Sony’s long-awaited action/adventure game The Last Guardian was nowhere to be found during the company’s E3 press conference tonight. That’s because the game simply is not ready to be shown publicly, PlayStation software product development head Scott Rohde told GameSpot this evening in Los Angeles.

“It was a fun week of Last Guardian news,” Rohde said with a smile, recalling the game’s rumored cancellation earlier this week. “At PlayStation, it’s really important to us to make sure that the creative process works. And in this case, [game director Fumito Ueda] has created something that’s great, it’s just going to need some time. We’ll show it when it’s ready.”

The Last Guardian was announced all the way back in 2009 as a PlayStation 3 game. I asked Rohde tonight if the game is now a PlayStation 4 title, but he wouldn’t budge. “I’m not going to talk about it more than that,” he said.

Earlier this week, Rohde confirmed that The Last Guardian had not been canceled after an initial report said that it was.

The Last Guardian has made “slow progress” for years. Before today, the most recent update on the game came in late 2013, when Sony president of Worldwide Studios Shuhei Yoshida said that the studio was “reengineering” The Last Guardian.

Formally announced at the 2009 Electronic Entertainment Expo, The Last Guardian tells a boy-and-his-dog tale, where the dog is a giant and feathered, yet seemingly amiable, beast. Team Ico has not been forthcoming with specific plot details, but gameplay will involve the boy manipulating his companion to navigate a variety of environmental puzzles.

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