THE LAST GUARDIAN GAMEPLAY TRAILERS 720P

It's also fair to assume this was targeting 720p on PS3 at best, the most common target resolution of the generation, and a far cry from the peak 1890p we'd eventually get on PS4 Pro. In motion it looked buttery smooth - a clear 30fps in the feed - and did a great job of hiding the game's troubled development. Simply put, the build would render at lower the frame-rate, before increasing playback speed to disguise PS3's poor performance. However, due to performance being so poor at the time, he states the team opted for a non-realtime solution. In retrospect, director Fumito Ueda confirmed that this 2009 showing was actually running on genuine PS3 hardware. This early trailer set in stone the visual style that would stick for years to come. As for Trico, feather rendering took a step up too, suffering from less pop-in across his body during a final panning shot. The boy's model was also replaced, going from a basic design clearly meant as a placeholder, to a more detailed model with a visibly higher polygon count. In the end, this aesthetic is closer to what we'd in the final product. The Aztec style architecture of the target render was no more, and the E3 trailer moved to more ornate, mossy temples with a grey colour pallet. The biggest change by far was in environment and character designs. The Last Guardian: an enigma across its nine year development cycle, we track its media footprint over the years and compare early showings with the final game. Lighting was improved overall, though the motion blur was downgraded to use fewer samples. For example, rendering of grass shifted away from a fuller, geometric design, to less taxing alpha transparencies for each tuft. Surprisingly this was almost shot-for-shot identical to that target render, meaning you could compare the two directly to spot big changes. 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.Īt Sony's E3 2009 conference the game got its first official trailer, now renamed as The Last Guardian. It was all there, and very much in standing with the team's previous hit. 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. Even so, you could see the same rendering techniques used in Shadow of the Colossus translating directly to this new engine. It showed the basic visual concept behind an eventual PS3 title, an almost CG-like presentation at points, though with some very obvious limitations.Ĭharacter 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. 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. A trailer leaked by, revealed a target render used by the developer, likely from a period earlier in development. Actual video of the title surfaced in mid-2009.

One image was released next to it: the mysterious motif of a chain leading into the ground. While it may have been announced in 2007, our first actual sighting of The Last Guardian came in 2008, through a public job advert. 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. 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. When it began as a PS3 title in 2007, nobody could have anticipated a nine year wait to see the title on store shelves. 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.

The last guardian gameplay trailers