In my opinion, the game is not particularly difficult. That is, if you’ve played through the original Hollow Knight. Which most people haven’t. In fact, it looks to me like a lot of people jumping on the hype don’t have too much experience with metroidvanias and soulslikes.

It’s a sequel, so intended to be played after the original. Why do we care what people who haven’t played the first game think?

Colorblind accessibility is easy to implement and pretty much everybody can do it after reading a wikipedia article on colorblindness.

On the other hand, balancing a game for several difficulties is not easy and takes a lot of time. Plus, it doesn’t always make sense. Part of the game is the struggle. If you’re skipping the struggle, then you’re missing a part of the game.

The main goal of a game is to be whatever the creators and/or you want it to be. Frustrating difficulty can still be fun, just like feeling scared in a horror game is fun. It simply has to be done right.

Keep in mind it’s already very hard to make a good, balanced game. Adding difficulty sliders increases that exponentially. Even if you add a few presets - that’s still a lot more work, which indie studios may not have resources for.

A good number of that is 3D artists. Try making a highly detailed 3D model in Blender. Now imagine a game like GTA V has thousands of those, but even more detailed. This is one of the major reasons why AAA are taking longer and longer to produce. At the same time, game systems and mechanics are simplified to cut costs.

I’ve worked in the video game industry for a couple years and have been credited in several games. This number may actually be higher.

It may sound crazy, but there’s a lot of people working on AAA games, usually most of them completely unrelated to game dev. Marketing, public relations, translators, 3D graphics artists, sound designers, orchestra performers, motion capture stuntmen, voice actors. Probably a few dozen managers, who have never even seen the game. Hell, some companies even credit IT staff in the game’s credits.

That’s already a whole bunch of teams. It’s also important to mention that many third-party contractors will often be skipped from the credits. QA is very commonly outsourced (to poorer countries like Romania or Serbia) and rarely gets into the credits. You may only see 5-10 names, while in reality it was at least 100. This is true for several other fields, though mostly non-game-related, e.g., localization, promotial material, merchandise.

I won’t disclose in what capacity, but in the past I have worked on several of Blizzard’s titles for a few months and I’m not credited anywhere. Just like at least a couple hundred other people. Not necessarily saying I should be - it was never mentioned or promised. Just highlighting that the real number of staff that worked on the game (or adjacent to the game) may be above 10k.

You’re also massively wrong about DirectX on Linux, DXVK and VKD3D both work to run various versions of it on Linux.

I very clearly wrote that Linux does not support DirectX. Which is 100% true, no matter how you look at it. Just because there are translation layers, it doesn’t mean Linux ‘supports DirectX’, because it doesn’t. It supports Vulkan, which DXVK and VKD3D translate DirectX API calls to.

Let’s say you can’t read Spanish, but you hire a translator to translate a text for you. Now you can read it. Does that mean you can suddenly read Spanish?

They created the Game Porting Toolkit a while ago

Hmm… Must have missed that. I’ll need to take a look. Might be the exact same thing I mentioned and I just had no idea it was already released.

The RaspberryPi has existed for ~15 years at this point, the platform is far more mature than Windows on ARM and rivals macOS for support.

I wrote “From my experience” and “Might depend on the device though.” Also, RaspberryPi is not a daily use device. At least not for the vast majority of people.

If Linux works on ARM for other people - great. I’m hoping to be able to switch to it sometime in the near future. However, the last time I tried it was horrendous. A lot of programs I use were completely unavailable, with no compatibility layer that I know of. That was about 2 years ago.

That said, I also tried Windows 11 on ARM around the same time and it was great. Practically everything worked out of the box and worked flawlessly. It was basically the same experience as on amd64.

After introducing Metal (their own proprietary graphics api), Apple killed OpenGL support and never implemented Vulkan support. Almost every single video game nowadays uses either DirectX (Microsoft’s proprietary API) or Vulkan for 3D graphics. 2D games use OpenGL and Vulkan. OpenGL and Vulkan are both open source and cross platform.

Windows supports everything, Linux everything except DirectX, and MacOS (for Apple Silicon devices) only supports Metal. You can still play OpenGL games on Intel-based Macs. Steam tells you which games won’t work on recent Mac systems.

In order for a game to run on ARM Macs, it has to either be ported to Metal, or there needs to be a compatibility layer like Wine and Proton. However, neither of these two work, since Apple no longer supports OpenGL or Vulkan. Theoretically, it is possible for people to write a new compatibility layer, specifically for Metal. The problem is, nobody wants to, because it’s a lot of work (as usual with development for Apple devices), and you never know when Apple may decide to drop support for some other libraries/APIs/drivers.

Additionally, Apple seems to be working on their own Metal translation layer. Leaks show impressive performance in Cyberpunk 2077. However, nobody knows what the availability will be like or when it releases.

In the case of Macs it’s not an issue with the ARM architecture, but with Apple. Since they dropped support for some libraries a few years ago, new versions of wine (and proton) stopped working on Apple Silicon. That’s the main and pretty much only reason why you can only play like 13 games on newer Macs.

As for Linux, ARM support is still in its early stages. From my experience it’s not even ready for regular daily use. Might depend on the device though. M1 Macbooks run pretty good with Asahi.