
11:30 AM - November 24, 2010 by RaychelSnr
While this news item is certainly a couple of days old now, I thought I'd bring recent comments made by EA Head of Worldwide Development Andrew Wilson to
IGN:
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"But unlike those games, NBA Elite just wasn't going to make the kind of impact EA desired. "Ultimately," Wilson admits, "it was just going to be a bad game." That's not because the ideas of radically changing the controls (one stick for dribbling and shooter, the other for foot movements) was a bad one. In fact, if you ignore all the other issues with NBA Elite, the controls show a lot of promise. But it is all those other factors that just weren't up to snuff and would have netted NBA Elite poor review scores and unfavorable reactions from gamers.
"I think that the goal of reinventing how people play basketball games and giving the gamer infinitely more control over the outcomes that appear on the screen in front of them, was something that just needed to take longer than we had," Wilson said. "We knew the goal was aggressive. But at the same time, we believed it was an important enough goal for the gamer, who'd been playing basketball games in a very similar way for a very long time." |
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Interestingly enough, I agree with EA's approach on this one. They were too bold too fast and got caught in a really bad situation. If they come back next year with a really solid game, which I feel they can, then I think that might be an endorsement of some kind for taking a year off from time to time.
While a lot of people, myself included, have criticized EA's offering of Elite 11 as being really bad -- the foundation and ideas that they were rolling with are things which will force the competition to change how it approaches the game of basketball. So given a more polished game than what we saw with the ill fated Elite 11, I think EA could end up ending up with nothing more than a small hiccup from a business standpoint.