Jak and Daxter is a franchise that’s up there with some of Playstation’s greats. Twisted Metal, Ratchet and Clank, Sly Cooper, God of War, InFamous, and more have all been exclusive series to the gaming console over the years, and yetJak and Daxter have never seen a next gen leap. While tomorrow’s Jak and Daxter Collection will have the first three games bumped up to HD, developer Naughty Dog reveals the duo almost received a new sequel. Also, Sony announces that if you don’t want to pick up the collection tomorrow in stores, you can do it from the comfort of the Playstation Store.
Sony announced on the Playstation Blog today that starting tomorrow, all three Jak and Daxter games will be available in the Collection package and individually via the Playstation Store. This is the first time a collection has been released the same day as the retail version. The Sly Collection was eventually released on the Playstation Store some months after the retail version of the title.
Developer Naughty Dog is being highlighted in this month’s Game Informer for their upcoming title The Last Of Us, but they told the gaming zine that their next title could have been something completely different: Jak and Daxter 4. The biggest problem, however, was their attempt at the game, and unfortunately coming up short.
“We dug around trying to find the core of Jak and Daxter,” creative director Neil Druckmann said. “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? 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.”
Naughty Dog co-founder Evan Wells said that “All the ideas just started to feel like they were going so far away from what made Jak and Daxter Jak and Daxter. 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.”
Does this mean that we won’t see Jak and Daxter during the PS3′s life cycle? May we have to wait for another console in order to play a full out sequel to the popular franchise?
Wells continued to ignite hope in fans, ultimately saying that the duo could return in 2013, after The Last of Us releases. But, it seems like a pipe dream. ”Never say never. It could happen. 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.”
