i’m willing to bet the sheer pressure of having to follow up Hollow Knight added a couple of years to the development stage. they’re a small studio and their first game that got any attention got all the attention. and now they have millions of people salivating over the implications of word spellings in their dialogue and lore texts. everyone suffers from a debuff to performance when someone is watching, and the eyes are all on them

1. It was originally a DLC but they expanded it to a full sequel a few months after the reveal trailer. That’s very different in scope.
2. It looks like they were gonna release in 2023, but something happened and they decided to redo a ton of stuff.

(Also I don’t think “2D sidescroller” makes it any more than a tiny bit easier.)

Feature creep, release the first one, make bank, you now have the budget do just do whatever you want for the sequel and to keep working on it without having to worry about money so if you have a new idea you can just take the time to add it to the game…

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It’s hard to make a good and fun metroidvania, and to make one that could top the OG? With a character that basically travel using needle and thread? That’s even harder, and takes a lot of time to design and implement. I assume they complete the whole game early on(as in playable from start to finish) but found out that it just couldn’t be as good as Hollowknight, so they went back to the drawing board and redesign a lot of stuff.