In an interview with Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells, the studio considered returning to the Jak and Daxter universe “fairly extensively” but couldn’t make it work.
“Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Lets 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 honor.” [taken from VG247]
“Even if we felt like we’re going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted. 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.”
With the existence of The Last of Us, clearly things did not pan out. However, Wells remarks that the studio could return to Jak and Daxter under the Uncharted team. But don’t hold your breath.
“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 this new IP that we’re definitely going to be supporting,” he said. “I guess there’s a possibility the Uncharted team could move on to Jak & 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.”
Jak and Daxter fans, however, can look forward to the HD Collection featuring the first three games when it releases this week for Playstation 3.
