well it's no secret that i hate this game and i think it represents when naughty dog seriously lost the plot when it came to game development. dark schala pointed me to a postmortem from daniel arey shortly after the game was released. i'm not going to post the whole thing, but it confirmed a lot of my suspicions of the mindset of the people developing it. people who claimed to have respect for the genre and games that influenced them, but in reality looked down on their contemporaries.
We looked deeply at the current state of platform gaming, and although we had tremendous respect for those who had shaped the genre, we felt that after breaking through the 3D dam and flooding down the ravine of possibilities, platform games had run their current course. We saw the genre suffering from a general malaise and a waning audience, and we were convinced that this atrophy was due primarily to lack of innovation in a changing market, especially in light of new gaming paradigms that had evolved. Gone were the days when coin collect-a-thons in neon bright worlds were enough to excite players. The maturing videogame audience wanted more realistic themes and intense experiences, and platform games had the decidedly uncool stigma of G-movie kiddie fare. Naughty Dog decided that if we could make JAK II more mature, add a deeper emotional layer to the action, and increase the entertainment value of the entire experience, we could reignite interest in action platforming.
keep in mind this is 2002. just six short years after super mario 64, it was decided that the platforming genre had been pushed as far as it would go. while naughty dog was right with the idea that collectathons were a thing of the past, they bought heavily into the idea that kid-friendly meant bad. more worryingly is the word 'uncool' and the idea that a new aesthetic and artistic direction was what it took to make these games appeal to a wide audience again, instead of looking for new and appealing ways to platform in 3d space.
'what went right'
excuse my snide editorial laugh.
Recognizing the changing audience, our biggest goal for JAK II was to mature the universe. We wanted to remain true to the original vision of the first game but add more maturity to the visual style. This decision required extensive exploration by the art department, starting naturally with the central hero. Since the first game was about Daxter's transformation, we decided early on that JAK II would be Jak's story and his evolution. Daxter was already a resounding success, having been named "Original Game Character of the Year" in the second annual Game Developers Choice Awards, but Jak was a different story. Extensive feedback told us that Jak had less personality than a slug on Prozac.
a change in art direction isn't really that bad, and listening to feedback isn't bad either, but naughty dog really didn't get why daxter was appealing in 2001. it seems the lessons taken away were that people actually cared about daxter's transformation in jak and daxter, and it was daxter's inner-turmoil that people enjoyed- not that he was a fast-talking humor machine.
probably the most alarming part is that this is the first thing of 'what went right'. instead of viewing elements of design, they start looking at artistic elements (visual style, writing). actually, this becomes something of a theme throughout the article.
The story was also given a darker edge and swam in more adult themes like revenge, love, betrayal, and death, all rare elements in platform games. Even though the game still retained much of the cartoon feel, the new designs shed some of their earlier iconic sugar coating, moving the game more toward the mainstream Playstation 2 audience.
there's also a lot of talk about appealing to the mainstream ps2 audience. it's already been mentioned a couple of times, but it's a recurring theme with the development process of this game. there's this idea that the ps2 audience was an adult, mature and culturally-savvy one, and didn't have time for childish endeavors. so naughty dog made a game for a made-up group of people.
The story evolved into 90 minutes of cinematic sequences linked inexorably to gameplay. This tight coupling between game and story required specifics in the dialogue that locked down play elements to an uncomfortable degree. As we recorded and animated the scenes, it became increasingly difficult to eliminate or adjust gameplay because of these links. To combat this, we kept the story as flexible as possible without breaking the causeand-effect chain by having a few alternate recordings for vital plot and character revelations attached to a variety of backup gameplay tasks. We also built in what we called stand-alone levels, which, if needed, we could excise from the game (and the schedule) without greatly affecting the story experience.
keep in mind this is still in the 'what went right' section, and now they're talking about how they were focusing on the story so much that they built levels with the sole purpose they could be cut from the game without hurting the story. i can't even fathom how they came to the conclusion that level design was that inferior to story
in a platformer.
Making the huge city hub for JAK II (20 times the size of a single JAK AND DAXTER level) was a massive undertaking but well worth the investment. By adding this "game within a game" to the platform experience, we hoped to create a new expression of the genre. The sense of place and purpose was designed to keep the player plugged into the world as never before. Gamers weren't just playing a succession of platform levels; they were visiting a "breathing" universe.
i think the only thing to take away from this is the pride in having created a city, and not the problems with the design of the city or interacting with the environment and characters. there's almost a sense of back-patting for having created a hubworld just for the way it looks.
i won't quote the full thing, but they do talk about the programming challenges in having created the city. and i can appreciate that. it did sound complex, but i never thought it was a necessary addition to the game and actually hurt the overall experience. the design of the city is never discussed outside of how it related to programming issues:
Memory and load constraints dictated how fast we could drive through the streets, and loading limits and line-of-sight issues forced the city to be more mazelike than we had originally intended. Since the entire city obviously couldn't fit into memory, load planes were painstakingly placed to hide the actual geometry swaps, and visual pop-ins were slowly tested out of existence (well, almost).
there's also discussion of the shooting mechanics and i kind of agree where they're coming from that the few weapons reinforced an idea of skill over mindless shooting (like ratchet & clank).
