Coming into 2022, the wait for Hollow Knight: Silksong continues. Rumor has it that the game could come out as early as February 2022, but there has been no word on that actually happening. It could appear in the Nintendo Direct rumored to be within a month, but once again, this is idle speculation. Hollow Knight fans are still left to their own devices, playing, discussing, and making content for their favored title. Hollow Knight is a very flexible and content-rich game, but even so, players are running out of things to do within its confines.
Fortunately, plenty of mods have been made to extend Hollow Knight’s life. Randomizers and challenge mods provide new ways to play the game, and there are an enormous number of skins available to modify the Knight and their HUD. However, one of the most interesting mods is the multiplayer mod. A number of these have been made over the past few years, and thanks to mod installers and optimization, they are fairly easy to use. These are fairly popular among content creators and the community, and they tend to work with a lot of other mods. Team Cherry may want to consider implementing multiplayer in Hollow Knight: Silksong to capitalize on this feature’s popularity.
What Multiplayer Adds to Hollow Knight
Hollow Knight's multiplayer mods allow players to host game worlds that other players can join. These players will be visible to one another, and the more popular mods grant options to allow different skins to be displayed on their owners. By default, these players can’t interact with each other in any way, but further adjustments or options in more customizable mods allow players to team up or fight each other. Players must progress separately by default, but some mods can grant shared upgrades and abilities. Synced enemies and bosses are much more complicated, and there is no complete mod that enables multiple players to fight the Hollow Knight's toughest foes together yet.
Much of the appeal of Hollow Knight’s mods owes to their convenience, thanks to a handful of mod installers and groundwork laid by mod creators. It’s not as simple as loading up an online mode, but there’s only a couple more steps if a player wants to use a mod’s most basic functionality. By using a mod installer like Scarab, players can install and enable a multiplier mod like HKMP, and then check and access it in-game.
Server addresses and ports will need to be handled by players, at least in HKMP, but once they know what they’re doing, it’s only typing out some numbers. Further options may be available for players and hosts to customize the experience to their liking. Thanks to the wide compatibility with other mods, the resulting transformed Hollow Knight adventures can prove novel and infinitely replayable.
How Hollow Knight: Silksong Can Integrate Multiplayer
What Team Cherry would be able to add to Silksong wouldn’t be as versatile, but it would still be able to capture the base experience. Multiple Hornets, perhaps with different color palettes, would be able to explore the kingdom of Pharloom together. An official multiplayer implementation would also sidestep some of the limitations of a mod.
Players could simply create or load into rooms without dealing with ports and IP addresses, and true splitscreen co-op could be added. There may still need to be a bit of player effort for a private, locally-hosted session, but at least the tools for that could be in Silksong. Enemies and bosses would also be synced between players, allowing fans to finally bring Dark Souls’ co-op to Hollow Knight.
That is the ideal implementation, and Silksong may not end up getting all of those features. At this point, it’s also unlikely that official multiplayer will be announced as part of the game at launch. This is the sort of large-scale project that is best saved for after the game is done. The market for Hollow Knight multiplayer has definitely been established, however, and Team Cherry should at least consider making it a feature in Silksong.
Hollow Knight: Silksong is in development for PC and Switch.