In the previous post, I had a small, paragraph long tangent where I talked about Jak and Daxter and why I view it as the pinnacle of video games Naughty Dog has made and how they've had a rocky history ever since. Today, I'd like to discuss that in-depth.
For those of you who are too young to remember or even know what I'm talking about (play the f**king games!!) allow me to explain. Jak and Daxter was a series of 3D Platformers that were designed from the ground-up to be open world. Some people have compared the first game, Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy to the N64 Platformers by RareWare Banjo-Kazooie. In particular, the open nature and the fact that triggering something in one part of the world can affect another made it rather similar in concept and execution to the 2nd game Banjo-Tooie.
And, needless to say, there have been a wide variety of opinions on the series and each installment, varying from "The first game is best because it has the best artstyle" to "Jak II is garbage because it's hard and aimed itself at an older audience" to "Daxter was a fun portable game for what it was" to "Why does The Lost Frontier need to exist?!"
In terms of my overall game time, I've played four of the six: Jak 1 - 3 and The Lost Frontier, all Platformers. I have not played Daxter, and I never owned Jak X: Combat Racing, so I will not be discussing those. But, overall, the Jak and Daxter games have been relatively solid.
Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy was probably the most open world Platformer in existence and, while story was lacking, and the only notable characters were Samos, Keira, and Daxter, it was a great Platformer with very few, if any load times, and though Jak was silent, at least he didn't get in the way of enjoying the game.
Then Jak II came along and dramatically changed the formula. Many have compared Jak II to Grand Theft Auto in tone and setting and, while there are some similarities here and there, those are only skin deep and could be said about a wide range of Open World games that have been released since. Of course, Jak does have a personality now, which is quite aggressive and sarcastic and I like it, the first thing you'll probably do after breaking out of prison is jacking someone's car, and the Krimson Guard serve as the cops that will reign hell upon you if you cause too much trouble, you could say similar things about The Elder Scrolls, Saint's Row, Sly Cooper, and Just Cause.
Of course, many people do dislike Jak II because of how hard it was. And while it is true that it is a hard game, I think it's unfair to say that it's bad because of it. Jak II often utilizes its difficulty very well in terms of the run-and-gun gameplay and terrain traversal. In fact, it's open ended enough that there is some degree of sequence breaking in terms of acquiring Dark Powers in particular. If you know where to go and how to get around certain terrain, you can actually acquire a decent number of metal head skulls well before you're supposed to and get yourself a boost in terms of your overall Dark Jak strength. It is because of this that I think Jak II could be a good game to do a no-damage run of if any player ever feels skilled enough to attempt it.
Jak 3, by comparison, is praised a lot more often as "The best in the series" and I somewhat disagree. Don't get me wrong, I do love Jak 3, in particular the Light Jak additions, and the upgrades to the Morph Gun but it does have some issues with certain aspects of it, particularly the driving and the bosses.
I've never been a fan of driving in video games and boss fights have always been the series' weakness. I also don't like very much how Dark Giant did not reappear in Jak 3. I understand why it didn't, the way the Powers are set up, it could be very confusing how Dark Giant would work in terms of reversing the effect without turning Dark Jak off completely. I just wish they had gotten over it. The power boost that Dark Giant provided to anyone who had it made it well worth the price of admission.
The series was also very heavy on cutscenes in areas but, one of the series strengths, even in Jak 3, was how open and non-linear each game was.
Then we get to Uncharted: Drake's Fortune, which was essentially an interactive movie. It did have some interactive sequences of gameplay but those were generally not very good because of how poor the gun-play was. Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is widely considered one of the best games ever made and I don't really see why. It has an okay story and the set-pieces were really good, special mention goes to the train sequence but outside of those things, it didn't really do anything in terms of gameplay or characterization that older games hadn't done and, in some cases, better.
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, another contender for best game ever made, was pretty light on characterization and wasn't as open-ended and non-linear as the very first game, or even A Link To The Past but it still featured solid game design, fairly good bosses, a cohesive narrative that takes itself seriously enough, and had solid gameplay overall.
Metal Gear Solid featured a similar push to cinematic gaming but Snake was just as solid as a protagonist as Nathan Drake, maybe more so depending on who you ask, and though it was light on content, it made very good use of the Stealth game setup, something that Uncharted has understandably struggled with.
Mario Sunshine was about as unfinished as Mario games ever get and has far too many interruptions from the story, too, but even that front-loaded most of the good stuff and hid most of the bad stuff for completionists, which gave it an edge for the average consumer.
