afterward reduced to 24 when he concluded that his former vision was unrealizable. Eventually, Ueda settled on the released game's 16 beings due to a concern that the game would not achieve the desired quality level if the previous number of the colossi was maintained. To choose the colossi that were negligible, Team Ico estimated their level of completion at the time and the degree of overlap between the anticipated method of defeating a given entity and a strategy reserved for another enemy. Other omitted elements of the game included a two-player gameplay mode, excluded due to insufficient development time, as well as a simulation of a full day cycle and weather variations, excised because of problems that Ueda attributed to the PlayStation 2's memory capacity. Despite the design-related difficulties, Kaido remarked that the staff managed to reaffirm their creative priorities repeatedly after they had consulted the NICO technology demo. As the time passed, the development proved to be a strenuous endeavor for the staff, and fan expectations for Team Ico's second game placed them under pressure to surpass their past work in Ico. The team's morale was challenged by Ueda's perfectionistic tendencies, as he was often demanding in his requests for revisions of the game's components. According to both him and Kaido, Ueda's insistence on exercising personal supervision over the artistic facets of the development was a factor in the emergence of the setbacks that the team encountered as they continued to work on the game. Thomas Wilborgh of the Swedish gaming magazine LEVEL afterward commented that Ueda's hands-on role in the creation of his games was evidence of his familiarity with every aspect pertinent to their development, and that Ueda was able to command the respect of individual personnel because of that personal quality. At the height of production, Ueda stayed in the office after hours to make progress in contributing content to the game; Kaido also refused to leave work early when he felt it necessary to provide other team members who worked overtime with moral support. Kaido commended the staff's dedication in retrospect, as he believed that their output allowed Team Ico to "[stick] to the schedule in the end", despite the reductive alterations that the game had undergone over the course of its production. In late 2004, following two years of development during which NICO was listed on Sony's internal schedules for forthcoming products under