Jakking It All In

The two of them complement each other very well. Daxter is all talk and no walk, while Jak is big on action but light on the communication skills. It's also been very important to us to make sure that the characters' personalities and relationships continue to grow and evolve from game to game. This adds a dimensionality to them that most video game characters lack.

It seems to be their lot in life. Trouble follows them wherever they go. I guess it makes for a more interesting game than watching the two of them sit at home fighting like an old married couple.

The Pecker fans should be happy to hear that he's back in Jak 3 with a bigger role than ever. Also, all of the favourites from Jak II are making a come back (including Ashelin!) and Jak 3 introduces a host of new friends and foes for our heroes to meet. In fact, the game begins with Jak being banished from Haven City by Count Veger, who is the head of the new City Council and a religious zealot who despises anything associated with Dark Eco.

One of the things that we are most proud of about Jak 3 is the sheer amount of variety between the missions. Every task presents a new and unique challenge from the last. On one mission you may be hang gliding, on the next you may be called upon to use Jak's new Light Eco powers, and in the very next you might be put in control of Daxter on a run-away torpedo!

There are over 60 main path missions required to complete the game and additionally there are more than 70 side missions that help you unlock all of the game's secrets. My personal favourite is the mission when Jak gets to team up with Sig and head out into a raging sand storm to track down and take out a band of Metal Heads.

Difficulty spikes where a very important issue that we addressed during the development of Jak 3. We took extraordinary care, conducted 1,000's of hours of focus testing, and carefully examined all of the gameplay data gathered from these sessions. From this data we were able to refine the difficulty to an appropriate level. I'm certain that we don't have the frustrating spikes that were in Jak II.

The size of Jak 3 in terms of game real estate and code is larger than Jak II, but because we've refined the difficulty I predict that the time to complete the main path of the game will be roughly similar to the previous one. However, we've put in even more side missions and a ton of DVD-like extras (developer commentary, concept art galleries, model viewers, etc) to unlock that will definitely provide the incentive to find all of the secrets.

This is a difficult issue that we face as developers. If your game is to deemed too small or short, you run the risk of it being considered not worth a purchase and consumers may simply end up renting it. If you make your game too long, the majority of players don't see all of the content and you're wasting money on development. Right now it's a tricky balance to strike, but other opportunities may open up to us as online distribution becomes more of a reality.

The PS2 never ceases to amaze us with its depth and flexibility. The amount of additional power that we've seen out of the machine since the first generation games were shown 5 years ago makes me confident that there is still life in it and the best games on the platform are still to come.

The programmers at Naughty Dog are always trying to find ways to push the technology and add extra details to raise the level of polish in the game. In Jak 3 alone they've added rag-doll physics, improved the data streaming and loading, created a new renderer for the wasteland desert environment that supports bump-mapping, enhanced the particle system, and revamped the rigid-body physics system to enable the four-wheeled dune buggy gameplay.

We made sure that the game can stand on it's own but the story does reference plot points from the previous two games. If this is a player's first Jak and Daxter game, they will be able to enjoy it and follow the plot contained within it, but fans of the series will get the extra satisfaction of having mysteries from the past games finally answered.

Multiplayer was never considered for Jak 3. We wanted to concentrate on making the most rewarding and satisfying single-player experience possible. We had always planned on telling a story that spanned three games and didn't want to compromise that original plan. Of course multiplayer and online gaming is something that many Naughty Dogs are very passionate about and most certainly will be considered in future games.

Jak 3 is only the end of the Precursor Legacy trilogy which is but one of many stories to be told within the Jak and Daxter universe. I'm sure you will see more Jak and Daxter games in the future, but what comes next for Naughty Dog is not something that we are discussing at this point.

I think any of those things are definitely a possibility and in fact we created a "Trilogy DVD" that puts many of the FMA cut-scenes from all three games into a sequence to tell the entire Jak and Daxter story. It's really neat to see how as the games progressed the story interconnects between all three. We're using the DVD to promote pre-sales of the game here in America.

As I stated earlier, we really can't go into what we are working on next at this point in time, but rest assured that we are hard at work!

Jason has done a fantastic job making sure that the company was set up to continue on in his absence. He is an amazingly gifted and intelligent person and his presence will certainly be missed but Naughty Dog still has one of the strongest collections of talent in the industry and will continue to create cutting-edge games for sometime to come.