Zipper Interactive, the development studio that Sony put in charge of creating SOCOM 4, has announced that the shooter, which was initially scheduled to arrive at some point during the fall in order to aid in the launch of the PlayStation Move motion tracking system, is now slate for an unspecified date in 2011.

Jeremy Dunham, who is the community manager working for Zipper Interactive, wrote on the behalf of the entire development team that, “While we're certainly aware that you've been looking forward to playing SOCOM 4 this year, we don't want to take any shortcuts. Instead, we want to deliver the best and most immersive SOCOM game we possibly can and we're going to use our extra time to do just that.” The team also promised that more information about the game will be delivered in the coming months, highlighting the improvements that are made thanks to the extra development time.

The announcement that SOCOM 4 would offer support for PlayStation Move was a surprise and Sony was probably preparing the title as a sort of showcase of how its new hardware peripheral could be used by the more hardcore crowd, who is not interested in the mini game collections that Move would launch with. The game was set to offer support for a traditional controller out of the box with certain aspects also available with motion control. The delay might actually negatively impact initial sales of Move, which is set to be released on.

SOCOM 4 will allow gamer to control a NATO Special Forces squad which is sent into an undisclosed country somewhere in South East Asia in order to face an insurgency group known as Naga. There are five operatives that fight together as a team, each with a complex set of skills. Zipper claims that the story will be deeper than that of the typical video game shooter and that the gameplay will be more engaging than in previous titles in the series.