Before deciding to go with the haunting post-apocalytic world of The Last of Us, the second team at Naughty Dog was seriously considering developing a new Jak and Daxter title.
In the latest issue of Game Informer, Evan Wells, the co-president of Naughty Dog revealed that they were initially looking into how they could apply the lessons they’ve learned from working with the Uncharted series to Jak and Daxter.
We’d all talked about it in interviews with fans asking, ‘Where’s the next Jak & Daxter?’ I don’t know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively. Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Lets go back and apply what we’ve learned with the Uncharted games to Jak & Daxter.’ It’s one of the franchises that’s near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we’d like to somehow honour.
Unfortunately, their plans never came to fruition.
Even if we felt like we’re going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted. We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realised we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point, the conversations started to move in a new direction.
Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future, so to say we’ll never go back is kind of crazy. But right now, we’ve got this new IP that we’re definitely going to be supporting. I guess there’s a possibility the Uncharted team could move on to Jak & Daxter. It’s still up in the air, but I wouldn’t think that’s going to happen because I think we’d run into all of the same problems with that team that we did with this team.
While a shiny new Jak and Daxter should would be a nice treat to fans of the series, what the team is doing with The Last of Us makes this news a bit easier to swallow. Plus, with the HD collection set to arrive tomorrow, there will be more than enough content featuring the orange Ottsel to keep gamers busy for a while.
