The Last Guardian

THE BUZZ: Sony is determined to see The Last Guardian finally be released—so much so that other well-known Sony studios are helping on its development.

EGM’s TAKE: Life wasn’t supposed to work out this way for The Last Guardian. I still remember the very first rumors that a third game from Team Ico was coming, and how excited I was by that idea. I was expecting the game to come out, be a huge deal on the PlayStation 3, and to have already purchased and beaten it long before now.

And yet here we sit, teetering on the edge of the announcement of the next generation of consoles, and the game is still nowhere to be seen. It isn’t dead, at least not publicly—and I’m grateful for that—but it’s hard not to be a little worried about how the game is coming along.

In an interview with Sony Computer Entertainment’s Shuhei Yoshida, Wired’s Chris Kohler brought up the fact that he’d heard that staff from Sony’s Santa Monica Studio—the team responsible for releases such as the God of War games, and collaborators on many, many other Sony releases—had gone to Japan to help out in the development of The Last Guardian. Here was Yoshida’s response to that:

“Well, you know, it’s not just Santa Monica. We have great tech people in Worldwide Studios. We have a central tech group in the U.S. and the U.K. so we are giving them whatever help they need. Technically, we have the best engineers in the U.S. and Europe, so these teams are helping them, giving advice.”

In everything that’s come out, we know that development of the game has been troubled—but the exact problems aren’t exactly known. My guess is that the project simply ended up being far bigger than Team Ico was able to handle, especially given that the game is implementing a computer-controlled character that will require a very high level of artificial intelligence.

The question now will be if all of that external help coming in to assist on The Last Guardian will be exactly what it needs, or if it will leave us with a final product that—while finished—also feels obvious that it had a large variety of different people trying to fix or create its various pieces.

Source: Wired