Yoshida: The Last Guardian making "slow progress"

Sony WorldWide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has said The Last Guardian is still coming along nicely, but it's making "slow progress."

Yoshida told 1UP at DICE that despite stopping as a full-time employee from the company, Fumito Ueda is still coming in daily to Team ICO to work on the OTT-delayed game on a contractual basis, as previously announced.

"He comes in every day, and he's probably one of the people who works the longest hours," he said.

"The project has been making progress, but slow progress. So that's tough, but we haven't changed any focus. It's still a really important project and a vision we want to see realized, and Fumito's vision is really causing a very difficult challenge for the developers, so there's some scrapping and rebuilding -- iteration in the process. That's why [it's taking so long]."

Yoshida's comments are on par with what he said in Cologne last August at gamescom, telling VG247 the game was "still making progress," adding it'd "continue to support" it.

As for Ueda's 'departure', it was actually more of an rearrangement to let him do more creative work on the project.

"Well it's confirmed in terms of the status of his relation to the company -- he was an employee, and now he's working on a contract basis,' said Yoshida.

"You know, we discussed an arrangement so he could focus on the creative side. But his work and his presence on that team never changed, so it was just more a contractual rearrangement, and that was taken as 'he left'."