Fumito Ueda submitted a proposal of changes for the Shadow of the Colossus PS4 remake
He doesn't know if they'll be included yet.
Shadow of the Colossus game director Fumito Ueda submitted a proposal of changes to Sony for the upcoming and recently announced PS4 remake. But he doesn't know if they'll get in.
Speaking to me via translator at the Gamelab conference in Barcelona, he said, "I transmitted my petition about the content and tuning but I don't know the implementation will be what I told."
"It's he who wants to change something," his translator clarified, "but he doesn't know if it is possible to change all of the things he [wants] to change."
Ueda continued: "Those things of the remake that I would like to change, I can't mention, because if I say one thing and in the final version that thing is not included, it's a problem."
Sony announced the Shadow of the Colossus PS4 remake at E3, revealing Texan developer Bluepoint as the studio doing the work - Bluepoint being the team which remastered Ico and Shadow of the Colossus for PS3. It's something of a remaster specialist.
Sony's Shuhei Yoshida said to Japanese magazine Famitsu that Ueda "wasn't that involved" and no content would be altered, just assets. Speaking to me, Ueda seemed to back that up, saying he wasn't implicated in overseeing the whole process but was focusing on his own new game instead.
He also shot down any hopes of any cut Shadow of the Colossus bosses being reinstated and finally seeing the light of day
"In this game there are 16 enemies and there's a story about 16 enemies," he told me, "so to change this history... I don't think about changing this history. It's finished with 16 enemies. It's OK."
His new game he's cagey saying much about. But he's doing things a little differently. Unlike in the past, when he'd kick development off with a powerful visual stimulus like a short film, this time, for the first time, he intends to make a prototype. The tools are there these days to make this doable; he doesn't have to build everything from scratch. It's something he hopes will lessen overall development time as well.
"I would like to finish a game as soon as quickly possible," he said with a smile. "Many problems" were responsible for The Last Guardian taking "a very long time", he said, but offered no further detail.
What Ueda's new game will be - and whether it will be multiplatform for the first time - we'll have to wait and see. But will it feel like a Fumito Ueda game? Will it feel familiar to Ico and Shadow of the Colossus and The Last Guardian - the games that have come before?
"The last three games we created I didn't intend to be very similar to each other," he said. "When I start to create a game, always I think we will create something different. But the result was that in the three games there are some similarities. There's a moment when one game links with another, but I didn't put it in at the start, it happens in the process.
"So now, I think I'm creating something very different, but the end result? I can't say."
The Shadow of the Colossus PS4 remake is due out next year.