Jak 2 was a divisive game when it launched 20 years ago to the day, and it remains a divisive game now. With a Metacritic score of 87, you might not think it was all that controversial, but 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 2 has 93, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Breath of the Wild has 97, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Cyberpunk 2077 has 86. A game can be universally beloved and yet still highly divisive, and Jak 2 is another game in that club. But it's not talked about in those terms, and as it turns 20 years old, maybe it's time to look at why.
A major reason is the very fact that it is 20 years old. Gaming is quick to erase its own history, always looking towards the future, to faster, bigger, more graphically enhanced games, embarrassed of its own legacy. When gaming does turn to the past, it's rarely to revere and often to plunder, with remakes and remasters made to cash in on nostalgia. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog is an especially interesting case study here - it has already run 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us Part 1 back 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:through the shoe buffer twice, and se♊ems ready toꦅ polish up The Last of Us Part 2 again. But it has sold off 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Bandicoot, the studio that made𒊎 it, and ignores Jak in favo🅠ur of its photorealistic blockbusters in TLOU and Uncharted.
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Assassin's Creed Mirage is supposed to be Assassin's Creed back to its roots, but it was never meant to be a small, curated game 💖in the first place
Another reason is the nature of the controversy. TLOU, BOTW, and CP77 all promised to herald new dawns for gaming. You'd get few arguments that TLOU or BOTW at least moderately achieved these goals, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:while fans will defend CP77 (at least played on the most expensive PCs and with three years worth of patches and a major expansion). Games these days are either masterpieces or trash. While TLOU2 took a huge narrative swing, most games become divisive these days because they overpromise, or because we expect them to be foundation shifting and they turn out to be just 'okay'. Jak 2 was controversial in a very different way.
Jak 2 came out in 2003, which you'd have already figured out if you studied subtraction at school. The first Jak game arrived in 2001, and the third in 2004. Combat Racing was 2005, and the PSP spin-off Daxter was 2006. That's five games in six years. Conversely, The Last of Us Part 2 arrived seven years after Part 1. There was an 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted game and spin-off in that gap, but gaps between series are growing far larger. There were six years between Breath of the Wild and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of the Kingdom, the longest wait between two mainline Zelda games ever. Cyberpunk 2077 came five years after 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Witcher 3 (and didn't work as intended until three years after that), but most importantly, released eight years after it was announced.
Games take so much longer to make these days, and that raises the expectation that they must be perfect and boundary breaking. It means there are no do-overs. Studios die off after one bad game because they're so expensive and it will be half a decade before the next one comes out to fix it. Jak 2 moved to a darker, grungier, more steampunk version of its world after the bright and jungle-toned palette of the first game, giving Jak a dark side and making him more powerful, while introducing more urban gameplay and firearms. It looked at what GTA 3 did,🍸 and thought ‘we could do that, and still be us’. Mixing and matching of identities, trying things to see if the🏅y land, was far easier for games to do back then.
These days, a game couldn't afford to uproot itself like that without committing to a hard reboot and adding extra layers of risk. The sporadic release schedule of each series also makes it harder for games to build hardcore fanbases. This is why we get die-hard fans from hype alone, who defend a game sight unseen - they're starving out here. Jak 2 was a risk, admittedly a calculated one as Naughty Dog tried to mature and move away from bouncy cartoon fun. You can trace the nihilism and prestige melancholy of the studio's current output back to the shores of Jak 2, if you squint hard enough.
These sorts of risks aren't allowed these days, and games of Jak 2's size and stature are rare. The only top level studio regularly producing polished triple-As that don't consume your world and release every year or two is Insomniac. Experimentation is entirely left to the indie scene, and while triple-A games remain great (looking at what we've had this year, maybe better than ever), they're often the result of similarly sized teams, working to similarly drawn out development schedules, and made to similarly safe parameters. 2023 has been full of hits, but studios operate on a 'one miss and you're out' policy that stops a Jak 2 from getting a chance, not to mention two years to make a triple-A sequel and then have the sequel to that come out the year after is no longer achievable.
Technology has gotten better but rather than helping to produce games faster, we now get ostensibly better games but slower than ever. When the pandemic backlog clears into 2024, and we're left in the desert with only the rare oasis of a triple-A every other month that looks and plays like the ones from the month before that and the month before that, we might miss the halcyon days of a risk like Jak 2.