Fumito Ueda's The Last Guardian changed platform from PlayStation 3 to PlayStation 4 in 2012, Sony Worldwide Studios president Shuhei Yoshida has told Kotaku.
“The game is totally playable,” Yoshida commented, explaining why they finally decided to show the game again earlier this week. He added that it wasn't played live during their E3 show due to the artificial intelligence behind the cat/bird/dog hybrid not necessarily performing in a stage demo-friendly manner at all times.
The Last Guardian is due for release in 2016 and Yoshida said, “We have a certain level of confidence about the launch window, which is why we showed it.”
Yoshida noted that the game was running very slowly in 2011, with a poor framerate and the team needed to remove features in order to make it work "but it was taking lots of time."
As such, it became a natural choice to move development to PS4, “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 rumours that PS4 lead designer and Knack developer Mark Cerny had been drafted in to save the project are not true, and Fumito Ueda, who officially left Sony in 2011, is still very much involved with the game's development. Ueda is responsible for overseeing art direction, animation direction, game design direction, and other aspects of The Last Guardian.
