Yoshida: PS3 asked too many compromises of The Last Guardian

The arrival of PS4 is one of the main reasons why development of The Last Guardian has taken so long to develop.

Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida told Kotaku that the team working on the game was struggling to realise its vision on PS3. In fact, he even admitted that the trailer used to introduce the game way back at E3 2009 was ahead of what the console could actually produce.

In 2011 the progress became super slow. There were lots of technical issues. The game was not performing at speed,” he said. The video we showed, the trailer on PS3, was specced up. The game was running at a much lower frame rate. Some features were still missing.

So it was clear that the team had to make a compromise in terms of features and number of characters so while they were taking time, the engineering team ported the code on the SPU [processors of the PS3] to improve the performance, but it was taking lots of time.

But, in the meantime PS4 arrived, the development environment was available. So in 2012 it became apparent we should move it to PS4 to achieve the visual [ideal.]”

Yoshida added that the game is playable right now, but that Sony opted against a live E3 demo in case the animal AI decided it didn’t want to perform for an audience.

So when exactly will we see The Last Guardian in 2016? We have a certain level of confidence about the launch window, which is why we showed it,” the exec added.