets look nice even when unblurred would require the game to take up even more resources from the system running the game.

Given this information, it’s possible Team Cherry has done this with Silksong to help optimize the game for Switch. Now Hollow Knight’s Switch port does run at a smooth 60 frames per second, which can’t be said for every game on that console [SEE POKEMON SCARLET AND VIOLET]. But it also only outputs to 720p and the load times are a bit long. And any optimizations made to the Switch port will be done on all releases of the game. So dropping asset quality and adding more blur could help alleviate this. But this is just speculation on my part. Maybe Team Cherry could get higher background assets working, but they choose to do this either out of an artistic choice or just so that they can make the game more quickly. It doesn’t matter if every single element put in the background looks right. If it’s blurred, the stupid idiot playing the game will be none the wiser.

So, it seems we might be stuck with a slightly blurrier Silksong from now on. Or once the game comes out, we can just mod it out… since… you know… modding’s a thing.

I want to thank SFGrenade for creating the Graphics Options mod, which allowed me to turn off the bloom, blur and film grain settings for this video, as well as everyone who has worked on the Hollow Knight Debug Mod, which allows for things like zooming in and out, and removing the Knight and the vignette from the screen. And I also want to thank nesrak1 for developing HKWorldEdit2, which is a Hollow Knight level editor I used to show off Hollow Knight’s 3D camera. I had a lot of fun looking around Hollow Knight’s maps with this thing.

And finally thank you for watching. I hope you’re doing okay. You know, it’s been almost four years since Silkong was announced. Isn’t that mind boggling to think about? Children born when the first trailer released are starting high school this year. The United Kingdom has had 3 different prime ministers since Silksong was announced. Troll 2 came out. If you’ve been in the community since back then, I hope the wait hasn’t completely crushed all your hopes and dreams. I hope you’ve gone on to live your own life. I hope you’ve enjoyed life’s blessing, survived life’s tragedies, and never lost sight of what’s most important to you. I hope you’ve lived, laughed, loved, ligma.

Mods mentioned in this video:

Graphics Options:

https://github.com/SFGrenade/GraphicOptions/

Debug Mod:

https://github.com/TheMulhima/HollowKnight.DebugMod/

HKWorldEdit2:

https://github.com/nesrak1/HKWorldEdit2

Songs used:

Dung Defender - Hollow Knight OST

Dirtmouth - Hollow Knight OST

Lace - Hollow Knight Silksong OST

Resting Grounds - Hollow Knight OST

Decisive Battle - Hollow Knight OST

Optional NPC Room - Hollow Knight

Enter Hallownest - Hollow Knight OST