Naughty Dog’s creative director talks about Jak X: Combat Racing
By Michael Lafferty 

“Jak is the hero you want to be and Daxter is the hero you are afraid you are”

Just when you thought the trilogy of Jak and Daxter had closed with the third and final chapter, along comes Jak X: Combat Racing. A fast-paced (pun intended) title that will pit Jak’s racing prowess against a cadre of other opponents, all in high-powered, and well-armed vehicles, Jak X will take players on a journey through the streets of Kras City.

Jak has been lured to the location to hear the Last Will and Testament of Krew, a former nemesis. But Krew is devious, even from beyond. He has poisoned all those who are there to hear the reading, and if they do not race on the Combat circuit, they will be denied the antidote.

The game itself is a perfect fit for the PlayStation 2 platform, with easy-to-use controls, and in addition to the street racing, it even has arena-style combat for multiple gamers hooked up online.  

Shown at a recent Sony event in Santa Monica, Naughty Dog’s E. Daniel Arey, the creative director, took time to talk with GameZone about this fall release.

Question: Obviously when you created the Jak and Daxter franchise as a trilogy, and finished it up, you realized that the gaming public did not have enough of the characters and the franchise itself. What thought processes lead you to creating the Combat Racing title?

Daniel: It’s funny that you say that because I haven’t had enough of Jak. For the last five years these characters have really grown on me as I have been writing and creating the characters. We built this universe and realized we don’t want to say goodbye to these characters. And so as we talked about the next game, we kept getting feedback from everybody like “I loved the dune buggies, the dune buggies are so much it is a game by itself.” We heard it from so many people we said ‘you know what, we got these great characters who always were racers’ … if you remember way back in Jak 1 the story was a lot about the racing concept so that’s when we decided let’s make it a racing game. Let’s make a full racing game and do what Naughty Dog does best – focus on just that aspect and make it fun. 

Q: Did getting the vehicle physics right present a challenge?

Daniel: It’s a rigid body physics system that we worked on in Jak 3, the entire process of the game. We had somebody dedicated to just that part of the physics. Toward the end of Jak 3 we were getting better and better at it. Our version is lively and you have enough control so you don’t feel like you are just bouncing around everywhere.

Q: Not only did you create a racing game, but you also managed to incorporate a robust drive-or-die adventure storyline to underscore it. Did that aspect of the game pose any difficulties for the design team – as in creating a game with a high fun racing factor but also with a storyline that made sense?

Daniel: When I was starting to develop the new story I was thinking ‘how do you make a story … in an adventure game it is pretty simple – you climb to the top of the mountain and talk to the monk or go to the bottom of their cave and save the thing, it’s not the same when you think about racing. Racing and adventure don’t necessarily naturally come together because everything you do has to be resolved on the track. Any challenges you have, any issues that the player has to face has to be resolved on the track. So it is a really difficult issue but we finally came up with a spin to make it work. It’s not about this giant ‘save the world’ idea … save the world? Ok, let’s go race! That doesn’t make sense, but racing for your friends, racing to survive and trying to help your friends on the track – it became a story about friendship, and your ‘wing man’ if you will, and ultimately betrayal.

Q: In the multiplayer games, will there be any kind of ladder-ranking system involved?

Daniel: We haven’t talked directly about that, we are going to talk about that in the future, but there is, of course, going to be a full suite of online elements there, which we will release (details about) in the future.

But we have been playing (online) for three months and it is extremely addicting. Tracking things, ladder rankings – all that will absolutely be in.

People still tell us that CTR (Crash Team Racing) is one of their favorite Naughty Dog games of all time. So we have a tradition of making a racing game – we understand track design, that interactivity of when you have four people in CTR, but now you have six people, you have friends, you have full-duplex voice where you can actually talk to each other and talk smack, and yah, we are having a hard time getting the game done because people are playing so much in our own studios – so we know we are tapping into a vein that is pretty exciting.

Q: Jak and Dax has been, in the past where it comes to the dialog, sarcastic and very much tongue-in-cheek humor. Does that continue in Jak X?

Daniel: Absolutely. In Jak 3 we really kind of unleashed Daxter even more. He’s my secret weapon. Whenever I have a scene that is starting to sag – it’s an old adage in Hollywood: whenever you have a boring scene, have somebody run in with a gun. Well, in my case, whenever I have a scene that I’m a little concerned about, have Daxter get involved. So we’ve really unleashed him. We’ve unleashed all the other characters – Ashelin, a lot more double entendres, they have a lot more layers of humor.

Q: What, in your mind, keep the characters of Jak and Daxter an enjoyable element and videogame experience? 

Daniel: I think the key for me is that Jak is the hero you want to be and Daxter is the hero you are afraid you are. And I think that dynamic between these two – Jak is the stellar guy who is going to make it happen, who is going to save the world and Daxter is the guy who is just a little bit concerned, a little bit afraid and he would rather take the easy way out – and that dynamic between these two characters, we see ourselves in both of these characters.

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