Sony confirms that The Last Guardian is still in development

By: Moses Abaortae

  |   August 16th, 2012   |  

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Team Ico explain that development of their upcoming title is slow but the studio is “still working on it very hard”. The game has been the subject of quite a fair amount of speculation.

For those readers who are new to the entire ‘The Last Guardian’ saga, as in the story behind the game’s much publicised delays, cancellation rumours and counter statements, the basic gist of the story is that the game has been in development for so long that many doubt whether or not it will be released.

The title was shown off two years ago during Sony’s E3 Press Conference and since then there has been no news on the title. The lead designer of the game also resigned from his post, which led to speculation of the game being canned.

Sony came out and publically stated that The Last Guardian was still in the works, however, a number of online retailers removed the game from their listings citing that the game had been canned.

A no-show at this year’s E3 Press Conference also fuelled the rumours and new reports began to emerge of the game possibly being redeveloped for the PlayStation 4. However, Shuhei Yoshida, the President of Sony Worldwide Studios went on record to refute all those claims and rumours starting off with the change of console.

He stated that “The game is developed on PS3.” Before going on to state that “The team is still working on it very hard.”

Mr. Yoshida went to explain the reasons for the constant delays and pointed out that the main issue arose when the studio prematurely started talking about the game’s release.

He said, “We had the game playable. At one point we felt that it would be produced for a certain time period. That was the time we prematurely talked about the launch window. But it turned out the technical issues are much harder to solve.”

The technical issues mentioned related to an earlier statement made by the boss of Sony Worldwide Studios. He had said, “There are certain technical issues they’ve been working on. That’s the period of time when the game, looking from the outside, doesn’t seem to be making much progress. But internally there is a lot of work going into creating the title.”

It seems that there is still time left for the game to be, well, for anything related to the game to made public. In the meantime all gamers have to hold on to is the promise that the game is in development and the trailer that was shown off over two years ago.

The question remains whether gamers will still be interested in the game despite its long development cycle and whether or not it live up to expectations.