Perhaps it was a misquote referring to their sharing of technical know-how, which may have benefited The Last Guardian team, he muses. First-party teams don’t ”necessarily actively work together”.
There’s definitely chatter between Sony teams but they’re not all in each other’s business directly; it’s an exchange of ideas and technological breakthroughs, says another.
”I’m never really sure how that got in the press, because as far as I’m aware we’re not helping out with The Last Guardian,” Tim Moss told Eurogamer. ”The only way you can say that is the knowledge that we contribute back to the central tech groups benefits The Last Guardian. So I’m guessing someone was slightly misquoted.”
”The different Sony first-party teams do not necessarily actively work together, but we do communicate with each other,” added fellow director of technology Christer Ericson. ”We tend to visit each other several times a year, and doing so we may exchange ideas. They’ve been here, and we’ve been there.”
”We do ask each other how are you doing that, and just sometimes go over to provide feedback.”
Sony’s Worldwide Studios encourages the sharing and even co-development of new tech. Moss continued: ”There are very low-level bits of rendering code that we can take and put in our engine.”
”Ice code is in the Naughty Dog engine, for example. But if we need to explain how our player code works, for instance - that’s much more of a spiderweb. The way that Nathan Drake runs around the world - I know how it’s done, but it’s diametrically opposed to how God of War works.”
The Last Guardian remains shrouded for now but fans were told last month by Fumito Ueda that development continues marching forward. Speculation is now building that it’ll be switching to PlayStation 4 and will become a launch title.