The Last Guardian has had a rough time in development since its announcement at E3 2009. It was expected to ship in Q4 of 2011, but was later delayed with no release date given. In December, Team Ico head Fumito Ueda and the game’s executive producer both decided to leave Sony, though Ueda remains on the project as a consultant. In an interview with Wired, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida admitted that the company’s Western studios have pitched in on The Last Guardian to get it done.
When asked about rumors of Sony Santa Monica helping on the title, Yoshida replied, “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.”
Yoshida explained that Team Ico was still tackling a “very tough and technical issue” that was holding back the game.
“The progress is slow and sometimes the team has to go back and review things. There’s a vision that we want to realize but it’s very very tough and technical issue that the team is tackling and some plans have to be made to evaluate and go through the process. At one point the progress was great, so we talked about the timing of the launch in the past. But now it’s making progress, but still not to the level — it’s playable, but not to the point that we can talk about the timing of launch,” he said.
So we shouldn’t expect The Last Guardian anytime soon, it seems.
