For the past several years one of the more popular pastimes for those in the video game reporting biz is to track down Sony Worldwide Studios boss, Shuhei Yoshida, and force him to state that Team Ico’s The Last Guardian is still in development for the PS3. With Sony out and about for the PlayStation 4 reveal earlier this week, Venturebeat tried their hand at making Yoshida once again confirm the game’s PS3 status. Interestingly, the Sony exec refused to talk about the game for the first time in recent memory.
When asked “is The Last Guardian still a PS3 title?”, Yoshida responded:
“I’m not ready to talk about that … sorry. We’ve broken promises. we are waiting for the right to time reintroduce The Last Guardian. I’m not going to say anything beyond what [The Last Guardian lead designer Fumito] Ueda said.”
The comment that Yoshida is referring to comes from a post on Fumito Ueda’s website last week that confirmed that The Last Guardian is still in development, and that he is still heading up the project. Ueda also told fans that the game’s “release is solely decided by Sony Computer Entertainment” and to “please keep an eye out for their official announcement”.
With Sony now suddenly refusing to talk about The Last Guardian and the PlayStation 4 confirmed for release later this year, it would seem that the game’s exclusive PlayStation 3 status is very much in doubt.
Backing up that line of PS4 speculation is a recent post on the NeoGAF forum from former Sony BigBig employee Kenny Linder. In the post Linder stated:
“I know [The Last Guardian has] been in development on Orbis for a long time now. It’s platform has been questionable for nearly two years, but the last time it was restarted (it’s been restarted a number of times), it was moved to Orbis.”
The last time that Yoshida confirmed that The Last Guardian would be released for the PlayStation 3 was in August 2012, when he revealed that “technical issues” forced the developers to “re-do” some of the engineering work on the game. It is unclear exactly what is going on with the game now, but the sudden silence suggests that we will soon get an official announcement.
We will keep an eye out for any additional information on The Last Guardian. In the meantime, let us know if you would prefer a PS3 or PS4 release for the extremely long-overdue game.
