BioWare's new IP has been delayed due to the improvements the developers are making to its live service. The new release date is in the fiscal year of 2019.
Quarterly investor calls have been all the rage during the last couple of weeks. Wonder why. Yesterday, during EA's quarterly report call, they announced that BioWare's next intellectual property has been delayed into their 2019 FY. That acronym means "fiscal year", silly. The fiscal year will kick off in April 2018.
Prior to the new IP talk, they had to mention Mass Effect: Andromeda: "Mass Effect [Andromeda] is an interesting title; it was in development for a really long time and represented a lot of the great things that BioWare is known for: story, size, depth, breadth, imagination,". Oh and yeah, speaking of long developments, we're delaying our latest title.
BioWare
In January, the company announced their IP's release date is going to be sometime before March of 2018 rolls around. The reason for the recent delay is due to the features BioWare is adding to their game, which is built around a live service. The project is still nameless, so I'll call it Project Aardvark.
During the call, EA CEO Andrew Wilson said: "We're very pleased with the progress of our new action IP from BioWare". He continued by saying: "We decided to add more to the disruptive new social design for our players.". Yay?
Project Aardvark is an entirely new, ground-up endeavour for BioWare. Back in January, Mr Wilson said it was: "clean-sheet design with new concepts, new gameplay mechanics, and new stories.". Standard words anyone uses when describing a new project, and wanting to sound extra convincing while remaining as vague as possible.
Not vague enough for you? Here, have some more words: Andrew Wilson also said that Project Aardvark will not be an RPG, but rather a "unique IP that will bring players together in exciting new ways.".
As far as EA's earnings are concerned, they have had "record net sales and operating cash flow in fiscal 2017.".
