At Sony’s press conference at E32015, President of Sony’s Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida unveiled what to some, the announcement of this year’s E3 - that The Last Guardian is very much alive and is set for release in the near future. Having first started the development of the game in 2007 followed by its unveiling at E3 2009, it's been an eight-year journey of ups and downs for Sony with The Last Guardian coming into E3 2015.

Explaining some of the issues faced which led to the eight-year delay, Shuhei said “The demo (The Last Guardian) shown (in 2009) was (taken) straight from the dev kit; running on the engine but it wasn’t running up to speed as shown in the video. The game was running on lower frame rate but we captured them frame by frame and sped it up for the 20-second video, fully expecting the final game to eventually run on the desired speed."

He went on to explain that the development team then spent a lot of time optimising (the game) after that but were unable to get it to run on the required performance. Obviously frustrated with the slow progress (development) of the game, the team met and tried to develop it on the more powerful PS3 but still were unable to create a game they envisioned from the start. “It was clear that we have to compromise on the vision of the project in terms of scope, size of the levels or number of characters to continue on PS3” Shuhei added.

It was later in 2012 when they decided to put it on ice and aim for the game’s development on Sony’s next console which came to be the PlayStation 4. “We were not sure if we were able to finish the game on the PS3 and even if we did, we knew that we would have to cut corners to make it run on the PS3”.

A fully working demo of The Last Guardian was shown at the E32015 Sony Press Conference last week and is slated to release next year. For more news on The Last Guardian as well as bits from our discussion with Shuhei Yoshida at E3, stay tuned to IGN.