The Last Guardian Creator Reveals Why Game was Delayed

So, as you no doubt know, The Last Guardian, the mysterious and highly-anticipated new game from ICO and Shadow of the Colossus creator Fumito Ueda was shown off at this year’s E3, to the delight (and relief) of fans worldwide. However, while seeing some gameplay and assurance from the creators is certainly nice, a big question remains unanswered: what have they been doing all these years? It’s hard to believe, but we first saw The Last Guardian six years ago, running for the PS3… what happened?

Well, the folks over at Kotaku got to talk to the man behind the game, and Fumito Ueda was able to shed some light on the six-year development of his next masterpiece.
 

“[In 2009, development was going strong] But in 2011 the progress became super slow. There were lots of technical issues. The game was not performing at speed. The video we showed, the trailer on PS3, was specced up. The game was running at a much lower frame rate. Some features were still missing.

“So it was clear that the team had to make a compromise in terms of features and number of characters so while they were taking time, the engineering team ported the code on the SPU [processors of the PS3] to improve the performance, but it was taking lots of time.

“But, in the meantime PS4 arrived, the development environment was available. So in 2012 it became apparent we should move it to PS4 to achieve the visual [ideal.]”

 
Yep, that would cause problems—people these days bicker about getting less than 60 FPS, releasing a game at 15 or worse would probably cause some people’s heads to literally explode. But now, he told Kotaku, things are vastly improved—not only is the game totally playable, they’re fairly confident about the release date at this point. He pointed out that the only reason there wasn’t a playable demo was because the big monster’s AI is still a little spotty, and thus, couldn’t be trusted to perform in real-time.

So! That’s super nice, but not unexpected: perhaps the strangest thing about this story is just how upfront everyone was. Whenever Sony or Ueda would say where was no problem and the development was still going strong, people suspected there was some secondary thing no one was sharing, a secret yet unspilled… and yet, turns out, they were telling the truth the whole time. How often does THAT happen in video game PR?