EA has finally released an official trailer for NBA Live '13. Mind you, this isn't our first look at the game as leaked gameplay footage made the rounds on the internet just last month.
One thing I noticed straight away is that while the footage is comprised of gameplay clips, we don't get to see actual gameplay footage. It's just a montage of slams, signature shots and so on. There's no footage of the Lakers setting up a play for Kobe, or Lebron going coast-to-coast for a jam.
That observation is not that surprising once you hear that NBA Live '13 is getting delayed. Of course, EA is not acknowledging that the game is delayed since they never divulged a release date for the game.
Andrew Wilson, executive vice president of EA Sports, commented (via Kotaku), "The team is making steady progress, and we're continuing our work on NBA Live " Wilson adds, "We remain focused on rebuilding this franchise for the future."
While no specific release date has been given before, EA acknowledges that people were expecting an early October release date to put it within the timeframe against its lone competitior — NBA 2K13. Another EA spokesman can only state, "our plan is to release at a later date. We will share more information in the future," at the time of this writing.
Additionally, you might remember that we posted a report that NBA Live '13 was supposedly intended for a digital release only. EA would not answer any questions regarding the game's format, release window, etc. However, they did have a formal statement ready.
We're not going to get into that level of detail with this announcement. In early April, you saw where we were with this project and how ambitious it was, that they had to take down the code of Elite and rebuild it. Its easy to surmise that also took time, in the development cycle, to get the whole thing up to speed. It was an ambitious project and it is a challenging game to create.
This certainly doesn't bode well for EA's latest attempt at making a basketball sim. Will NBA Live '13 eventually go the the NBA Elite route? Hopefully not, but at the same, it's quite worrying to see the game still doesn't have a release window and we're quite close to the start of another NBA season.
Are you concerned at all with NBA Live '13's fate or is NBA 2K13 all you need?
