Over on his official EA.com blog, EA Sports President and arm-tattoo model Peter Moore has announced that NBA Elite 11—the comprehensive reboot and reworking of the NBA Live franchise—would not be making its launch date next week. Citing that the game simply “isn’t ready yet,” and that additional play testing and polish is needed on the title, Moore revealed that EA is pushing Elite out of October, with no available timeframe to indicate the game's new release date.
What makes this story especially crazy is that it doesn’t sound like a case where the Elite team just needs a few more weeks to fix bugs or adjust statistics balance. On the contrary, it sounds like the Elite delay is far more serious; as Moore notes in his blog entry, reactions to EA Elite 11—and to its recently released demo—have been very critical of the title.
NBA ELITE had the benefit of play-testing, a demo and a lot of our own research. All that feedback revealed some concerns about gameplay polish, so we’ve listened to your feedback, and made a judgment that the game would benefit from more time in development.
According to Moore, EA will be continuing its support of NBA Live 10, throughout the 2010-2011 NBA season. All NBA Live 10 owners will receive the full roster update for the current season, as well as full support for EA’s “ Dynamic DNA” updates, which automatically adjust player and team statistics depending on their real life performance. All of these updates, Moore writes, will be available for NBA Live 10 owners totally free of charge.
== TEASER ==With EA coming forward and publicly admitting to quality concerns, as well as the company’s measures taken to keep its basketball player base happy (and away from 2K’s basketball franchise) for the remainder of this season, it’s possible that NBA Elite could miss out on a 2010 release date and maybe miss the current basketball season season entirely.
So, with NBA Elite possibly pushed out of this current release season, what does this mean for NBA Jam HD? The graphically enhanced, but feature-limited port of EA’s NBA Jam game for the Wii was originally planned as a free download packed in with copies of NBA Elite 11 for the 360 and PS3. However, because of the delay, Moore writes, EA has decided to release NBA Jam as a standalone product for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, “in time for the holidays.”
Whether this means that NBA Jam HD will be released as a downloadable game for XBLA and PSN, or whether the full disc version coming out on the Wii next week will be ported up to and released on a disc for the 360 and PS3 by year’s end is unclear at this time.
This just goes to show; no matter which company you are, you shouldn’t try to put Jesus in your basketball game. You’re just asking for trouble.