Electronic Arts has confirmed that development has ceased on Tiberium, its squad-based shooter set in the world of the Command & Conquer franchise. According to both the development team and publisher, the game was not meeting quality standards; it was in fact constantly plagued by "design challenges". EA LA studio head Mike Verdu posted further details in what was originally an internal memo:
"The game had fundamental design challenges from the start. We fought to correct the issues, but we were not successful; the game just isn't coming together well enough to meet our own quality expectations as well as those of our consumers."We need to make sure this doesn't happen again. I believe we are already doing a better job of engineering success in from the start. The quality bar has been raised. Now we need to step up our focus on great design and execution, catching any problems early and correcting them quickly."
As a result of cancelling the game, EA LA will unfortunately be forced to reduce its staff. The studio stresses it will attempt to place as many of these members as possible either on their other projects, or within other studios at EA. It all sounds eerily similiar to the situation currently faced by Microsoft's soon-to-be-shuttered Ensemble Studios.
Reportedly in development over the past two years, Tiberium first made its big splash in the January 2008 issue of Game Informer magazine, where EA LA highlighted the use of variety of infantry and vehicle squads which players could control easily amidst the first-person shooter action. The game was built on the Unreal Engine 3 development platform, and was scheduled for release on PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 sometime during 2009-2010 after being pushed back from its original "late 2008" timeframe.
