Going on with The Last Guardian development on PS3 would’ve resulted in sacrificing features

The PS4 exclusive that came back from the dead this E3, The Last Guardian has been in development now for over 7 years as a PS3 game at first. However, if that continued the team would have been forced to drop some features in favor of making the game run.

According to Sony Worldwide president Shuhei Yoshida, Fumito Ueda’s team had to make some cuts to make the game run at an acceptable framerate, but with the PS4 reveal the development no longer has these issues.

“Simply, we failed. We decided, no, we cannot make it [on PS3],” said Yoshida. “The trailer that we showed at E3 2009 was sped up. It was from the development system but we took it frame by frame and made it run smoothly. Ueda-san, his style of development is very set out, clear, like a vision, at the beginning of the project. Because he is an artist, he creates a short video to show to the team members, this is what we make. So the vision is totally the same.

“Because of the technical difficulty, running the game at the frame-rate required that the team look to compromise some features – the number of characters that Ueda-san wanted to do – if we were to continue on PS3. But because we moved to PS4, now he can make what he wanted. So people say it looks like the same game – there’s a reason.”

The last Guardian was re-revealed at this year’s E3 after people believed it was never seeing the light of day, and it’s finally coming out next year on PS4