It was only days ago that IGN fooled the gaming community into thinking The Last Guardian was canceled. It wasn’t all that surprising, but it also wasn’t true.
So where is The Last Guardian? Well, it’s somewhere, but whatever it’s like Sony isn’t ready to raise the curtain. Sony’s Shuhei Yoshida spoke to Eurogamer about the state of the game, offering only a vague glimpse into what’s going on, and really, it doesn’t sound all that positive.
He said:
There were a difficult couple of days before the show – I’m sure you noticed. I’m so happy it was retracted before the show happened. Lots of people tweeted me they were heartbroken by that news [prior to the show]. People are going through this roller coaster of emotions, and it’s our fault for not releasing the game, yet.
Yoshida added:
We owe a lot to those people, but we really don’t want to release piecemeal information until we can say this is The Last Guardian – so we ask you to wait.
The Last Guardian‘s development began as early as 2006, following the release of game of the year award winning Shadow of the Colossus. A teaser trailer would leak onto the internet in May 2009, showing a game that adheres to Team ICO’s artistic formula while going bigger than ever before.
Since then, more than five years have passed and nothing new has been shared of the game. Sony executives have spurred on hope as the game’s existence is consistently doubted. So where is it?
When a team isn’t confident showing gameplay footage this long into a game’s development cycle, it’s never a good thing. We saw the same from Duke Nukem Forever, and a few games that have never made it out of development over the years.
If I had to guess I’d say that the original premise, a young boy who befriends a giant bird/cat-like creature, was one that required way more work than initially thought. Creating a giant, realistic bird friend and making that not only a compelling but noteworthy mechanic isn’t an easy task for 50~ development team members. Team ICO is a development studio with a perfect record, releasing two games that earned 90+ Metascore ratings. They aren’t going to release something half baked. This bird creature needed to behave in a way that lived up to their standard, and be something that defines the game similar to the Colossi in Shadow of the Colossus.
Team ICO is also a team that knows how to push hardware. Shadow of the Colossus was so ambitious and large in scale that it suffered from some framerate problems; the PS2 couldn’t keep up with the vision. It’s likely that as Team ICO was experiencing bottlenecks in performance with The Last Guardian, it was given a PS4 development kit. If true, the ceiling for what could be accomplished would be raised, but the time it takes to design and a next-gen production is immensely time consuming.
This is all pure speculation, but makes sense to me. I think The Last Guardian definitely isn’t canceled, but it’s a radical departure, at least gameplay-wise, from its original unveiling. I expect to see a re-announcement that looks very dissimilar to the Project Trico trailer of 2009, and it might not be until 2015 that we get to see it.
Gamers, as well as Team ICO, are fortunate enough that Sony are willing to invest millions into a lengthy development cycle. Whatever they’ve been showing to management appears to be enough to keep it going, because to this day Sony refuses to call The Last Guardian a dead project.
For now, it’s better off that we pretend it doesn’t exist.
