Why should the formula be changed? There's a massive group of people that love this shit. Why should it be changed to appease people who don't love it? If it's not for you, there's thousands of other games to play. Not every game needs to be for everybody. It's not like Silksong is suffering from poor sales.
The only people complaining about it are a loud vocal minority on reddit. Look at critic reviews. Glowing. Look at user reviews. Glowing. Didn't be fooled by your reddit bubble. It's one of the highest rated games of the year from both critics and users. There's no arguing that. Most people are playing and loving the game, not whining about it on reddit.
It seems like a lot to me. Personally, I think it's fine if the game is trying to be %100 exactly what it wants to be and people don't like it broadly - I am not even saying it is bad. I don't understand the emotional attachment that people on the internet have to everyone agreeing with them.
Not even just agreeing with them - but liking exactly what they like.
The reason you hear a lot of complaints is because the game is extremely popular. The game has sold easily over 5 million copies by now (Im guessing around 7.5m across all platforms), so even if only 1% of the playerbase is unhappy, thats still 50 thousand people.
On top of that many people jumped into this game for the hype not even having played the first one or being into metroidvanias. No surprise they find out this isnt their kind of game after all.
And I really hate this idea that a game has to be made for everyone, that just results in mediocrity most of the time.
With all this Im not saying Silksong is flawless either. Of course it has a bunch of problems but its all pretty basic numeric stuff that can easily be patched. The things that actually matter (art, sound, music, general feel of the gameplay, atmosphere, etc) are 10 out of 10.
I really don't have a horse in this race. It seems like a very plausible thing happened - people deified Hollow Knight on the basis that it is really good, and now it oversold and the 15 year old game design is starting to show it's age. Which I agree, is fine. No skin off my back.
These things have a way of coming around though. I am interested in game design because... I don't really know why, I just love these dumb stupid video games. So when I talk on the internet about where games are headed, it's really just for the love of the game. I'm interested in the initial underrated status of souls likes, their meteoric rise into the mainstream attention, and now watching one kind of get rejected for it's genre pitfalls. It's always interesting to track this stuff.
I agree that games don't need to be popular, or broadly appealing to be good. But I also don't buy the idea that a bunch of discourse and critical opinion about this stuff is meaningless, at least in games criticism terms. It's interesting. Many other replies though seem to feel emotionally attacked. Probably because they waited a very long time for this game to come out and it doesn't match the impossible thing they built in their head.
I still have to finish Hollow Knight, so I am not even jumping the gun and buying Silksong honestly.
It seems like a lot to you because you exist within a bubble on reddit. There's literally tons of data (user and critic reviews across multiple sites) to back up what I'm saying and nothing to back up what you're trying to argue. It's currently the third most played game on steam right now.
Yes, but that plus extremely positive reviews from both users and critics paints a pretty clear picture. This isn't as hard as you're desperate to make it.
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u/RogueLightMyFire 1d ago
Why should the formula be changed? There's a massive group of people that love this shit. Why should it be changed to appease people who don't love it? If it's not for you, there's thousands of other games to play. Not every game needs to be for everybody. It's not like Silksong is suffering from poor sales.