Remember the days when Naughty Dog used to develop fun, cartoony platformers before moving on to action adventure titles like The Last of Us and Uncharted? Community strategist Arne Meyer actually revealed to IGN that the developer is always interested in revisiting franchises like Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter but it has to make sense at the time.
“It’s never off the table. It’s not too much time passing, but it’s the same issues we explored with the Jak game: Is it something that makes sense to us now? I mean, we still have people that worked on the Crash games in the studio. We never forget our past and it’d be great for nostalgic reasons. It’d be the same reason as why there isn’t a Jak 4: I don’t know if it’s playing to our strengths right now.”
Meyer said that Naughty Dog was looking to make a new Jak game in 2009 but that initial ideas were “kind of getting away from what Jak and Daxter was. We were questioning, ‘Are we doing this for marketing reasons? Naming something Jak and Daxter, when it’s not really Jak and Daxter? Or are we really passionate about it?’
“Right now, what’s exciting everyone at the studio is continuing to work on narrative-driven games with strong characters. I think, at least for the time being, we haven’t exhausted the possibilities there, but that could change with something as simple as hardware. That’s what drove it before. I think we’re on to something really good though creating character-driven stories so that’s where our focus is going to be.”
That means the studio is completely focused on games like Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End. But who knows? Some day, we could see the return of the dynamic, quirky duo of Jak & Daxter.