Jak & Daxter

Playstation 3 (PS3), Sony

Jak & Daxter 4 [PS3 – Cancelled / Concept]

monokoma
16-10-2014
1 Comment

Before to fully work on  The Last of Us, Naughty Dog was planning to create a new, even more grittier Jak and Daxter game for the Playstation 3, but after the concept art team drawn some Jak and Daxter artworks to use in this “reboot” of the series, they thought that they would have more freedom to just create a new IP for the mature audience, and thus the project evolved to became The Last of Us. After Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, Jak 2 and Jak 3, this project could have been the 4° title in the main Jak series (or even the 5th one if you consider Jak and Daxter: The Lost Frontier). In the end, Naughty Dog never released any new Jak & Daxter game for the PS3, only an HD collection with their first 3 PS2 games.

At the IGDA Toronto 2013 Keynote, Neil Druckmann (Creative Director & Writer from Naughty Dog) talked about this cancelled Jak & Daxter concept:

Our task was to reboot Jak & Daxter. We spent a lot of time exploring the world of Jak and Daxter and how we would reboot it; how we would bring these characters back, some story ideas that we were getting excited about.

As much as we like these concepts and exploring these fantastical worlds, we found the ideas that we were getting passionate about were getting away from Jak & Daxter. We were questioning ourselves, were we doing this for marketing reasons and naming something Jak & Daxter when it really isn’t Jak & Daxter, or were we really passionate about it?

As we can read at GameInformer:

Shelving the Jak and Daxter ideas meant the team could begin work on a fresh idea. Shedding the restrictions of an existing IP allowed directors Druckmann and Straley to let their creative juices flow and explore whatever they wished.

Some concept arts from this cancelled “Jak & Daxter 4” project were shown by Neil Druckmann at the IGDA Toronto, in the “A Tribute to Naughty Dog: 30th Anniversary” exhibition in september / october 2014 and in the “Naughty Dog’s 30th Anniversary” art book (you can buy it on Amazon UK for 20.39£, Amazon USA for 25$ or Amazon IT for 32 euro), as posted by Junkie Monkeys!

Thanks to Loïc Caria for the contribution!

Images:

Video:

 

Playstation 2 (PS2), Sony

Jak 3 [Beta – PS2]

U64 Staff & Contributors
25-08-2011
No Comments

Jak 3 is an action game developed by Naughty Dog as the third game in the main Jak and Daxter series, published in 2004 for the PlayStation 2. As we can read on Wikipedia, Jak 3 was first revealed to be in the works by one of Superplay’s writers on January 8, 2004. While browsing the Naughty Dog offices, he saw early work being done with desert environments.

Below you can see a video of a Jak 3 beta dated 24-28 August and about 70% complete, thanks to BamzookiMan130.

  • Most maps lack borders, such as water or walls.
  • Crates are missing from the game.
  • Health bar for vehicles.
  • Different noises for collecting items.
  • Different shooting noises for the desert drones.
  • The Wasteland map is vastly different.
  • NPC’s seem to be missing from Haven City.
  • The KGB Blast Bot seems to rarely take damage.
  • The voicing in the game seems to be unfinished/not started on.
  • The Armor of Mar is unused.
  • The Jak 2 health bar is used, and even though it is used in the trailer, there seems to be no way to check how much Light Eco you have.
  • When Jak changes from the Scatter Gun to the Plasmite RPG, the diagram of the gun doesn’t change.
  • There is no appearance of the Dark Mod for the Blaster in the trailer, hinting that one of more variants of it were unfinished.

Video: