After years of teasing, Fumito Ueda has confirmed in a recent interview that he hopes to reveal the next game from GenDesign at some point in 2023.
It's been quite some time since GenDesign's last game, The Last Guardian, which was released back in 2016 after having been in development for close to ten years and being swapped from Team Ico to GenDesign towards the end of development. Since then, the team has teased its next project a few times, including confirming that it'll be funded by Epic Games, but it looks set to give some more concrete details soon.
As translated by Gematsu, the most recent Famitsu issue contains a segment where Japanese gaming developers share their ambitions for 2023, which mostly consists of little teases and hints at more information for their upcoming projects. One of those developers is Fumito Ueda, who revealed that he hopes to show off GenDesign's new game in 2023.
Underneath the section asking about ambitions in 2023, Ueda said, "All of genDesign is working hard to be able to finally announce something, so please give us your support". As is the case with many of these recent comments from developers, it's worth noting the word "hope", which means that it's not a guarantee. Still, it's been long enough that it seems likely that Ueda will live up to those hopes.
Although we don't know much at all about GenDesign's next game, there have been numerous teases about it over the years that give us a few clues as to what it's going to be about. The first image that was shared of it was back in 2018, and it shows a glowing girl sitting on a pedestal while a giant's hand sits on the right side of her. The image was titled "Beauty and the Beast" when it was uploaded to the site.
The next tease we have of the project is a piece of concept art that was included in an image showcasing all of GenDesign's games so far. The concept art shows a small boy standing next to a mechanical ship of some sort that towers above him. It doesn't clearly relate to the Beauty and the Beast image that we received before, so it'll be interesting to see how the two tie together.