Ultimately the diversity of JAK IPs gameplay became its biggest strength and our proudest achievement. It's difficult to label JAK II simply a platform game, since there are so many gameplay types folded together. jumping isn't the primary player response in JAK II. You also get to drive multiple vehicles in a huge city (including a stadium with highspeed race courses), create havoc with a solid run-and-gun shooting element and multiple upgradeable gun types, trick and grind anywhere with a TONY HAWK-style JetBoard, crash-and-smash the world with a Titan Powersuit, play mini-games, and work with characters in AI-assisted escort tasks. Our goal was to achieve a diversity of gameplay in JAK II that would keep the game fresh for the player, and the challenges evolving.
this kind of reminds me of the wonderful 101 and the many game types it introduces in its 20-hour playtime. i'll let ian malcom explain:
'i'll tell you the problem with the scientific power that you're using here, it didn't require any discipline to attain it. you read what others had done and you took the next step. you didn't earn the knowledge for yourselves, so you don't take any responsibility for it. you stood on the shoulders of geniuses to accomplish something as fast as you could, and before you even knew what you had, you patented it, and packaged it, and slapped it on a plastic lunchbox, and now you're selling it, you wanna sell it.'
and now, 'what went wrong':
Facing the music (again). Our Achilles' heel of late, the sound and music spec became a monstrous datawrangling challenge. The sheer quantity of in-game events, foley effects linked to movies, and various other sound issues became a logistical nightmare. Add to that the in-game music and scoring for the large array of cinematic scenes, and you can see how quickly the problem multiplied. The biggest sound challenge in open gaming is that you can't simply load a discrete bank of sounds in a closed environment and call it a day. JAK IPs open environments were always evolving, so we had to devise a complex system of bank swaps and loads.
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Also, since some of our movies were being finished very late, we had our foley cinematic group working around the clock to finish the multitude of effects across 90 minutes of movie. We left them too little time in the end, and we missed some very important sound cues. The simple solution here: Don't send game objects and movies for sound and foley work right up until the last few days of production, and don't expect inhuman man-hours to make up the difference.
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As we improved our methodology, we learned to be more generic with certain gameplay-specific numbers in the dialogue and to use screen overlays to convey details. When we really needed a specific number cited in a scene for some reason, we recorded many, many variations to give the designers and animators enough coverage. Then we blocked the shot so that the character speaking the offending (and likely variable) line could be either off-screen or conveniently in an over-the-shoulder shot, effectively hiding his lips, when the high-risk line was spoken. These techniques allowed any required changes to be easily dropped into the AIF later with no impact whatsoever on the animation side. Still, we lost considerable animation time to reworking before we defined and implemented these tricks.
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We had some great particles very early, but as we went along, we realized that we needed more effects than we had budgeted for. Also, as the new highpolygon sets for cinematics came online, they too required a larger coverage of particle effects than we had expected. Add to that a breakdown in communication between departments about particle node placement and volume of particles in all levels, and some objects being completed very late, and you can see how the problem quickly escalated.
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Memory being an ever-present constraint, the background artists had a challenging time taking a designer's level map and remaining true to the gameplay distances while still serving the production art guidelines for the level.
i cut out a lot, but the jist of it was the technical aspects of incorporating all the artistic elements- the actual management aspect of the game-
that was what went wrong. there's no discussion, at all, regarding the design process and thinking behind the racing segments, the platforming segments, whether or not it was difficult to make all these separate elements work together. at no point in the entire article is the idea of learning what makes each element important brought up. simply the inclusions of those elements are thought of as positive additions to the game, and couldn't possibly take away from the overall enjoyment.
Despite the changing landscape of gaming, JAK II represents two hard years of work by a talented team of professionals dedicated to bridging a widening gap between old and new gaming. It was a tough haul, and we probably bit off more than we could chew, as many of the What Went Wrongs indicate. However, in the final analysis, we feel JAK II is the best game Naughty Dog has ever produced, and we are proud of the entertainment experience it represents.
Anyway, I enjoyed the series, including Jak II, but I thought the series never reached greatness. It was fun enough, but never in the same league as R&C or any of that gen's best. If I had skipped the series, I wouldn't be any worse for it.
