Yesterday EA Sports officially delayed NBA Elite 11 to a release sometime early next year due to serious game flaws, but the bad news did come with some good news: NBA Jam will now release full-featured on the Xbox 360 in Holiday 2010. We have spent a good bit of time with the "final" build of the brand new iteration of the NBA LIVE franchise, NBA Elite, and we can only say that this decision by EA's Peter Moore was a good one (even though the graphics looked amazing). Thankfully NBA Jam, which was set to be included with every copy of Elite 11, will still come to the Xbox 360 in only a few months and will include everything the Wii version does (online, exhibition, and career mode). This is the highlight of the breaking news and the fact that a developer would pull a top-shelf game like this only a week before it's retail release shows that there were some serious issues in the gameplay department, hopefully the next couple months will give the team time to fix the buggy gameplay. EA Sports also revealed that they will be supporting the 2011 NBA season by releasing free roster updates for last year's release, NBA Live 10, in the near future. Read the official statement below and stay tuned for more information on NBA Jam and NBA Elite 11 as it becomes available.
Official Statement: "Over the past three years, EA SPORTS development teams have had a laser focus on creating titles packed with innovation and unsurpassed quality. The acclaim from fans and critics on most of our titles the past few years makes us proud and it also motivates us to keep getting better.
This year, we set extremely ambitious goals for our new franchise, NBA ELITE. We are creating a game that will introduce several breakthrough features that have been missing from the basketball genre. Unfortunately, NBA ELITE 11 is not yet ready and we have made a decision to delay next month’s launch. We are going to keep working until we’re certain we can deliver a breakthrough basketball experience.
In the meantime, the NBA season is just around the corner and we have a plan to keep our consumers close to the action:
- NBA JAM will launch on the Wii, as scheduled, on October 5. NBA JAM won recognition this summer as the best sports game at E3 and it’s a blast to play. In addition to the Wii version, we’re going to ship NBA JAM as a standalone product on the Xbox360 and PS3 in time for the holidays. Watch for more news soon on the exact timing of that release.
- For NBA LIVE 10 players, we will continue to offer free content and services throughout the 2010-11 season. We will start with a new roster update so you get all the players for the new season, free of charge. We will also provide free Dynamic DNA updates, daily, for the entire season. That’s a full season of basketball with new rosters and updates, free.
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.
Why make this decision now? As with all of our titles, we continue to evaluate and improve the code right up until launch. Feedback from consumers is a very important part of the process . 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.
I want to thank our NBA ELITE development team for their efforts to meet this year’s lofty goals, and we’re behind them as they continue their work. While no one is happy with this delay, we appreciate the support and ongoing feedback from our fans. We’ll have more information coming soon."
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