Uncharted 3: Drake's Deception was criticized by some for being overly similar to Uncharted 2 but, in reality, Uncharted 2 had the same premise that the first game had, it just did it much better. Uncharted 3 did have flaws, I won't deny that, but to say that Uncharted 3 is worse than Uncharted 2 for doing the same things it did is really not fair.
The Last of Us was a game that got a lot of hype in the run up to its release for being Naughty Dog's first M rated game. While I don't know the ESRB ratings of the Crash Bandicoot games, what I do know is that Naughty Dog's games have steadily become more adult and less kid friendly over time.
Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy is rated E10+ which basically means it's okay for anyone over the age of 10 years old. Jak II and 3 were both T rated, which means Teenagers and older but Jak 3 had subject matter and events that pushed it further away from the E10+ rating that Jak 1 got than Jak 2. The original Uncharted Trilogy, Drake's Fortune, Among Thieves, and Drake's Deception are all T rated as well but the difference between those games and Jak 3 was not so much the subject matter as how it portrayed that subject matter: Jak 3 had a War Zone City setting as one of its maps, along with an alien invasion plot that essentially amounts to saving the world. However, it had a kid-friendly art style, the violence was cartoonish and exaggerated to make it more exciting than brutal, the weapons were portrayed as weapons you would see in a DreamWorks Sci-Fi movie, which would put the kid-friendliness just a few steps away from Disney on average, and none of the characters ever swore. They would make sarcastic jokes and Daxter has always been some more suggestive comic relief but even that portrayal made it closer to Johnny Bravo than Brad Wong (Bonus points if you can guess what game he's from).
In the Uncharted games, however, characters are saying words like "Shit" and "God damn it" far more frequently than Jak or Daxter ever did, which is not to say that it's a lot, just that Jak and Daxter said that stuff really never, there's realistic guns, characters bleed, Nathan Drake makes a Prison Rape joke in the form of the Panamanian jail, the villains are a lot more psychotic and visually brutal, and many of the enemies are corrupted in far more realistic and, by extension, graphic ways than the Dark Eco corruption of the Dark Makers.
I'm not necessarily saying that Jak 3 is kid-friendly or has a story that wasn't a bit on the mature side, just that it was hidden a bit by the art direction and general exaggeration of everything. In Uncharted, they're much more obvious about how grim all the situations are. The reason they remain T rated is simply because those games are intended to be comparable to Action Movies: fun to watch, and not always for kids, but obviously can't be taken all that seriously.
That's much of the reason The Last of Us got so much attention from PS3 owners: it's not because The Last of Us was an M rated game; trust me, the PS3 system has no shortage of those but rather it was because it was an M rated game made by a developer that never made an M rated game before. Of course, if Sucker Punch ever make an M rated game, it may not be met with the same anticipation that The Last of Us was for two reasons: reason number 1 because The Last of Us is an entity that has been proven is only as successful as it was because of hype and execution, and while some games are attempting to capitalize on the former (looking right at you, God of War 4) many will likely be unable to fully realize the latter. And the second reason is simply because Sucker Punch's games, on average, are not as popular as Naughty Dog's.
A lot of people looked to The Last of Us, saw the marketing, saw the development team, and instantly thought to themselves "This may be an M rated game that can make full use of the medium to tell a mature story."
That's not to say that Sucker Punch's games have ever sold poorly or are not popular. The franchises Sucker Punch has made almost universally sell in the millions range per installment and, for a team that makes Sony exclusive games, that speaks to how many people want these games much more so than a multi-platform game would. Sucker Punch also has a reputation for being among the only Sony-owned teams that can stand up to Naughty Dog in terms of overall sales and game quality, if not downright surpass them in some regards. But, Sucker Punch has never gotten the same recognition that Naughty Dog has.
This comes down to marketing. Naughty Dog generally gets much more of a push from Sony's Marketing Division than Sucker Punch ever has. The best example of a Sucker Punch game that sold well in spite of the marketing rather than because of it has to be the first InFamous game. InFamous sold over a million copies since its release but, apart from one trailer that, while it piqued my interest, was pretty lackluster all things considered, Sony never really pushed InFamous as hard as any of Naughty Dog's games. The reason InFamous sold as well as it did was because it came out at a time when there really weren't any other games to purchase, at least not any interesting or known brands anyway. But I'm way off topic so let's get back on track.
The Last of Us was subject to a lot of hype from both Sony and PS3 owners because it was the first M rated game by a developer that was known for making, if not always good, then at least mostly popular titles, with a story that looked like it would be something incredibly new.
