The trailer's focus is naturally on Trico, the "great man-eating eagle" of the game's Japanese-language title and a creature with a bit of bird, cat, dog, and everything else you can think of in him. Did the game's core concept begin with this guy's design? "We thought we could take the relationship you built with Agro as you went through Shadow of the Colossus and make that more of the main focus of the game design," Ueda said. "Also, both the PlayStation 3 and Japan-made video games in general haven't exhibited a lot of energy lately, so we chose a theme for our game that instead offered a very strong presence."
Discussing Trico's design, Ueda revealed that his team's primary focus was to create a virtual creature that was interesting to interact with while being as realistic as possible. "Replicating a real-life dog or cat is not impossible, but if you have a dog or cat in real life, you're always going to notice the unnatural idiosyncrasies of the virtual animal first," he said. "The current design is a product of thinking about what works with the game's design while looking as natural as possible. It's a mixture of features from many animals, and even I think it's a pretty strange combination. That's what we were aiming for, though. We kept it deliberately unbalanced because looking strange was important here.
"There are lots of games that have cute-looking characters, but that 'cute' is mostly a symbolic 'cute,' taking real life and deforming it. The traits of a real animal are much more complex, but I think video games, and in particular the power of the PS3, have the power to express them. The challenge for us is to show truly animal-like expressions -- the way the eyes move and open, or the way it moves or raises its hackles."
In The Last Guardian, the player controls the boy seen in the trailer, interacting with the eagle as he explores the game world. Exactly how the boy and eagle meet up is still a secret, but one scene in the trailer seems to show the boy giving the eagle some food. "You can feed the eagle, as well as take out any spears or harpoons stuck in his body," Ueda said. "You're free to interact with him at any time, but having to care for him constantly would be annoying, so we're striking a balance. Building your characters and solving puzzles are important parts of any game, but an animal strikes a presence in your life simply by looking at it. There is an air of mystery to them, since you can't be sure what thoughts could be crossing their mind, and that's another reason why animals are a main theme of the game."
Interacting with your griffin-ish friend is not going to be smooth going from start to finish, however. "The eagle does not simply follow all of your directions," Ueda said. "Throwing something that catches his interest will get him to move -- you aren't working with him and giving him orders, but you're more taking advantage of his natural behavior. Sometimes, you'll need him to sit still in order to finish a section, but he'll run off on you instead. He's not all that smart, and he won't necessarily do what the player wants all the time."
As Ueda put it to Famitsu, the classic Ico/Colossus gameplay -- climbing up, grabbing on to things, figuring out how to get from point A to point B -- will be the main thrust of The Last Guardian as well. "This game, unlike the previous ones, runs on a full physics engine, but it's not just for the purposes of technology," he noted. "I think it's important that any piece of technology you use contributes to the themes you're trying to express. We're very serious about this -- for example, in the scene [in the trailer] where the eagle grabs the barrel and swallows it, that's not simple animation; the barrel makes interactive contact with his mouth, and physical momentum drives it down his throat. We learned a great deal about AI processing in Ico and transformative collisions in Shadow of the Colossus; here, we've put the two together and brought them up to PlayStation 3 level, and that lets us make this world the kind of inviting, 'I wish I could go there' place that Ico and Colossus had."
Sony Computer Entertainment announced at E3 that The Last Guardian is a 2010 release, and Ueda declined to go into further specifics, other than to say "there is definitely a reason why we are announcing this when we are." Online compatibility is still up in the air -- "There are things I'd like to do with the online environment," Ueda said, but "I can't definitely say whether it will happen."
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