EA Sports apologizes for NBA Live 14
"I'm not going to lie; it's been a rough week. As you can imagine, this isn't exactly the NBA LIVE comeback story we were hoping for this year," executive producer Sean O'Brien said in a public letter. "We hear loud and clear that some of you are disappointed in various aspects of NBA LIVE 14, and I'm sorry if the game doesn't live up to your expectations."
"I'm not going to lie; it's been a rough week. As you can imagine, this isn't exactly the NBA LIVE comeback story we were hoping for this year," executive producer Sean O'Brien said in a public letter. "We hear loud and clear that some of you are disappointed in various aspects of NBA LIVE 14, and I'm sorry if the game doesn't live up to your expectations."
EA Sports hasn't released a basketball game in years, as it didn't believe its Elite product was good enough to release on market. However, Live for Xbox One and PS4 has been decimated by fans and critics alike.
EA Sports promises that the game will get updated for a better experience. Specifically, the visuals (which many say pales in comparison to 2K's competing product) will get a boost. "We felt authentic gameplay, control and the connected experience would provide the best foundation for the future. As a result, game visuals and animation polish suffered," O'Brien said on EA Sports' website. "Improvements on these fronts are also in development now for NBA LIVE 14. You will notice in the coming weeks and months that the game’s visuals and animation will improve significantly."
In addition, there will be better tutorials on how to play the game. "You've told us that the game is too hard to learn," he said. "As a result, we are working on improving the way the game teaches the controls and on-boards new users."
Of course, EA Sports will have another shot at making a good basketball game next year, something O'Brien is looking forward to. "We've got a lot of work to do; I've got a lot of work to do. It started 12 months ago, and continues until we build this franchise bigger and better than it ever was. This is just the first chapter in the NBA LIVE comeback story."
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Shacknews
replyAndrew Yoon posted a new article, EA Sports apologizes for NBA Live 14.
"I'm not going to lie; it's been a rough week. As you can imagine, this isn't exactly the NBA LIVE comeback story we were hoping for this year," executive producer Sean O'Brien said in a public letter. "We hear loud and clear that some of you are disappointed in various aspects of NBA LIVE 14, and I'm sorry if the game doesn't live up to your expectations."-
it's not like this reaction is a surprise, they knew what they were shipping relative to the competition
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what's strange to me is that they shelved it the past couple years knowing it wasn't up to par and now they bring it back with this quality? I could understand a feature light 7/10 type game that was serving as a foundation to build on (in a way that comes across to a reviewer/player) but this is getting like 5/10 or worse at places. How bad a shape were the last couple iterations that they shelved it? Or were they just hoping to ride next gen hype here and steal some sales for a game they knew is below par? What's also strange is that they know how long it takes to rebuild a brand from poor releases when PES was beating FIFA and yet they're willing to put out a product like this that will for years cement in consumers' minds that basketball = 2k, not EA.
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Well, we know why John Riccitiello ordered a post-ship cancellation of Elite 11... because he told Kotaku. http://www.kotaku.com.au/2010/12/how-a-big-video-game-was-killed/
“Somewhere in the July timeframe, they were flashing from Canada that the game was going to come in hot. In a way, they’d sort of bit off two years’ worth of work that they could only get done in 18 months. So it was going to come in hot. But they were still signaling to us that it was going to come in good, that they were going to get it.
“The demo went on around the same time we were mastering the game [Editor's note: Meaning the game was just about done and ready to go in boxes headed to stores] . The report was – we had known a month earlier that the gameplay was great but that they didn’t synch up well against the animations, which was what…."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJwXBw86g30#t=2m22s
"...Yeah. So we knew that there was an issue, but they said we’re going to gert this solved in the next 150 hours before it goes final.
"We’re in the middle of a nail-biter. The demo goes out. We final the game. We do an internal review. We’re not happy. Interaction between the label and sales organisation says the game is likely to be a 60 or something along those lines essentially for the fact that it wasn’t finished. What do you do?
"There aren’t many decisions that are essentially squarely on my desk. This was one."
As for NBA Live 13 getting canned, this is what then-head of EA Sports Andrew Wilson said: http://www.shacknews.com/article/75969/nba-live-13-canceled-ea-sports-aims-for-live-14
"When we started the process of bringing back NBA Live, we knew it was going to be a long journey. We started by moving the game to a new studio. We brought in some of the best new technology that has helped fuel innovation in our other games. We launched an even deeper level of engagement with our community to gather more feedback directly from fans. And we built a whole new development team to bring it all to life. We felt like we were on the right path... But making great games is not easy, and we're just not there yet on NBA Live 13. Having continued to look at the game over the past few days, it's clear that we won't be ready in October."
This year, Andrew Wilson is the CEO of EA, tapped for the role this September, after Larry Probst was interim CEO from mid-March, when Riccitiello resigned prior to the FY13 earnings call. Which means that Wilson was still at the helm of EA Sports during much of the formative period of NBA Live 14. Still a lot of questions as to why three years wasn't enough to make a decent NBA game... which makes me wonder if it's a similar story to how games like SimCity and Command & Conquer faltered over the years of their development.-
weird, it sounds like this year's iteration could've been canned for the same reasons as both of those other two. And yeah, I said the same thing earlier about why 3 years hasn't been enough to get it into better shape, but the reality is it wasn't like they shelved it and then were given a traditional 3 year dev cycle, they kept trying to schedule as if it was going to be a 1 year project and then delayed it a year over and over. That can't have been helpful.
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Ship early, patch, and hope for sales.
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that only works when you have a strong core game like Battlefield that's only rough around the edges not right down the center. It also helps when you don't have any obvious head to head competition showing consumers how much worse your offering is (Battlefield is competing with other shooters but if you want big, vehicle based military MP you don't have a lot of choices).
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Another ea game disappointment
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Remember when 2K did that for NFL 2K5? It forced EA to drop the price on Madden to compete. The following year EA just went out and bought everything up exclusively so 2K couldn't make a football game anymore. Even got ESPN exclusively which was 2K's big selling point.
2K5 was the better game too. -
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that would just be admitting it is a subpar product, people aren't looking for a shitty, cheap basketball game, they just want the best basketball game out there and EA hasn't been able to deliver anywhere near that for years now
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