Naughty Dog Co-President, Evan Wells, has explained in an interview with Game Informer why the developers decided against using mascots Jack and Daxter in a new game. While they loved the idea of a new adventure for the dynamic duo, Naughty Dog felt that they “weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted.”

Here’s the excerpt from the interview with Wells:

“We’d all talked about it in interviews with fans asking, ‘When’s the next Jak and Daxter?’ I don’t know if this is going to make them happy or sad, but we did explore the idea fairly extensively,” explained Wells.

“Something that we talked about early on was, ‘Let’s go back and apply what we’ve learned on the Uncharted games to Jak and Daxter.’ It’s one of the franchises that’s near and dear to us, and, in all honesty, we’d like to somehow honor.”

“But as we started exploring this and looking at ways we could evolve the game and apply the same narrative techniques that we had leveraged to good effect in the Uncharted series and bring the technology forward and allow us to render in a more realistic style like we were able to do in Uncharted, all the ideas just started to feel like they were going so far away from what made Jak & Daxter, Jak & Daxter.”

“Even if we felt like we’re going to give the fans another Jak & Daxter, we felt we weren’t going to give them the game that they wanted. We would end up limiting the direction that the company had this passion for while simultaneously not creating the game that fans wanted. We just realized we were going to just do everybody a disservice. So at that point the conversations started to move in new directions.”

“Now is not the time. Never say never. It could happen. Naughty Dog’s got a long history and I think it’s got a long future, so to say well never go back is kind of crazy. But right now we’ve got this new IP that we’re definitely going to be supporting.

“I guess there’s a possibility that the Uncharted Team could move on to Jak & Daxter. It’s still up in the air, but I wouldn’t think that’s going to happen because I think we’d run into all of the same problems with that team that we did with this team.”

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