The Last Guardian for PS3 Would Have Been "Compromised," Sony Says

Sony is feeling "extra pressure" to deliver an uncompromised version of The Last Guardian, executive Shuhei Yoshida has said.

Speaking in a new interview with GamesIndustry International, Yoshida said it was a relief to finally re-announce the long-in-development adventure game for PlayStation 4 during E3, but "now the reality settles in."

"We have to deliver, we have extra pressure, and the team has too," Yoshida explained. "But it's a good pressure. The team is super happy."

Yoshida also frankly acknowledged some of the issues with the first version of The Last Guardian, which was announced at E3 2009 as a PlayStation 3 game.

"The trailer we showed [at E3 2009] was running on the engine but not at the performance; the game had a much lower frame rate so we sped it up to look like it was running at 30 frames-per-second for the video," Yoshida recalled. "But the team has really really struggled to get the game running at the performance it needed and some features went missing so there are lots of technical challenges that they were going through."

In 2012, with the knowledge that the PS4 was due to release just a year later, Yoshida said Sony realized that it had to make an important decision regarding the fate of The Last Guardian.

"With the [PS4 development] system available it became apparent for us that we just cannot continue like this in terms of the pace of development," Yoshida said. "We knew that we had to compromise on the design or the scope or the number of characters if we stayed on PS3. So in order to realize the vision we said, 'Let's do PS4.'"

If this decision was made in 2012, why is the game still not out? Yoshida said the engineering team still had a lot of work to do to optimize The Last Guardian for PS4.

"They spent a lot of time optimizing to PS3 but that's a really unique architecture, so everything had to be kind of redone for PS4," Yoshida said. "So that took until last year, when there was huge progress. The fundamentals of the game architecture were done so the actual game was playable and being implemented on PS4."

For lots more, check out the full interview with Yoshida at GamesIndustry International. You can also read our own interview with creative director Fumito Ueda.

The Last Guardian launches in 2016, though a release date has not been announced.

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