Acclaimed developers, Naughty Dog, wanted to make the game more like Uncharted but stopped when it ‘compromised’ on the spirit of Jak & Daxter.
Anyone who has ever had video game console or plays video games will have, at some point in their life heard about a certain character by the name of Jak and his over the top side-kick, Daxter. If they have not, well then they probably missed out on an important piece of gaming evolution and culture.
The games made a name for themselves on Sony’s PlayStation consoles and the game’s IP belongs to none other than Naughty Dog. The studio was known for this series well before it ever began development on the Uncharted series, which has taken over the gaming world and set the benchmark for the industry.
Speaking at a recent interview, Evan Wells, who happens to be the co-president of Naughty Dog, confided in how the studio actually did extensive research into bringing the latest generation of gamers a Jak & Daxter game, but stopped when they felt they were not adding anything to the universe.
He explained, “We’d talked about it in interviews with fans asking, ‘When’s the next Jak and Daxter?’ I don’t know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively.”
One can be sure that that particular bit of news would be bittersweet to many, just as Wells suggested, as many gamers will be disappointed that a new entry in the series was not in the works, but at the same appreciate the fact that the studio were not pumping out games for the sake of revenue and ruining the series they love so much.
Mr. Wells continued by sharing how they wanted to bring elements of the Uncharted series to the game but that it did not work out well enough to warrant a new game.
“Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Let’s go back and apply what we’ve learned on the Uncharted games to Jak ad Daxter’”.
However, later on the co-president conceded, “But as we started exploring this and looking at ways we could evolve the game and apply the same narrative techniques that we had leveraged to good effect in the Uncharted series . . . All the ideas just started to feel like they were going so far away from what made Jak & Daxter, Jak & Daxter.”
Naughty Dog is however currently working on a new IP which has everyone taking by the name of The Last of Us. Details on that here.
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