168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Naughty Dog is highly regarded as a prestigious studio responsible for elevating storytelling in games like no other developer ever has. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:The Last of Us defined PlayStation’s future first-party offerings and raised the narrative bar for the medium. But it wasn’t The Last of Us that defined Naughty Dog’s more mature outlook. That path was set in motion 20 years ago with Jak 2.
If you went back to the 🍃‘00s and asked someon🦩e what Naughty Dog was, they’d probably scream at the sight of someone appearing out of thin air wearing Greggs-branded Crocs. But after calming down, they’d tell you that Naughty Dog is a silly PlayStation studio that makes games about humanoid animals who jump a lot.
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For Jak 🐠and Daxter's 20th anniversary, we spoke with its composer Josh Manc🐽ell.
At the time, it deserved to be spoken in the same breath as Nintendo and Rare, developing platformer icons like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxter. They’re a far cry from games about the collapse of society thanks to a pandemic as the government devolves into an authoritarian regime, forcing us to grapple with whether the cycle of violence we’re perpetuating is justified. Bac🧔k then, the biggest question you’d get from a Naughty Dog game was, ‘Where the hell is the last cra🌼te?’
Jak 2 tried to elevate sto♎rytelling in platformers🌸 long before Naughty Dog earned a reputation for it, even if it was a heavy-handed attempt that left a lot to be desired. Gone was the colourful fantasy setting of the original, as now we were left to explore a bleak, grey metropolis patrolled by corrupt cops upholding a fasci🌄st government. After 500 years, the vi🎉brancy had been stripped back by pollution and the history ripped away by greedy politicians more concerned with how full their wallets were and how much filth they could pump into innocent bystanders.
However, Naughty Dog’s immaturity never went away, resulting in an awkward clash of tones. Jak could now speak, so of course he sounded like every 12-year-old attempting to be ‘dark’. He was edgy, throwing around swears to prove that this story was adult. The themes were barely explored and any meaningful message was washed away by Jak’s over-dramatic performance, compounded by the concept of ‘Dark Eco’ that made its cruel world black-and-white. The juvenile perception of edginess bled into the design, as the city and its surroundinꦗg environments were uninteresting and bland, something Naughty Dog would later remedy with The Last of Us, telling a mature story without dragging its world into the monotonous and mundane.
Jak 2 didn’t get it right, but this stark new direction for the series spelt Naughty Dog’s future plainly. It wanted to break free of its self-made shackles and explore grittier themes, putting behind the Naughty Dog we knew in favour of something bolder. Back in the ‘00s,🔴 platformers dominated consoles, and we were seeing Naughty Dog’s ambition trickle through as it set its sights on something fresh and daring.
This shift in direction and clear desire to do something else led to 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Uncharted. Rather than developing Jak 4, Naughty Dog used the new generation of consoles as an excuse to shed its history, creating more in-depth characters with rich backstories, human flaws, and b🔯elievable motivations. Where Jak had spent years being tortured only to get a power-up, Nathan Drake would transform from a money-hungry treasure hunter, callous to those not in his circle, to someone risking it all to save a person he just met. These were living and breathing people, rather than stand-ins for the player with the occasional cheesy one-liner.
But Uncharted was derivative. Naughty Dog released a Mad Max copycat, Jak 3, and a clear Indiana Jones-inspired game within three years. The Last of Us was where it would finally carve out something new and fresh of its own design. And The Las🥀t of Us only exists because of Jak 2.
It began life as a Jak and Daxter reboot, aiming to use all the lessons Naughty Dog had learned over the years to finally tell a grittier story in a more meaningful fashion. Naughty Dog was keenly aware this wasn’t what fans wanted, so the project changed names and the characters were abandoned in favour of what would become 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Joel and Ellie’s story. To this day, there are still swaths of fans online demanding a return to the Jak series, but not in the style of the new Naughty Dog. Problem is, ಌthe ol🅰d ND died decades ago.
Jak 2 was a clear declaration of the kind of game Naughty Dog wanted to make, and eventually, it had the chance to do it right. That declaration was made 20 𒊎years ago, Crash has switched hands, and Jak ﷽is now a precursor relic of what is, at this point, a completely different studio.
The series is little more than nostalgia fanfare these days, with 20-somethings like myself desperate for its return♋, but it&🅺rsquo;s also responsible for Naughty Dog’s future. When we look at The Last of Us’ legacy, we can’t ignore the role Jak 2 played.