If they had of picked up the Jak & Daxter banner again they felt it wouldn’t be what fans wanted, and it would have been ”limiting the direction” of the studio. Never say never, ever.
After enjoying the ride that Uncharted gave the studio they didn’t feel it would be right for them or the fans of Jak & Daxter. The Last of Us provided the ‘right’ project for the studio’s passion.
”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,” said Naughty Dog co-founder Evan Wells.
”Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Let’s 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.”
”Even if we felt like we were going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted,” he continued. ”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.”
The Jak & Daxter Collection releases on PS3 the end of February, which bundles HD versions of Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Jak 2 and Jak 3. To completely rule out a new Jak & Daxter is ”kind of crazy”, says Wells.
