The Last Guardian Isn't Dead, According To Sony

[Casual Shinji]

Well Square Enix finally gave us Versus (now FF XV) news. So if they can resurrect a title long thought to be dead, I'm sure Team Ico might be able to.

Remember also that Shadow of the Colossus was first called NICO, before they scrapped the whole thing, started from scratch and it was re-branded into SotC. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happened to The Last Guardian.

For those who didn't know that, here's a trailer

Spoiler

But Fumito Ueda was still behind it then. Maybe I'm wrong, but he was the driving creative force behind those two titles (Ico, SotC). And the moment he left The Last Guardian I had a dreadful feeling it would not bode well.

And I'm still not buying that "freelance creative director" spin. My guess is, Sony felt Ueda was wasting the investors' money with the direction he was going with the game. So they booted him off the project or made conditions impossible for him to make the game he wanted and left on his own.

Now they're left with a game that they don't know how to finish.

And I was so looking forward to this damn game, too.

 

[Eclipse Dragon]

But Fumito Ueda was still behind it then. Maybe I'm wrong, but he was the driving creative force behind those two titles (Ico, SotC). And the moment he left The Last Guardian I had a dreadful feeling it would not bode well.

And I'm still not buying that "freelance creative director" spin. My guess is, Sony felt Ueda was wasting the investors' money with the direction he was going with the game. So they booted him off the project or made conditions impossible for him to make the game he wanted and left on his own.

Now they're left with a game that they don't know how to finish.

And I was so looking forward to this damn game, too.

Even with Fumito Ueda gone, you still have Team ICO, who spent a great deal of time with him and also worked on the other two games. We'll just have to wait and see how it goes. If the game gets released, I doubt it will be anything like what people are expecting. The good news for Sony is that people aren't expecting much (a game featuring a giant griffin thing and a little boy that looks something aesthetically like SotC). It's very likely they ran into development hell and had to rebuild the whole thing from scratch, possibly with a new gameplay concept. At this point if it doesn't get released, I'll be a little disappointed, but not surprised. If it does get released, I'm interested to see the new direction they'll inevitably take with a new creative head. You could certainly do worse than Sony as far as publishers are concerned.