14 DAY TRIAL // Publisher Electronic Arts has officially announced that its basketball simulation NBA Elite 11 will not be coming out on October 5, as previously thought, but will be delayed into 2011, with the main reason cited being the “concerns” linked to the polish of the gameplay coming out of play testing and the feedback offered by those who downloaded and tried out the demo version.
In the place of NBA Elite 11 Electronic Arts will be launching a full multiplatform version of NBA Jam, which was initially only targeting the Nintendo Wii and is now also planned for the Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3.
No clear date has yet been confirmed for NBA Jam but the publisher expects to put it out in time for the holiday shopping season.
The delay is unexpected because NBA is one of the main franchises for EA Sports, alongside FIFA and Madden NFL, and pushing it back is an admission that the development team failed to create a game worthy of the series.
A statement from publisher Electronic Arts says, “We are going to keep working until we’re certain we can deliver a breakthrough basketball experience.”
The company added, “The decision to delay NBA Elite was hard because the game has great promise. But ultimately we feel this is the right thing to do. We've been making steady progress on basketball for the past few years and it’s going to take extra time to make the game.”
Some fans of the NBA Live series became concerned about its future earlier in the year when the announcement was made that the name of the franchise was becoming Elite in order to better reflect the focus on placed on high level basketball match ups.
On October 5 gamers who want their basketball fix and are not interested in the more arcade mechanics of NBA Jam can pick up the Take Two published NBA 2K11, which will probably see a big increase in its annual sales.