The tragic tale of EA Sports’ would-be NBA franchise reboot, NBA Elite 11, just took an even sadder tone. EA CEO John Riccitiello revealed in an interview with IndustryGamers that before the maligned hoops game was ultimately canceled, he thought that the game would be ‘revolutionary’ to the basketball genre.
“The team set out a year and a half ago, with a very ambitious goal. They fundamentally changed the control scheme… double analog stick gameplay. You could bounce the ball back and forth between your hands, dribble independently… all sorts of tricky moves. To be honest with you, I spent significant amount of time with that interface, thinking this was revolutionary. Let’s be clear about this: I personally endorsed the game design a long time ago – way, way, way before we knew how the game was going to finish. We set a really ambitious target. We wanted to revolutionize the way simulation basketball was played,” he said.
However, this proved not to be the case, and as development continued on the game, more and more problems, namely some major animation glitches and issues with the control scheme, continued to rear their heads.
“I’d say if there was a breakdown in the process, it was at the end. A more sober assessment was we could ship a high-80s game in February. What we had in time for the basketball season wasn’t. There might have been a little bit of wishful thinking that it was going to come together. I don’t know if you’ve ever been involved in the finalizing of a game, but a lot of times… it’s astonishing how the last five bits of polish make a game go from feeling like an Erector set, sort of assemblage of parts, to feeling like a polished piece of software. In this case, what was not meshing as well was the core animations for some of the moves that are inherent in the game for players to do, and the control system,” Riccitiello continued.
All things considered, I’d say EA Sports made the right call. The project just wasn’t coming together, and it didn’t seem like EA’s upper brass had much faith in the title. Hopefully, taking a year to reflect and refresh is what EA’s hoops franchise needs to get off the injured list.
via IndustryGamers
I don’t know if this was a bad thing that the game was taking too long. Personally, I would like to see sports games with longer development times. If this would have revolutionized basketball games, I would have been all for it. Many sports games these days don’t seem to change enough to warrant a purchase every year.
Well its a shame but at least they did not release a broken game because i am sure that everyone that buys each new iteration each year no matter the change in case with this one it was significant would have lined up to buy this if EA put this out there.
I hope they keep working on it and release it eventually, kinda intrigues me the whole idea of the new control system. Maybe we could see it in a couple of years, who knows.
Anyway, we still have 2k’s series.