For a brief, shining moment, fans could’ve looked forward to a new Jax & Daxter title benefitting from the things developer Naughty Dog learned on the Uncharted series. Instead, the company decided to try something completely new with The Last of Us.
“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,” developer co-president Evan Wells told GameInformer.
The Last of Us is being developed by Naughty Dog’s second team, who’s been working on it for the past few years. But the title originally began as a new Jak game.
“We dug around trying to find the core of Jak and Daxter. Who are the characters? We had to reboot it essentially. Every time we got excited about an idea we’d take a step back and look at it and be like ‘It’s not Jak and Daxter, are we just slapping the name on it for marketing reasons?’” said Last of Us creative director Neil Druckmann.
“It started feeling like a compromise. The more we tried to make Jak and Daxter like we wanted to, it didn’t feel like things were matching up. We have folders and folders filled with scrapped ideas.”
“Even though we wanted to give fans another Jak and Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted, and that we would end up either limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realized we were going to just do everybody a disservice,” said Wells.
The Uncharted team could end up working on a new Jak & Daxter next, but fans shouldn’t hold their breath.
“Never say never. 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 [The Last of Us] that we’re definitely going to be supporting. I guess there’s a possibility that the Uncharted team could move on to Jak and 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,” said Wells.
