The Last Guardian "well staffed" and "in development"
But still no word on when, where or how it will be released.
GamesIndustry.biz has run the second half of its massive interview with Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida, and managed to squeeze a few vaguely reassuring but maddeningly inconclusive words from him regarding the status of The Last Guardian.
The game, the latest from Fumito Ueda, creator of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, has been in development for at least six years and was originally supposed to come out in 2011. Then it vanished from the release schedule and has all but passed into myth.
When pressed on the subject, Yoshida confirmed the game's development team was still housed in the Sony Studios Japan building, but offered little else in the way of concrete details. Will it be a PlayStation 3 or PlayStation 4 game, for example? "Ahh... That, I cannot talk about."
"We're waiting for the right time to re-introduce The Last Guardian in an appropriate way," Yoshida continues, somewhat awkwardly. "I can't... Well, the game is in development, and it's well staffed, and Ueda-san is here, working - even though he's not a Sony employee, he's dedicated to the product. But we're not ready to update yet."
At the very least, Yoshida debunks the idea that the game was put on hiatus, blaming Jack Tretton of Sony's US operation for putting that notion on the table. "Hiatus, I never... It was Jack Tretton!" says Yoshida. "He used that term, and I said no, hiatus is misleading. It was a hiatus in terms of releasing new information. The game has never stopped - the team has always been here. They're going through the re-engineering of the game, so the team size is smaller, because it's more engineering focused right now."
So there we have it. Development is ongoing. The game is being "re-engineered" but we don't know if it's been bumped to PlayStation 4. Fumito Ueda is still working on the project, despite no longer working at Sony.
Be sure to join us here this time next year for another fact-filled update.
