Hollow Knight: Silksong causes server chaos on Xbox, Steam, and Nintendo

Wait the original was only $15?! I got Hollow Knight in a Humble Bundle so I had no idea how cheap that amazing game was.

No wonder Silksong is only $20. I saw the memes about the devs asking for $20 and assumed it was $20 more like $60=>$80 or something like that.

Reminds me of how I found a switch light by thinking, “what’s the place that would have a Switch that would most surprise people they carried them?”

I got it from Humble Bundle and redeemed the key on Steam :)

I've been playing it since t=0, also downloaded from GOG>

Same. Bought it about 45 minutes after it launched, and though the download was a bit slow, it was steady and installed just fine.

When I was young there were two types of games I tended to enjoy: single-player games (e.g. Nethack, Half-life, Starcraft, & others with a good story and gameplay, or just deep gameplay) and LAN party games (e.g. Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike, Total Annihilation, Quake II, and similar). LAN party games were more fun at LAN parties than online, and not just because server browsers all kind of sucked. Playing along with other people you can see in the same room is a very different experience from playing along with other people you've never met, can't see, and will never encounter again.

These days my friends are scattered across the country, with jobs & families, and so LAN parties are basically dead. And many new games don't even support LAN play, instead they tend to be optimized for online play with some sort of ranking system.

That leaves single-player games. And really good single-player games are rare, just like really good anything is rare. I find a lot of story-driven singleplayer games have good stories, but crap gameplay, so it's frustrating to try to complete the story. If the story is good enough & the gameplay bad enough I'll just cheat & treat the whole thing more like a book or movie instead of a game, but for a lot of games I just don't bother even with that.

But occasionally a game grabs me. The story is great, and the gameplay is at least good enough, or it's just really good gameplay that stays engaging for a long time (e.g. Slay the Spire). These are few & far between, because making really good games is very difficult.

As I age my tolerance for mediocrity decreases, partly because I already own a whole bunch of still-engaging games I can always play. So I agree with your points. The really great games are rare, far rarer than best-selling games.

I do most of my gaming in the single-player indie space these days. It's really where the fun is. You have a deep time-tested catalog of beautiful and complete experiences that don't try to nickel-and-dime you with drip-fed content or recurring microtransactions. They're games first and foremost, not extraction machines. It's the opposite of the BS you see in big-budget titles.

Same here. Hollow Knight and Elden Ring are the only two games in the last decade that I've put more than a few hours into. E.g I used to love Civilization, but none of them since 4 have done it for me. Same with Simcity2000. I'll play Madden or Fortnite with my kids, but I'm done mentally after 20 minutes.

The last game I liked like these was Morrowind back in 2004 or so. One of the great things about being a parent is sharing these kinds of things with your kids. I've already got Silksong downloaded on our Switch and XBox to play together when they get home from school in ~1 hr.

I believe there is a function of age to some degree, I 100% Assassins creed 2 at 14 and now I have a decade and a half of watching studios remake that goddamn game. They're all trying to make the best practice, safest game they can to reach the widest audience and end up bland with nothing new to offer those of us that have been playing a longer time.

Almost all my favourite titles of the last decade have been smaller titles, even the ones I bounce off I can appreciate them for trying something and missing the mark, there are genuine amazing works of art out there that a large studio simply can't produce.

I don't think the AAA games are 'wrong', to my bewilderment assassins creed sells like crazy each year despite near everyone in my friendship circle tapping out after the pirate one a decade ago, it's just if you play more than a couple things a year you outgrow the 'mainstream' titles.

Felt a similar way when playing Expedition 33 earlier this year. Such a great game.

I've been keeping reviews in the last few years. Just privately, for myself. I started doing this because I couldn't remember what I did and didn't play, and had a "wait, I think I tried this before and didn't like it" deja-vu a few times.

Right now the rankings are: bad (388), meh (191), okay (71), good (63), superb (12). Turns out I dislike a lot of games. This is also why I started to just pirate things first and then buy if I like it; I have 558 games in my GOG library and I barely played (or like) >80% of it.

I can recommend keeping reviews by the way; I've since started doing this for tons of stuff, from games to films to TV episodes to wine to coffee, and writing things down really helps narrow down what you like or dislike about things. By keeping it private you can write whatever you like and don't need to do a "full" review. For example my entire review for Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound (rated "meh") is "Too fast-paced for my liking. Also don't really like the controls." And for me, that's enough.

I can write a long essay on why I like or dislike games, but to be honest I'd rather be playing Silksong.

I'm going to start playing Claire Obscure this weekend. Looking forward to it, first game in a while I'm exited to play in a long while.

have you played ori and the blind forest? that's another nice single player platformer, though it eventually proved too hard for me (can't really do the pixel-and-timing-perfect moves and don't much enjoy trying)

I was thinking about this for the recent GMTK game jam, which crashed itch.io.

Is it really such a bad thing for your launch/event to crash a platform? Nobody is going to decide not to buy Silksong after all because it's so wildly popular it brought down Steam. It generates a great deal of positive headlines. To me it seems like a good problem to have.

