The Last Guardian will finally be releasing in October this year, after a development cycle spanning the better part of a decade. The game was officially announced in 2009, and fans have been waiting for the title to release ever since, with many having resigned themselves to the game’s status as vaporware, and to it never releasing, multiple times until its re-reveal at E3 last year.
We may never fully learn what exactly transpired during the game’s development. But in candid interview with The Guardian, Fumito Ueda, who is the director of the game, opened up some on the protracted development cycle the title suffered.
“There was a lot of learning,” he said. “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.”
It sounds like there may have been a large part of the game’s development that didn’t work and was discarded, forcing the team to start from scratch- which is something a lot of people have suspected for a very long time. Let us just hope that the final game comes out to be the kind of cohesive, emotional, impactful product that Ueda’s games usually are, instead of the kind of disjointed mess that games with long development cycles often end up being.