It was fine on PS3, even finer on PS4?
The Last Guardian dropped off the face of the earth for a few years, didn’t it? Well, turns out that may have been less Team ICO’s Fumito Ueda’s decision and more due to behind the scenes decisions at Sony.
In a lengthy interview with Game Informer, Ueda is poked numerous times as to the decision to move development over to the PlayStation 4, despite originally being announced for PlayStation 3.
In the interview, Ueda hints at more than simply technical reasons being behind the delay:
There are always delays in production, as you know. Technical being one of them, but there were many others that were out of my control as well.
Ueda also mentioned that he believed he’d have been happy with the PS3 version of The Last Guardian, and the technical issues or the quality of the game were never doubted by the team:
I probably would have been comfortable with the end result – originally, this game was designed for PS3. Assuming that all of the game architecture and all of the game design was suited to deliver the experience I envisioned, given those assumptions I think it would have been a good product… The PS3 was not restricting me from doing something.
Eventually, Game Informer outright asked Ueda about his evasiveness on the topic, and got this interesting response:
It was pretty much a corporate decision by Sony. And that’s where we’ll leave it. [laughs] Sorry.
So there we have it: for some reason beyond our understanding, Sony held back The Last Guardian. It seems interesting that Sony would push one of its seemingly most anticipated games to over a year after their newest console’s debut. But at least we now know who to blame.
The Last Guardian’s Long Journey: An Interview With Fumito Ueda [Game Informer]