Have you played Silksong? No no no, I don’t mean that rank imitation that passes for Silksong today. I mean original Silksong, purestrain Silksong, pre-patch Silksong. Everyone knows Silksong’s patch one—the game’s “first major patch”—which hit yesterday, really just fouled it all up. It made things too easy. It turned our beloved Silksong into, well, you didn’t hear this from me, but it’s pretty much a baby game now.
Okay, okay. Community response to the patch, which makes its early game easier and its mid-game cheaper, as well as kneecapping an advanced technique or two, isn’t quite on that level, but folks certainly are lamenting the now-nuked techs they worked to uncover. For instance, plenty of players are sad to see the back of “float override”.
That’s the technique that, once you’ve obtained the Faydown Cloak, would let you float briefly in mid-air by hitting down and jump simultaneously, giving you a little extra room to nail jumps and the like. Well no more! You’ve all been living high on the hog for too long. It’s gone now, and players are sad. “Boo for the removal of float override,” writes one player in the Hollow Knight Discord. “REALLY disappointed by the float override removal,” writes another on Reddit.
Some fans are so dismayed by the removal that they’re sticking obstinately to the release patch. “I’m sticking with 1.0 entirely for this reason… I use the float override all the time, and I don’t need any of the other changes,” writes one player on Reddit. On the Discord, players seek advice about downpatching to the game’s release version.
It’s not just the override removal that has some fans sticking with the game’s launch patch. Some of them genuinely like the higher difficulty of that version. Again, over in the Discord a few players are sticking to the first edition for now, since they preferred that version’s increased difficulty. Meanwhile, at least one guy on Reddit would like you to know that Moorwing wasn’t even that hard, actually.
But honestly? What leaps out to me about the Silksong sickos is that, even among those who are sticking to the game’s launch patch, there seems to be very little judgment going on. Whenever a game gets made easier, I tend to expect a lot of tedious braggadocio from players eager to flaunt how good they are at videogames. But in the case of Silksong I’m mostly just seeing a lot of people content to enjoy the game as they want to enjoy it and happy to let others do the same.
Are… are gamers maturing? Well, let’s not go too far. Let’s see how people respond to patch two before we start saying things we can’t take back.
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