Josh Scherr, an animator with the Sony-owned Naughty Dog, has poured cold water on any hopes of the studio revisiting Crash Bandicoot and Jak & Daxter.
Speaking with Game Informer, Scherr was quizzed if he missed the cartoon-esque platforming days, to which he replied:
"No, I don’t, because we’ve got an amazing team of people making some really expressive performances with our current stable of realistic characters. I mean, animating the stylised stuff is a lot of fun, but the stories that we’re trying to tell right now are a little bit more grounded and a little bit more grown up than they were back in the Jak and Daxter days."
When asked if this was because the team has grown up in the years since Jak & Daxter was last seen, Scherr added:
"I think that’s part of it. I think that it’s also dictated by what the market wants, too. You know, that was a lot of what our decision was bounded by and based on when moving from Jak and Daxter to something more like Uncharted. And it’s also what we’re interested in, too."
Jax & Daxter’s last main entry was the 2004 sequel Jak III, although the whole trilogy was remastered for PlayStation 3 and PlayStation Vita in 2012 and 2013, respectively. Crash Bandicoot hasn’t been handled by Naughty Dog since the fan-favorite Crash Team Racing in 1999.
Naughty Dog is currently developing Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End for PlayStation 4, and said it has put on hold all other projects while the team focuses its efforts on the action-adventure sequel.
Interestingly, a Jak & Daxter reboot was considered at one point and the team had a darker concept for the title, though it decided to make The Last of Us instead. Concept art for the scrapped title later surfaced online.