Did Naughty Dog succeed? Did they make a game that is everything everybody wanted? Was it something I believe to be on par with Jak & Daxter? The answers to those questions in order are: depends on how you look at it, no, and not particularly.
In terms of the first question, The Last of Us was the best selling PS3 exclusive title to ever come out on the console and would've been the best selling game on the console in general had Grand Theft Auto V chosen not to participate. So, suffice it to say, it sold quite a lot of copies and made Sony a fairly happy publisher.
In terms of the second perspective, which applies to both the first and second questions, many people think of The Last of Us as the best game Naughty Dog has ever made, some people have referred to it as "The Citizen Kane of Gaming," whatever the hell that's supposed to mean, some people have referred to it as "A slog with no redeeming qualities" and others still have referred to it as "Enjoyable but not perfect." So, in that sense, Naughty Dog was fairly successful just not enough to please the maximum amount of people. In terms of the second question, the answer based on this would be exactly how it seems, which is a nice segue into my next point.
Given the vast rift of opinions on The Last of Us, it's safe to say that it failed to please everyone. And by that, I don't mean "Nobody liked it" I mean "Not everyone liked it" which is a very key distinction. Some people have praised the game for having a very great story and characters, something that some analysts have made very clear is not as obvious as it should be. Others have praised the game's visuals for "Whelming me at times despite the fact that I regularly play on a high-end PC." One particular criticism that many seem to have is the AI, namely that the AI "Is such a black mark on the game that there is absolutely no way Naughty Dog is happy with how it turned out." And, before you ask, both of those last two comments, the praise and the criticism both came from MatthewMatosis' review of The Last of Us.
Something that pretty much confirms that suspicion that Naughty Dog are not happy with the way the AI turned out, HyperBitHero stated in one of his videos on the topic that he actually got in touch with a Naughty Dog executive and asked them how they felt about the removed features and reduced AI quality that were not reflected in the original tech demo. They stopped responding after that question.
Of course, for me, this is an indication that they made a mistake and don't wish to talk about it but I would be remiss if I didn't mention that, prior to that video, and the release of The Last of Us, someone on Reddit asked if anything was changed from the tech demo, and the executive that responded said that the AI actually improved and got better since the Tech Demo, which many who experimented with the gameplay and played around in the game proved that this is clearly not the case. This has to do with how Naughty Dog views game design and player choice.
Naughty Dog believes that there is a set order of events a game should follow and that a game must follow it at all costs, regardless of what the player does or wants to do about it. I'd be lying if I said this attitude was anything new, however. Even as early as Jak & Daxter: The Precursor Legacy, you still had to follow the story in a sequence of events that they wanted you to, they were just a lot less strict and obvious about it. In that game, Naughty Dog gave you an open world where you can explore as much as you want but chunks of it had to be unlocked by performing certain tasks or, to make it less mundane, to achieve certain goals: To go to Misty Island, you had to acquire access to the boat by catching fish for the fisherman in the jungle; in order to get to the Blue Eco Sage's Residence, you had to ride a hover bike over a large pit of Lava and, in order to get to that point, you had to acquire a certain number of power cells. Naughty Dog has always had a structure that they want the player to follow, they just covered it up with the fact that, once you unlocked a good chunk of the area, you could access almost its entirety.
By the time Uncharted rolled around, they still adhered to the structured approach but they changed that approach from "Loose structure with open segments" to "Tight structure with movie pacing." And yes, I said movie pacing, not cinematic pacing. The reason for that is that "cinematic" has always been a very dodgy word that seems to mean relatively similar but also relatively different things to different people. At least as far as I've heard, cinematic can refer to the Kojima approach (lots of cutscenes), it can refer to the Mario 64 touch (a camera-man is actually controlling the camera you're watching the game through), and some will use the Order 1886 approach (looks like, feels like, plays like, and may as well be a movie but is still marketed as a game). Most developers who use the word "cinematic" are generally referring to the Order approach, including Naughty Dog, where scripted sequences and set-pieces are often only as interactive as necessary for the game to qualify as a game. "Movie pacing" is the term I'm using to describe these "Cinematic Experiences" because it's a lot less ambiguous, when I say Movie Pacing, you should know exactly what I'm referring to if you've ever seen a movie.
And, for some people, this is exactly what they want. Some people want a playable movie so that they can feel like they're a movie star (at least, that's the assumption I'm going with, I don't actually have proof of this). For others, it can be enjoyable so long as the illusion isn't broken, which it never will be if you never go off-script. And, for some people, they would rather feel like they're experiencing the world the game has to offer and interactive movie games are a failure of everything that goal stands for.
