Hollow Knight on Switch has been delayed until early next year
Empty inside.
Developer Team Cherry has announced that the Nintendo Switch port of Hollow Knight, its beautiful bug-themed Metroidvania, will now release early next year.
A Switch version of Hollow Knight was first announced all the way back in January, when Team Cherry revealed that the game's planned Wii U port would no longer be happening. At the time, the developer said that the new Switch version of Hollow Knight would arrive "not too long after the platform's launch".
March came and went with no sign of Hollow Knight on Switch, but Team Cherry has continued to update fans on the port's progress. In its latest news post, however, the developer dropped the bad news. "Despite our best efforts", it said, "we've recently made the difficult decision to push HK's Switch release to early 2018."
"We've been working hard to get it all polished up and ready (while working on the new content in the meantime), but last week, we took a moment to do a proper assess and decided that we should give it a bit more time. We both (Ari & William) want to ensure this version isn't just an okay port, but a great one, and our partners at Shark Jump agreed.
"Why is it taking us longer than we thought to get the port fully polished? Honestly, it's just that as first-time developers we built the game in some strange, unoptimised ways and to get things running smoothly and consistently we need to sweep back through and rewrite or fix bits and pieces. It's an involved process, but we've learnt a lot for the next project and it's a big relief to get everything cleaned up nicely! The good news is that it's steadily coming together, and believe us when we say it looks fantastic on the Switch's screen! That might be a bit of a tease, but hopefully it's not too much longer before you all get to see it for yourself."
The one continuing positive to this temporary Hollow Knight sadness is that the Switch version will include all currently released free DLC at launch, including the Hidden Dreams update and the recent Grimm Troupe expansion.