Naughty Dog has refused to rule out a possible return to the Crash Bandicoot franchise following persistent rumors of a comeback for Sony’s former marsupial mascot.
Speaking to IGN, the developer’s Community Strategist, Arne Meyer, said the studio is focused on realistic, narrative-driven games at present, though still made it clear Crash remains an important part of Naughty Dog’s rich heritage.
"It’s never off the table," he said. "It’s not too much time passing, but it’s the same issues we explored with the Jak game. Is it something that makes sense to us now. I mean we still have people that worked on the Crash games in the studio. We never forget our past and it’d be great for nostalgic reasons. It’d be the same reason as why there isn’t a Jak 4: I don’t know if it’s playing to our strengths right now.
"Right now, what’s exciting everyone at the studio is continuing to work on narrative-driven games with strong characters. I think, at least for the time being, we haven’t exhausted the possibilities there, but that could change with something as simple as hardware. That’s what drove it before. I think we’re on to something really good though creating character-driven stories so that’s where our focus is going to be.
"It comes back to our decision making process, whether it feels right. With Jak at that time we were really focused on making games grounded in a stylised but realistic world, and if you tried to transfer Jak to that you lose a lot of what made him special. It doesn’t mean though that at no point in the future will we get good at making stylised artificial universes however, and then it’ll work."
Naughty Dog is currently working on the fourth entry in the Uncharted franchise, A Thief’s End, which is due for release on PlayStation 4 next year.
The company recently expressed interested in remastering the Uncharted trilogy for Sony’s new home console, though nothing has been set in stone as of yet.
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