While gamers have waited for Fumito Ueda’s The Last Guardian to finally arrive on PlayStation since its original unveil in 2009, it appears they’ll have to wait just a little bit longer.
President of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida made an announcement on the PlayStation Blog indicating that they made the “tough decision to delay the release of The Last Guardian a few weeks.”
The six-week delay provides gen DESIGN and JAPAN Studio the opportunity to finalize some finishing touches and add some last-minute polish to the game. The title will still likely receive a day one patch to further update visual fidelity and fix some minor bugs that are caught between the time the game code is finalized and it’s public release.
With the game’s original unveil in 2009 and a few very (very) minor drips of information for the next six years, it took until 2015 for the game to officially be unveiled again at E3, where it was revealed to be a PlayStation 4 game launching in 2016.
Few games have as prolific an identity as The Last Guardian, and even fewer, if any, are unreleased titles that are not technically a direct sequel to a previous title. Ueda has promised a magically crafted experience, and an extra six weeks is not going to be too much of a burden on gamers. However, with the new release date being December 6th, it remains to be seen whether the public will have already had their fill of games to that point; the holiday season has become increasingly crowded, and a December release usually indicates a game will not be as successful as one that releases in October or November, for example.
Time will tell what the fate of The Last Guardian is, and it will almost certainly be a lesson for game publishers, whether good or bad, to determine if a long-cycle, eagerly-awaited game actually pays off in the end.
The Last Guardian arrives on PlayStation 4 December 6th.