I never could decide if this game was emotionally brilliant or just emotionally manipulative, based on the tiny amount of material that was ever released. Penny Arcade probably said it best.
the lost game of a microgeneration
Uh oh. Is that a thing now?
Are they small-batch artisanal?
The half-life of a sony dev studio
“Yearning soul-whisper” – best euphemism I’ve heard for “vaporware.”
Curated, don’t’cha know?
A game you can only dream of playing
How about a game I can only play by dreaming? Like that building I was in last night which existed simultaneously in two different places hundreds of miles apart?
Something tells me “The Last Guardian” isn’t ever coming out. Publishers almost never admit to games being canceled, but 8+ years of development, high developer turn-over and the loss of the creative lead tell another story. The only game that I can think of that came close to those kinds of conditions that actually ended up being released was “Duke Nukem Forever.” It didn’t lose its creative lead, and it only barely managed to get published as almost an act of charity. Not a great precedent.
I’m not sure it’ll ever be released, but if you’ve played Ico or Shadow of the Colossus, then you want it to come out.
Whenever I’m sick I have these infuriating puzzle game dreams, where I have to do a sort of Sudoku/timetable/coding thing with hundreds of variables and I keep making mistakes and having to backtrack.
It’s probably a morphic resonance thing where my immune system is trying different protein folds to match the antigens.
In my dreams, physical space is the puzzle. I can’t read or do any math then because any symbols change too often. But meanwhile everyplace exists as a constantly shifting labyrinth with no end to it. The city/megastructure which engulfs the solar system in Nihei’s “Blame!” comics reminds me of this.
On the other hand, Team Fortress 2, winner of numerous Wired Vaporware awards and still going strong 8 years after release.
Although in that case, it wasn’t actually in continuous development for 8 years, nor was the game that was released even the same game they had started working on 8 years previously. They did three or four different iterations of the idea - essentially unreleased sequels to the original TF - before finally coming up with a version that they liked well enough to release.
I gather DNF went along a vaguely similar line, with George Broussard repeatedly changing his mind (and therefore the dev’s focus) on design, engines & god knows what else. Of course, a polar opposite result when compared with TF2.
Nope. Nope. Nope. Don’t want this game to ever come out. The trailer leaves me weeping and I don’t think I could cope with the full thing. 
Yeah, Broussard kept changing the “Duke” design, and because they were taking so long, they had to completely redo the work every few years just to keep up with changing technology and developments in first-person-shooters and redo the work for the latest engines, as both the technology and design became obsolete. “Guardian” is going to have that same problem to some degree. “Duke” also had a hugely demoralized staff that experienced high turn-over (it didn’t help that they paid less than market wages but promised a big bonus when the game was released - after working on it for a couple years, it would become clear that they’d never see that point and quit). That also increased development time. If “Guardian” has lost not only rank-and-file developers but creative leads, then whatever creative/development problems they were having that previously prevented the game’s release are unlikely to ever get solved. Perhaps, like DNF, they’ll release some disappointing mess, but more than likely it’ll never see the light of day, given their additional issues.
Valve is like Blizzard in that they’ll work on a game, decide it didn’t meet quality standards and not release it. Except that Valve is more likely to have people work on something else and then come back to it at a later time and continue or start over but keep the product. Diablo 3 lost its dev studio and they started over (keeping some elements) and Half-Life three has been allowed to sit for long periods of time, for example.
Some part of me is still waiting for Witch’s Wake 2.
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