20 years ago, Naughty Dog left Jak & Daxter on a high with Jak 3

Naughty Dog is perhaps best known for its hyper-realistic and mature story-driven games, but it wasn't always that way. Actually long before Uncharted and The last of us were franchises that Crash Bandicoot and Jak and Daxterwhich hasn't seen a full main post since Jack 320 years ago.




Launched on the PS2 in 2004, Jack 3 followed in the footsteps of its immediate predecessor, doubling down on typical open-world adventure and action tropes and veering away from the more colorful all-ages platforming of the first game. Players follow the title Yak and his sidekick Daxter as they make their way through the wasteland, an inhospitable stretch of desert that seems to take more than a few cues from Mad Max franchise, albeit with a fair injection of high fantasy and PG-13 violence. It's not exactly a game that audiences expected, but many look back on it fondly all these years later. Furthermore, it is remembered as a bittersweet pit stop in PlayStation history, as few could have predicted that this would have been the last full Jak and Daxter games coming to market.


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Jak 3: Naughty Dog's unexpected farewell to its Modus Operandi

Jak 3 is hard to forget

Jack 3 is something of a time capsule for a specific era of gaming. Released around the same time as infamous but delightfully edgy games like Shadow the Hedgehogit takes on a surprisingly dark and almost mature tone, with gunplay, carjacking and cartoonish violence making up the bulk of the gameplay. Really, Jack 3 can feel a bit like”GTA for kids” sometimes, when players are presented with a huge open world to explore, (flying) cars to steal and a host of inventive sci-fi weapons to shoot bad guys with.

It was also quite an ambitious game for its time, with graphics and animations that still hold up surprisingly well today, solid gunplay similar to the likes of Ratchet and Clankand a sandbox full of opportunities for varied play. With Jack 3Naughty Dog began shedding the conventions of its previous releases and moving in a more grown-up direction, making the game an unexpected precursor to what the studio would eventually become much better known for.


Jak 3 ended up being a swan song for a definitive era of naughty dog

Naughty Dog is a developer that needs little introduction at this point. Its two leading franchises, The last of us and Unchartedhave become two of Sony's crown jewels, serving as blockbuster showcases for the strengths of new consoles thanks to their remarkable fidelity, character animations and attention to detail. It's almost hard to remember that the company was once known for making action-platformers and action-adventure games aimed at a younger audience.

Jack 3for all intents and purposes, is the last of this kind of Naughty Dog title. Yes, Naughty Dog released Jak X: Combat Spin-Off a year later, and two PSP spin-offs followed in 2006 and 2009, but these were not mainstream entries. Also, the PSP games weren't even developed by Naughty Dog. Just three years after the launch of Jack 3 come on Uncharted: Drake's Fortune which, while not perfect, would come to define the company's future for more than a decade.


Perhaps Jack 3s mature tone was an early sign of Naughty Dog's desire to tell more adult stories in games, or the studio simply fell out of love with the series. Anyway, the jump from Jack 3 to the first one Uncharted was shocking at the time and historic in retrospect. It's not clear if the gaming world will ever be blessed with another Jak and Daxterbut for now, Jack 3 is a great starting point.

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