1. That's Valve's prerogative, not the developer's. If they're not partnered with Valve they may not have had the option to enact pre-purchases. [1]

2. The game has no DRM and Steam preorders (in my experience) download the game files so people can play instantly on launch day. (They call it 'preloading'). For a game as highly anticipated as this, it'd likely just be cracked, leaked and pirated the moment preorders came live.

[1]: https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/store/prepurchase

Very surprised they didn’t do preorders for this

Certainly well-deserved.

I have a similar list of _art_ instead of most _entertainment_, and Hollow Kight there together with Disco Elysium

In my experience, the computer games that classify as art today are mostly developed by small studios

Exactly, just like Spelunky 2 and Ufo 50

It's not like this kind of thing happens everyday. If Valve spent the money and effort to prevent itself from something like this, it could, but would it be worth it?

Huge spikes over a short period of time are hard to deal with for anyone, and payment processors have their own infra whose scalability Steam can't necessarily control.

The fact that every platform, even the biggest, richest, and most "has their shit together" you can name, has had this problem at some point, points to it not actually being as solvable as you would expect.

Is something wrong in payment and/or entertainment spaces? Not just that there is ongoing censorship problem, but there's also sudden increase of PC port of mobile games, and now this. Feels like there could be common root cause of a profitability problem.

Payment systems turn out to be particularly thorny because they hit an intersection of technical issues with conflicting goals:

* You want them to be as fast as possible (ideally: instantaneous)

* You want them to be validated (long-poll to a third party validation service)

* You need them to be sequentially auditable (this is a "... or you could go to jail" requirement)

* If a failure occurs, you don't want to be out your own money

While these are solvable, it's the reason that so many cloud services suddenly hit scaling issues at the payments layer: things are going great and then that layer gets involved and "oops, hold on, we're waiting on Visa's servers. Still waiting. Stillllll waiiiiiting..........." Or the team was certain they'd simultaneously solved speed and sequential auditability this time but, oops, there's yet another sequencing point that's actually a bottleneck.

No system is completely redundant proof. It's just a matter of money and infrastructure. They didn't have any preorder system in place even so everyone had to search, buy and download all at the same time. It's probably close if not more than a million people waiting for a countdown to buy it.

Bad planning, maybe but definitely not a conspiracy against the game.

What I don't understand is why Steam and others don't use a torrent-like protocol on their back-end to reduce their bandwidth requirements large numbers of customers downloading the game at the same time. Back in the day WOW used used it for distributing large patches it seems to be a solved problem.

Not having touched Silksong yet, I'd recommend playing the Hollow Knight first. It holds up really well and is absolutely worth a play through. I think sometimes a sequel releases and it makes the original feel hard to go back to, if it's added new features or quality of life things. If I were in your position, I think having the "uncontaminated" experience of Hollow Knight is worth it.

That is, unless you really want to feel like you're part of the conversation these first few weeks after Silksong comes out.

I don't think anyone has played far enough into Silksong to say for certain yet, but the first game is so story-light that I can't imagine you'd be lost if you skip ahead. You really shouldn't though, the first one is very good.

It is very much worth playing but you could probably skip it. As others have alluded to, the storytelling is very influenced by Fromsoft (Souls games, basically) and is pretty oblique. But, even without following it exactly, the gameplay itself is still great, and the music and art do an excellent job setting up a melancholy vibe. The different zones have a lot of personality.

No-one can know that for the next dozen hours or so. There were no early review copies, which means no-one knows if Silksong benefits from knowing the story, mechanics, or world of the first game

No need to play the first plot-wise but Silksong is significantly harder. I’d strongly recommend playing HK first.

Hollow Knight is a great game, even with the fact from a story PoV you can probably skip it, I simply do not recommend it. To most (myself among them, and metroidvanias are one of my favorite genres), HK is one of the games at the pinnacle of the genre.

If you like metroidvanias, the first is an absolute gem. Whether you do it first or second, you shouldn't miss it.

If you do, use a guide or something to get through Hollow Knight. If you 100% Hollow Knight you’ll probably be too burnt out to pick up Silksong for a while.

Silksong is supposed to be a standalone story so play order does not matter.

Maybe, but the first one was so incredible, why not play it first?

In addition to what others have said, my understanding from Team Cherry's few reveals over the years since HK released is that Silksong takes place in a different location than Hallownest, the setting of Hollow Knight (though within the same world). Thus, given that most of the story of Hollow Knight is about Hallownest and what happened there, it is likely that you wouldn't miss much besides a few cool little connections by playing Silksong first.

Hollow Knight is a classic. If you enjoy Metroidvania style games you’ll love (almost) every minute. The music and sound effects are great too, so it’s worth playing with headphones if your gaming setup is in an environment with heavy background noise.

That being said, from what I’ve played of Silksong so far, it doesn’t seem to be crafted such that you’ll get the most out of the gameplay only if you played HK. Full appreciation of the in-game lore you’ll discover in Silksong is probably another matter, but even then I think playing them in either order will be a good time. Enjoy!

