The thing is, there is no reason not to add accessibility settings.
Hollow Knight and Silksong are beautiful games with an intriguing world, great characters and lots of areas to explore. There’s no reason to gatekeep games like these from people that just can’t beat them because they are too hard.
Just add a simple accessibility menu where you can scale health, damage and loot drops. It’s almost no work to implement, players can still try the regular difficulty and turn it down when it’s too much and speedrunners can make their lifes more difficult. Everyone wins.
How locked down a flatpak is depends entirely on the developer and what permissions they request. By default, they can’t really see much. For example, they can’t even see the processes running on your host or your user and system files.
Flatpak does not do anything about network access though, it can only do no access or full access, no in between. The data they can collect on Linux in a Flatpak is very limited but it does not prevent them from calling home.
They went pretty fast with performance improvements after launch and the first major update. There was a larger gap with the last update because they bought their publishing rights back and had to wait for all the legal stuff to settle.
So far they had one large update which added end-game content and another large update with a major balancing overhaul, which also reset character progress.
HLTB currently sets the game at 12.5 hours for the main story and 24 hours for main + side quests.
I’m planning to play it once co-op releases, the game seems to be in a good state and has enough content for me.
Although judging by this news and the first sentence on their Steam page being “…Bungie’s team-based extraction shooter.”, maybe it’s a good thing I can’t play their games.
There is now source code for the ROM, which makes creating ports and mods significantly easier.
The initial goal of most decompilations is to produce a 1:1 match of the original ROM. That’s how they know they’ve got a perfect representation of the original code.
I bought the game on release mostly to support them. The folks at Moon Studios are seriously talented and deserve some support.
I played ~2 hours on release and thought the game was decent. The combat had some weight, the art style was excellent, the bosses were fun and challenging and the exploration was pretty neat. There were many performance issues which they have since mostly fixed but there were also a few systems taken from different genres that didn’t work that well together for me. I didn’t play for a while though, so maybe they improved things in that area.
Still, I’m also waiting for the coop, which is scheduled to release with the next major update.
I wouldn’t read too much into this news article. Their CEO has since clarified that he might have been a bit hyperbolic and didn’t expect the media to pick up on his random Discord post.
I don’t quite agree with his assessment of being “review bombed”. Most negative reviews come down to the game being released in early access: bad performance, many systems not working well together, being behind roadmap, missing coop on launch and more recently, difficulty. I do get their need for releasing in early access after Microsoft dropped them but it might have hurt them in the long run.