Stepping away from The Last of Us in Bruce Straley and Neil Druckmann’s AMA on Reddit, they did also respond to queries about Jak 4 – the game they had attempted to make before deciding to go ahead with The Last of Us.
First up, Bruce responded to someone who brought up the fact that they “were working on ideas for Jak 4 (not counting Lost Frontier), but you couldn’t come up with a good enough story/game idea/etc. so it got scrapped.” Here’s what he had to say:
It’s all true.
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.
Whenever we tried to make a Jak & 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. Which meant that when we finally got to a story we actually liked, we weren’t actually making a J-n-D game anymore. And that wouldn’t be honoring what the fans would want… it wouldn’t really be a Jak & Daxter game… soooo… we tried lifting the constraints and said, “What if we could make anything? what’s exciting to us??” and that became [The Last of Us].
BUT the door is never fully shut though… there’s always a possibility…
Next, Bruce answered the question of whether the fictional world of Jak & Daxter was easier to create than the real world-based world of The Last of Us:
AREYOUKIDDINGME?!?! haha. Jak & Daxter would be a luxury to design in that world again. Story would be hard to have depth though. Those characters are who they are now – it’s hard to infuse them with the motivations and choices we’d need them to have to make a compelling story (we tried early before we decided to make [The Last of Us]). A grounded world is a difficult solution space to design in though. But nothing good comes for free…
Neil also chimed in on a potential Jak 4 by saying, “It’s dependent on coming up with a good idea that we (as a studio) are passionate about.” Also, for those of you hoping to see Jak X HD on PS3, Druckmann said it’s “doubtful.”
Are you surprised that we haven’t seen a second Jak & Daxter HD collection with Daxter, Jak X, and Jak & Daxter: The Lost Frontier? Let us know in the comments below.
