Naughty Dog Game Director Bruce Straley held a Ask us Anything Session on Reddit recently. Details on why the studio passed on the production of Jak 4, but is still leaving the door open for its looming development.
He said ,”The types of stories we were interested in telling just weren’t fitting into the Jak universe. It was hard to deal with all the baggage of all of those characters and the lore and try to apply everything that we were learning about how to mesh stories and gameplay and we just couldn’t make it all fit.”
The developers think that the Jak and Dexter Series lacks that special something. “Whenever we tried to make a Jak and Daxter story, constrained to what had already been created, those stories were falling flat for us – and the world didn’t give us a lot of flexibility,” he added. “Which meant that when we finally got to a story we actually liked, we weren’t actually making a J-n-D game anymore.”
He is known to be a fan of the series and he hinted “that the door is never fully shut, there’s always a possibility.” So Naughty Dog Hasn’t Completely Given Up on Jak 4
After a game like The Last of Us, it will be hard to achieve the same or even close to that level. But it is unfair to compare the two titles. They are completely different games. But the Jak and Dexter series is one of the best series of all time, in my opinion. Whether it will achieve as much as it has in the past is unknown, but dropping an amazing series like Jak and Dexter is disappointing.
Do you think Naughty Dog should work on Jak 4, or would you rather see the studio work on something new?