Which brings me to the third and final question I asked earlier, if you still remember: what do I think of The Last of Us? Well, I don't hate it. I think its father-daughter story with Joel and Ellie was, if not ground-breaking, then at least well presented, its shooting gameplay and stealth feel just as tense and edgy as it needs to to convey the events, and, while I'm not particularly a fan of scripted, movie-like games, for a story that features a cross-country trek from Point A to Point B, a level-based structure with cutscenes that make it look like it's not actually level based was probably the best way to go about it.
That said, though, I do not believe The Last of Us holds a candle to the main Jak & Daxter Trilogy. While The Last of Us presents a narrative that is quite a bit more adult than anything the Jak games have offered, Jak & Daxter's approach to level design was what made those games so great at being games even for as structured as the narrative was. Jak & Daxter required you to meet some criteria before you could progress to a new area but, once you had, you could instantly go from one area to another afterward, either via boat in the case of Misty Island, or through a Teleport gate in the case of pretty much every other area in the game.
Jak II had a heavier use of Teleport Gates and hidden load times than Jak 1 but its allowance of light sequence breaking and unlockables via the Secrets Menu made Jak II work as a great game; the story improved quite a bit, too. Jak II also required you to perform a certain number of missions of certain categories before you could progress parts of the plot forward but, of the available missions, they could be tackled in any order. The looser structure didn't seem to harm the narrative at all and it's still a great example of the medium, even if it's not a perfect example of the "Narrative" angle.
Jak 3 had some balancing problems with some of the bosses and vehicles and also a larger focus on a more serious narrative but, outside of one example right at the end of the game, the game never forces the choice of how you want to tackle situations for you. It also handled the different hub-worlds problem well by having a ship take you from the desert to Haven City and back without breaking the illusion that Spargus and Haven City are clearly very far away from each other.
I'm not saying any of these solutions would've worked for The Last of Us but, going outside the Naughty Dog corporation for just a short bit, the Ninja Gaiden games, or at least 2 and 3, handle going to different parts of the world just as well if not better by allowing you to complete the section of gameplay the way you want to complete it and then, once you hit the goal post for the level, ships you right to the next one.
The Last of Us does suffer in this area in certain parts of the game. One example is where Joel gives Ellie a gun so she can cover him as he goes in to take enemies out. Ideally, if this game were crafted with the core mechanics in mind, this entire sequence would've been possible with stealth without ever triggering Ellie to protect you, at least if you were skilled. However, it's impossible to deal with this mission entirely stealth because the following cutscene implies that Ellie fired the rifle at least once. Rather than put a set number of enemies on screen, allow the player to deal with them the way they want, and make a second cutscene to make less of an implication that Ellie did anything, they instead chose the easy way out by simply putting in a few enemy generators that spawn those enemy types infinitely until Ellie starts firing the rifle.
And before you ask, yes, that is the easy way out. Speaking as a programmer and game designer myself (however inexperienced I may be at the time of this writing), even the most finicky of engines allow infinitely spawning minions with, at worst, a small amount of code that can be reused over and over again whenever necessary, referred to as Modular Programming. Slightly Altering a cutscene is quite a bit harder because, since I'm absolutely confident the story cutscenes are all pre-rendered, the best thing they could've hoped for was taking the one section that needed to be altered, altering the animations where necessary, and re-rendering them before reinserting it into the game and creating code that would allow a dynamic change.
And finally, we get to Uncharted 4: A Thief's End, which Sony and Naughty Dog have stated will be the last Uncharted game and everybody assumed Nathan or Sam was going to die in. As it turns out, the former is too early to tell, and the latter is completely false. Most people, understandably, believed someone was going to die based on the title of the game and the nature of the most recent game that Naughty Dog made before it. However, it's called "A Thief's End" because Nate gives up being a thief forever by the end of the game.
Now, a bit of an addendum to earlier, if you can really call it that. I said that Naughty Dog's games have been getting progressively more mature as time went on. Well, that cycle has pretty much been broken by the release of Uncharted 4 which is simultaneously T rated again and does not feature any of the same subject matter that The Last of Us did.
So, what is the best way to describe Uncharted 4? Probably as "Uncharted 3 but Prettier" which is pretty par for the course considering that Uncharted 1-4 all follow the same formula, though I would argue Uncharted 4 handles the formula better because it subverts expectations a bit more. Sure, it's still scripted as hell, and going to a difficulty any higher than Normal is just begging to run into problems that games designed with difficulty in mind never suffer from but, it takes itself more seriously overall, Nate has shown to have finally learned from his previous experiences with Elena, Sully, Chloe, and Cutter, and there's no supernatural element in this game.
