Sony executive Shuhei Yoshida has said that they are now feeling “extra pressure” to deliver an uncompromised version of The Last Guardian. When he spoke in an interview with GamesIndustry International, Yoshida mentioned how it was a relief to finally re-announce this game, as it was very long-in-development. However, “now the reality settles in.We have to deliver, we have extra pressure, and the team has too,” Yoshida explained. “But it’s a good pressure. The team is super happy.”
Yoshida also acknowledged some of the issues with the first version, when it was announced at E3 2009 as a PlayStation 3 game. He spoke up saying that: “The trailer we showed [at E3 2009] was running on the engine but not at the performance; the game had a much lower frame rate so we sped it up to look like it was running at 30 frames-per-second for the video,” Yoshida recalled. “But the team has really really struggled to get the game running at the performance it needed and some features went missing so there are lots of technical challenges that they were going through.”
In 2012, they were informed that the PS4 was due to release a year later. The company had to make an important decision for this game. “With the [PS4 development] system available it became apparent for us that we just cannot continue like this in terms of the pace of development,” Yoshida said. “We knew that we had to compromise on the design or the scope or the number of characters if we stayed on PS3. So in order to realize the vision we said, ‘Let’s do PS4.'” But this choice still had some drawbacks, as there was a lot of work to do to optimize their game for the PS4.
“They spent a lot of time optimizing to PS3 but that’s a really unique architecture, so everything had to be kind of redone for PS4,” Yoshida said. “So that took until last year, when there was huge progress. The fundamentals of the game architecture were done so the actual game was playable and being implemented on PS4.”
They’ve been through a lot with this game, which makes it slightly more exciting to hear that it will release in 2016. We’re proud of all the work you guys have done, and can’t wait to see the final finished product.