The Last Guardian

Overview

In February 2007, Sony announced a new project by Team Ico with a full page advertisement in the popular Japanese gaming magazine, Famitsu. The game is exclusive to the PlayStation 3 and will be published by Sony Computer Entertainment. Very few concrete details have been released about the title however the artwork and trailers show that it will continue to expand on the unique look and feel established in ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. At the moment however it is unknown if the game will take place in the same universe as the previous two titles.

Story

From the recent trailer we can deduce that the game will again feature a young boy as the main character who will interact with a large creature named " Toriko." The creature has purposely been designed as an amalgamation of several different types of animal, as Ueda feels this will create a greater sense of empathy in the player. The developers let slip in a recent interview that player's shouldn't expect the creature to be too intelligent and that luring it onwards may be an important aspect of gameplay.

Development

In March 2009 at the Game Developers Conference '09, Fumito Ueda stated during a Q&A session that "it [the new game] might be similar to what's been done," and "the essence of the game is rather close to 'ICO.'"

On May 19 2009, PlayStationLifestyle.net released a several images and a video of the studio's newest project. Tentatively titled 'Project Trico', the footage began with the scene shown previously in the first image. It showed a boy together with a giant feathered beast traversing vast temple ruins, the architecture similar in style to both ICO and Shadow of the Colossus. It was revealed to be old footage however, shown internally within Sony.

On June 1 2009, the game was officially revealed at Sony's E3 press conference, with the first trailer being shown. It was an updated version of the footage that had been leaked previously, with the scenes slightly edited and now showing a lot more polish, in addition to completely new scenes. The game's title was revealed to be 'The Last Guardian.' New screenshots were officially released too. Sony Computer Entertainment announced at E3 that The Last Guardian is a 2010 release, and Ueda declined to go into further specifics, other than to say "there is definitely a reason why we are announcing this when we are."

On September 24 2009, The Last Guardian made a highly-anticipated appearance at Tokyo Game Show on the first day, albeit in limited form. While there was still no playable demo present, a new trailer was shown, revealing a few more scenes of gameplay. Another batch of screenshots were also released, in addition to a short behind-the-scenes look at the game's development featuring Ueda.

At TGS '10, Ueda announced a late 2011 release for the game, but by April 2011, a post on the EU PlayStation blog revelaled a delay to both this and the ICO/SotC re-release, the reason being "to provide more challenging and better quality of content to users and to fulfill First Party Studio’s obligations". The new release window is to be announced later.

On February 13, 2013, Shuhei Yoshida announced a significant amount of work on The Last Guardian had to be completely redone. “At one point we felt that it would be produced for a certain time period. That was the time we prematurely talked about the launch window. But it turned out the technical issues are much harder to solve. So the engineering team had to go back and re-do some of the work they had done.”