It hasn’t been an easy journey for The Last Guardian, developed over a period of nearly a decade by SIE Japan Studio and genDESIGN. The PS4 exclusive is set to release this October but according to director Fumito Ueda, there’s still plenty of work to be done.
When asked by The Guardian about the decision to not make Trico controllable, Ueda noted that, “To be honest, we’re still fine-tuning Trico’s behaviours, there are two extremes – if you can fully control a character, what’s the point? It becomes a pet. But at the opposite end if you can’t control it at all it becomes a nuisance, a barrier to progression. We’re still trying to find the balance.”
Ueda also noted that the development process involved a lot of learning. “There was a lot of learning, it’s hard to explain, to describe it in words at this moment, but maybe if there’s one thing…In life, there are always things that mesh well, and things that don’t. In various ways that applies to what we’ve done in the last few years.”
Perhaps that hints at why The Last Guardian took so long to finally come out. Regardless, it will release on October 25th for PS4.