The Last Guardian is still in the works, Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshia insists for the third time in the last month after rumours of its potential demise coupled with the expiration of its trademark last week.
"The team is still working on it very hard," Yoshia said to Eurogamer. Yoshia explained "technical issues" that developer Team Ico has been experiencing and fixing has slowed down progress and subsequently created rumours about the title's demise.
"That's the period of time when the game, looking from the outside, doesn't seem to be making much progress."
The Last Guardian was first officially announced in early 2008, and since then numerous delays, rumors, silent news periods and resignations have plagued the game and Team Ico, its creators responsible for Shadow of the Colossus, which was released way back in 2005. It has failed to make an appearance at E3 2012 and other major game shows since.
When the game’s executive producer left Sony and Team ICO’s visionary Fumito Ueda also left the company, things looked grim for the title's future.
An updated listing of Sony’s long-in-development The Last Guardian on August 6th furthered speculation of its demise when it was classified on Trademarkia as "abandoned", although they can still reclaim it with a petition before January 2013.
Yoshida says that Sony Japan Studio had to completely re-do work on the game to bring it back to a playable state.
"...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," he said.
Despite its delays, The Last Guardian will remain within this console generation: "The game is developed on PS3," Yoshia insists.
Source: Joystiq
By Nathan Misa- Writer Bio