Then, if you haven't already tried it, I can heartily recommend Nine Sols as well. Not _quite_ up there with HK, but not too far behind ...

I think that's mainly down to those mega-huge games usually having preorders, and small indie game usually not, for whatever reason.

Neither Deltarune or Silksong could be preordered so everyone was zerg rushing the stores at the same time.

There’s a natural break-even point between the cost of maintaining peak server capacity and the lost revenue of server outages, especially if that peak demand is primarily fixed-quantity for a unique product with a very low chance of giving up. Ticketmaster figured this out decades ago and clearly the major game platforms have learned it as well.

Note to clouders, they could spend on pre-warmed autoscaler pools, but a corporation that spends a single dollar of revenue more than necessary to make the sale is violating its duty to shareholders, and total gross launch revenue will be the same whether they do or not, so they won’t, even though they could.

Note to game developers, for this exact reason you should be demanding launch month bonus targets rather than day or week; any less and you’re being knowingly ripped off by business execs.

Games, as an industry, have a lot of overlap with film. One of those overlaps is that it's still an industry where one person, with the right idea and (depending on the idea) the willingness to invest the ungodly amount of time to see it through, can put something out there that competes with the big teams and big budgets.

Sometimes, the idea hits so hard that you don't even need the time investment. Notch got Minecraft from version alpha to version 1 in 2 years. That one was lightning in a bottle; unlikely to be reproducible consistently.

Not since the last Steam sale (and every single Steam sale before it) ... really, Valve need to sort out their creaking server infrastructure for big events and launches. It's not like no-one could have predicted this ...

Screws over players and streamers who are in the later zones

Which great side scroller do you simp for?

It's the sequel to an indie darling widely viewed as among the best (or the best) metroidvanias. On top of that, the game has been in development for 6+ years, so long that the release has become a meme. See r/SilkSong. The hype for this is remarkable and people have been counting the hours since it was announced 2 weeks ago.

People trust Team Cherry to deliver a commensurate experience to Hollow Knight, which stands as many peoples' favorite games of all time.

This kind of hype comes rarely, and it's very specific to this specific game.

For me, the original Hollow Knight wasn't exceptionally innovative or original, but did set an extremely high bar for polish and refinement over similar indie games. I've played a lot of metroid-style games and Hollow Knight has super tight movement, and expansive and thoughtfully interconnected map, simple but addictive combat, great art and design, memorable music, etc. Plenty of other games have some or most of those things, Hollow Knight just executes them at such a consistent level of craftsmanship that it stands out.

Not sure, really. Hollow Knight is a nice game, but it didn't blow me away. The atmosphere is very nice, but the main storyline is IMO overwrought and kind of random. The side stories and most characters are also nice. The mechanics are, I guess, above average as well.

What makes a meal stand out amongst others made with the same ingredients? Game design is a thing that requires careful balance to produce an engaging and satisfying experience both moment to moment and over course of the whole game. Think how difficult it is to make a truly great movie, only now put the camera in the hands of any random person for it's duration and keep it great.

Many games do well at a few aspects, but few hit it out of the park across the board.

Hollow Knight managed something pretty close to that. It's a creative feat that required not only excellence in storytelling, art, music, and interaction design, asking others, but also excellence in blending then together to make something that is more than the sum of its parts.

The studio that did that is releasing a new game in the same vein and people want more of that established track record of excellence.

Eurogamer just published an article on what was so impressive about the original:

https://www.eurogamer.net/whats-so-special-about-the-origina...

From what I've seen on Reddit it seems to have a viral meme aspect to it.

Lots of things but let's focus on just two.

First you're looking at it wrong: it doesn't really matter how busy the calendar is. I mean just because people say that it does matter how many games or creative products or whatever are released, and just because some of those people are experienced execs, doesn't mean that it's true.

People who buy games aren't thinking, man I don't have time for games. Okay? So you see how the first thing to understand is: this isn't for you. Someone who has to make choices about how to spend their time isn't buying many games at all.

Before Silksong, they validated marketability & audience many times. Hollow Knight was in Ludum Dare, Newgrounds, festival & conference circuit, Kickstarter, multiple stores & formats.

Why was it standing out then? To me, the coherence of the art, and a game format that aligns with the indie art production and audience validation well.

Consider that larger games are arted by art directors and teams of contractors. If your whole team is excellent and you spend a lot of money rejecting art, okay, you will wind up with something coherent. You can also have 1 person make all the art like Hollow Knight & Silksong.

Indie games - and these guys are actually independently published and actually just 3 people and a handful of contractors - have this superpower. Any 1 person can make all the art for their indie game, and some have found great success doing this, like Stardew Valley. Some people give up a year in, or ten years in, or whatever.

So if you have little trickles of validation along the way, then you actually finish your game, which is maybe why this all worked.

And then this game is a sequence of levels, you can finish all the art for one screen and then move onto the next screen. You can finish a walk cycle going forward, and record the character moving forward in a single background, and it looks like a finished game. A 3D Hero Shooter requires a huge amount of work on level and character art before a preview is fully arted.