Tweet
The Last Guardian is out at last. After the release of Ico in 2001 and Shadow of the Colossus four years later, it's fair to say Team Ico's third game has had the most troubled development of them all. When it began as a PS3 title in 2007, nobody could have anticipated a nine year wait to see the title on store shelves. But on its own terms the result is breathtaking; despite the age of its concept - and many of its assets - The Last Guardian's backdrops still wow due to on-point art direction from director Fumito Ueda. The story behind its technology however, from a leaked target render in 2009, to its eventual release in 2016, plays a big part in explaining how the final game turned out.While it may have been announced in 2007, our first actual sighting of The Last Guardian came in 2008, through a public job advert. One image was released next to it: the mysterious motif of a chain leading into the ground. Actual video of the title surfaced in mid-2009. A trailer leaked by playstationlifestyle.net, revealed a target render used by the developer, likely from a period earlier in development. It was an internal demo with a working title of Project Trico - a blueprint, much like Killzone 2's infamous first reveal, that Team Ico would strive to recreate using actual PS3 hardware. It showed the basic visual concept behind an eventual PS3 title, an almost CG-like presentation at points, though with some very obvious limitations.
Character shadows were missing and aliasing was prevalent, and while much of its content would appear in later media, some environments would be completely cut from later trailers. Even so, you could see the same rendering techniques used in Shadow of the Colossus translating directly to this new engine. Particularly the ruined, Aztec-style architecture, the faux HDR lighting, motion blur, depth of field, and physics-based elements on chains, and even body ragdolls. It was all there, and very much in standing with the team's previous hit. This render serves as a fascinating mid-point between Team Ico's work on Shadow of the Colossus and a true PS3 engine we'd get to see just a few months later.
Read more…
More...