Why did Jak II go dark?
Jak II (2003) is a deliberate reinvention, planned as one. The first game was a success that still fell short of the Crash Bandicoot series' numbers, and co-founder Jason Rubin attributed the gap to the original's insufficient maturity: the audience that had played Crash as children was older now, and the studio judged that gamers of the 2000s wanted more than fuzzy animal antics.
THE DIAGNOSIS
What Naughty Dog told itself in 2002WHAT CHANGED
The sequel, item by itemThe story itself performs the turn: Jak is thrown 300 years into the future, captured, and subjected to two years of Dark Eco experiments by Baron Praxis, emerging able to transform into Dark Jak and, for the first time, able to speak. Around him, Haven City is a single seamless hub 24 times larger than any level in the first game, populated with procedurally generated citizens and two levels of hover traffic. The Morph Gun adds firearms to the melee kit, the Jet Board, inspired by Tony Hawk's Pro Skater, adds tricks and speed, and character models jumped from roughly 3,000 to 5,000 polygons to between 12,000 and 15,000.
The craft circle behind this gallery's shelves shows again inside the production: environments were designed in part by Sonic the Hedgehog veteran Hirokazu Yasuhara, and the engine borrowed Insomniac's polygon occlusion code from Ratchet and Clank, the technology sharing between the two studios now running in the other direction.
The turn worked on its own terms and kept its critics. Jak II scored an 87 on Metacritic, won Editor's Choice awards from IGN and GameSpot, and was named the best PlayStation 2 game of October 2003, while GameSpy scored it 2 of 5 and the standing criticisms targeted the city's navigation and the difficulty. Dark was not a costume change; it was the series' permanent direction, and Jak 3 followed it in 2004.