

While originally intended as an exclusive for the Playstation 3, the game would not see the light of day until December of 2016- almost a full 10 years later, and on a console one generation ahead of their target.
#Funny the last guardian gameplay free
It’s not likely we’ll ever be free of it - hype is as human as flattery - but at least for now, it seems like we’ve managed, as a community, to ground ourselves.Development on The Last Guardian, or "Project Trico" as it was known early on, began in 2007 headed by Fumito Ueda, the mastermind (and often heralded genius) behind Ico and Shadow of the Colossus on Playstation 2. Whether or not gamers are truly tired of hype will become clear once Star Citizen releases. They have delivered something instead of nothing at all, and that’s laudable. The pieces still have to be put together and fit into the greater picture Roberts has promised, but these smaller releases have the potential to pull high expectations back down to earth. The promises are there for sure, but Roberts and his studio, Cloud Imperium Games, have continued to release smaller modules for the game, letting people play bits and pieces of it as they continue development. Unlike No Man’s Sky, though, fans of the game aren’t subsisting solely off promises. The game has collected over $140 million from the community and has the potential to disappoint on an unprecedented scale. Expectations among the gaming community are high thanks not only to promises from creator Chris Roberts, but also thanks to the game’s status as the biggest crowdfunded project ever. Now that No Man’s Sky is out of the way, the next big target for the hype cycle appears to be Star Citizen. I don’t blame the gaming community for getting tired of this cycle. It’s given its initial push from enthusiastic creators, who just want to do well by their game, but gets fueled by the publisher and, often, those of us in the press. It’s also likely this whole mess further showed people how the hype train gets created in the first place. The blowout of No Man’s Sky shielded these long-awaited games from the kind of anger they might’ve otherwise incited for some rather minor shortcomings. When Final Fantasy XV - and, a week later, The Last Guardian - were released, the gaming community felt like it was heaving one big sigh of relief. Maybe it even tired out the gaming community. Instead, the blowback did a lot to reset expectations. In another year, in a pre- No Man’s Sky world, both The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy XV might’ve fallen victim to harsh blowback that affected No Man’s Sky. The blowback lasted months, with some of these events occurring two or three months after release. The reaction to the gap between the expectations and reality of No Man’s Sky was like none we’d ever seen, with jilted gamers taking measures like hacking director Sean Murray’s social media accounts, starting crowd-funding campaigns, and hassling him on Twitter. It fell short of many of those promises and seemed to forget entirely about some others. No Man’s Sky was accompanied by countless promises. Final Fantasy XV has a pretty homogenous cast and more systems than one would want to handle, but makes up for them with great characterization and fun gameplay.īut no game (or any piece of media) exists in a vacuum. The Last Guardian offers the emotional thrust we expect of Fumito Ueda’s games despite not looking quite like the PlayStation 4 game we’d hoped for. Dropping out of hyperspace, into a galaxy, and then landing on a planet that first time was a truly impressive experience. What No Man’s Sky lacks in variety, it makes up in spectacle.

If you could separate any of them from the years of promises, expectations, development time and delays, you’d see three very different and interesting games. In a vacuum, none of these games are bad. The Last Guardian and Final Fantasy XV weren’t victim to the same intensity of hype that No Man’s Sky was, but they both rode the train three times long as it did, with each seeing about a decade of development. The game saw a bunch of delays, each accompanied by more and more vicious response from fans - up to and including death threats - until it finally released this August. No Man’s Sky promised infinity, but was developed by something like 20 people. His promises were fueled by the possibilities of video games as a medium, but ultimately reality had to break in and spoil things.

The realities of a small team’s development capabilities crashed headlong into the optimistic promises of the game’s creator.
