The reason why EA decided to cancel NBA Elite 11 is quite simple: the game was going to be bad.
The frank admission came from EA Sports' worldwide development senior VP, Andrew Wilson, who explained that the studio's ambition to change the series' traditional control proved more challenging than expected.
For NBA Elite 11, EA Sports decided to map the feet movement to the left analog stick and the hand controls to the right stick. The new control scheme promised to give players more flexibility and control but after developing a demo, it became apparent that this didn't happen.
"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."
