Sony Worldwide Studios bigwig Shuhei Yoshida has assured gamers that Team ICO is still busy beavering away on The Last Guardian, and more importantly, it’s still due out on PlayStation 3.
Chatting with Eurogamer at Gamescom this week, Yoshida-san said a lot of work is going into the title, though the developer has had to redo a fair chunk of work that had previously got the game up to a playable state.
“The team is still working on it very hard,” he 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.”
The Last Guardian was originally unveiled at E3 2009 and has made sporadic trade appearances ever since. The project was dealt a bit of a blow late last year when creator Fumito Ueda left Sony to work on the game in a freelance capacity.
“We had the game playable,” added Yoshida. “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. So the engineering team had to go back and redo some of the work they had done.”
The Last Guardian’s lengthy development cycle has resulted in many commentators speculating the game may have in fact been moved to PlayStation 4.
However, this is not the case: “The game is developed on PS3,” Yoshida-san assured.
Stay tuned to PSU.com for more details on The Last Guardian as they become available ot us.