Instead, this game has the driving motivation for what everyone wants to be greed. And this is now the section where we talk about Ludo-Narrative Dissonance. For those of you that don't know, Ludo-Narrative Dissonance is an occurrence in video games where the things a playable character can do inside a completely interactive sequence of gameplay does not line up with what the story wants you to believe and is therefore non-canon. And the reason we have to talk about it is because Naughty Dog seems to think that they can still use that excuse in Uncharted 4 when it's not applicable anymore. How do we know Naughty Dog believes this? Uncharted 4 has an Trophy called Ludo-Narrative Dissonance which you can only get after killing one thousand enemies. Whether this is serious or a joke, they do seem to believe that it applies here nonetheless.
Many people have accused Nathan of being a sociopath who kills to get what he wants. This is actually addressed at the end of Uncharted 2 with Lezarovic stating that they're the same. However, in the case of the entirety of the original trilogy, Nate did have reasons for the killing he did. In pretty much the entirety of those three games, he only killed who went up against him because they attacked first and, in the case of Lezarovic and Marlowe, they are clearly too evil to just let them live if they obtained the power they were looking for, which again, has always been supernatural in nature.
In Uncharted 4, however, Nate and Sam are constantly the aggressors in the engagements, attacking and stealing from the enemy at their own events, on their own property, and the only reason is because of the vast riches that they can get from the sunken ship. No supernatural element means Nathan and Sam's motivations are just greed. The antagonist here, sure, may be a bit unstable, but he is willing to work with Nate and Sam to get the riches, and it's stated or at least hinted that he acquired his wealth through inheritance and wanted the treasure so he could be his own man rather than a child who has everything handed to him his entire life.
In this sense, Nate is clearly the bad guy, no matter how much Naughty Dog wants us to believe that he is the hero.
Other than that particular thing, there really haven't been a lot of changes to the formula. Outside the addition of a grappling hook, the gameplay is mostly the same and is still on rails. Not really much to talk about there.
Now Naughty Dog is still alive and well and they don't seem to be going out of business any time soon. So it is possible that, in time, they could completely negate everything I've said in this post by making a 3D game that is as open world and pro-exploration as the original Legend of Zelda or the FromSoft games Demon's Souls going forward. That said, before I wrap this up, there is one more point I'd like to bring up in terms of where they might be going next.
Firstly, my point about the maturity thing is one that I can't let go of because Naughty Dog has been very steady in the progress they've made from kid-friendly to adult. However, Uncharted 4 seems to break that pacing by going from Mature back down to Teen. The reason they didn't go up is because Sony doesn't publish or distribute AO rated games but it's worth mentioning that they've Trademarked the titles "The Last of Us 2" and "The Last of Us 3." That said, they also still have access to the Jak & Daxter property and, though they are hesitant to go back to it, the desire to do that is still very real. So I pose a question, where are they going to go: are they going to make The Last of Us 2 and 3 over the course of the next five to ten years? Are they going to revisit Jak and Daxter one last time before moving on to something else? Or will they make a new property?
Some are assuming that The Last of Us 2 is what they're going to be making. However, the way The Last of Us ended, and the way the DLC pack went, Naughty Dog doesn't seem to want to tackle that world without including Joel and Ellie, which they can't do without ruining the ending. They may have Trademarked the titles but Sony still owns the IP, which means that even if Naughty Dog abandons the world in favor of another property, The Last of Us 2 could still be made by a separate developer.
My inclination toward their progress in their ESRB ratings does not eliminate the possibility that they will make another M rated game but it does make me lean more toward "Jak & Daxter or some other more kid-friendly IP." Some have speculated Crash Bandicoot. However, that's not happening. The only reason Crash Bandicoot was talked about with Sony to begin with was so Naughty Dog could put a small Crash Bandicoot sequence into Uncharted 4 as an in-home mini-game sequence. Go back and see it again if you don't believe me. So, no, I don't believe Crash Bandicoot is ever coming back, at least not at the hands of Naughty Dog. I think they've put that IP firmly behind them. Even its appearance in Uncharted 4 was a call-back to a previous work rather than a new sequence involving the character.
Even if Naughty Dog never touches Jak & Daxter again, I think they may probably go for a more, adolescent gaming experience to appeal more to teenagers before going back to their roots with E rated games. That's just my take on it and, while I do believe that it's possible, I also acknowledge that it's probably highly unlikely that my prediction will come true. Only time will tell.
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