Of all of the first-party titles Sony Worldwide Studios has in-production right now, none look more amazing than Team ICO’s The Last Guardian. Breathtaking graphics and production values that would rival any major $100 million blockbuster fantasy film, The Last Guardian is looking to blow away the competition come Holiday 2011. Fumito Ueda has kept details regarding the game close to his chest, but after the games ‘re-introduction’ at the Tokyo Game Show 2010, he has opened his mind and is more willing to talk about it.
Ueda-San talked about why he feels fans were attracted so much to his past games, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus and how he hopes to gain the attention of a much wider audience this time.
Ico and Shadow of the Colossus were both set in fantasy worlds, and I think movie fans, at least, were attracted to the games because of those fantasy elements. However, I thought about how to have a wider group of people relate to our games, and I figured that introducing more physically-oriented scenes like that would help with that effort. I also thought it was an element of design we haven’t really tackled before.
If you missed the TGS 2010 trailer for The Last Guardian, check it out. Did you notice something about the enemies? They appear to be floating armor. Wait a minute!!
They are non-human creatures, you could say. The boy definitely isn’t able to defeat them by force — he can manage the feat only by taking advantage of the environment or the objects around him. I may have mentioned this before, but there’s a rock-scissors-paper relationship between Trico, the boy, and the guards, so generally you’d want to have Trico take care of them for you.
Ueda even talked about the differences of developing on the PS2 and PS3, and the added advantages it presented.
Before, we’d have a single artist work on every aspect of a stage, right down to the little details. But the world is larger in this game, and the PlayStation 3’s a more powerful machine, and so the sheer amount of work has skyrocketed. So we aren’t making the world like that any longer. Instead we’re devoting our efforts to building a bunch of small parts, like LEGO bricks, and putting them together to build stages. This streamlines the production process while still enabling us to make HD-quality graphics.
Enough about The Last Guardian..what about the Team ICO Collection? Ueda confessed his team is too busy with TLG to work on them, but that he is still ‘directly involved’.
I’m overseeing everything in a supervising position, receiving updates each week and checking over them. The company handling development is extremely talented, and they’re doing great things with the material, things that never even occurred to me. The PS3 versions are in no way going to be inferior to the PS2 originals, and they’re making it even better in places where it’s necessary, which I’m very glad to see. Reworking the games for 3D is a trickier process than I even imagined — how much should the images pop out; how much depth they should have; where the focus point should be. I’m glad we found an opportunity like this to tackle the idea.
So we have a release date for The Last Guardian, Holiday 2011, but what about a release date for the Team ICO Collection??
I can’t say exactly when yet. But the PS3 port announcements created more buzz than I ever imagined, which made me both surprised and very happy. I’m hoping gamers will want to play both of them through to the ending, and I’m also hoping they get some sort of emotional reaction along the way.
If there is two games the entire PlayStation LifeStyle staff is interested in, The Last Guardian the HD re-release of ICO and Shadow of The Colossus are easily it. Make sure you check back for news regarding both titles here at PlayStation LifeStyle as we can promise you, no matter how big or small it may be, we will cover it!
[Source: Famitsu]
