It's hard to believe, but The Saboteur was announced around this time ... in 2007. Crazy, right? We can hardly believe it's been so long, and since it was announced, we really haven't had much to talk about. Thanks to Tom French of Pandemic, we now know it's because the game was revealed too soon. Sabotaging The Saboteur, amirite?

In speaking with VG247, Pandemic's Tom French said the game is pretty ambitious and that the title was just revealed too soon. At the point where it was announced, most of the title was still on paper, with only a "small section of the world even built." Then, EA acquired Pandemic, which French said really helped The Saboteur out, allowing the team working on it to grow through inheriting people from other projects (he cites folks coming on board from Mercenaries, for example). French said the additions to The Saboteur team have helped "refine all those little details that we've been talking about but nobody had time to touch."

Delays are never good, but in the case of two titles emerging from EA's acquisition of BioWare and Pandemic, it's nice to see the publishing giant giving its studios the time they need to get the job done right. In particular, we're talking about BioWare's all-new original RPG title, Dragon Age, and Pandemic's WWII action game, Saboteur, both of which EA boss John Riccitiello revealed are now 2009 titles during a speech Tuesday.

BioWare, hot off the PC release of Mass Effect, has been crafting its first fantasy RPG since Neverwinter Nights for some time. Saboteur showed substantial promise when we saw it last year; it's a third-person action game set in Nazi-occupied France, starting off in black & white, with color appearing as Nazis are driven out of areas of Paris.

Electronic Arts has dropped a cold, emotionless reminder of its late-2007 acquisition of both BioWare and Pandemic Studios, announcing that the pair have now been officially digested by the EA collective. While we remain cynical of the whole affair – it is, after all, what we do – EA has announced that the pair has been tapped to create a whopping ten new franchises for EA, based on six different "wholly-owned" properties. 10? Seriously? BioWare alone hasn't touched that much code in nearly a decade, though to be fair EA hasn't laid out a time line for how often these games will emerge.

Both BioWare and Pandemic will be overseen by EA Games' top cheese Locutus...erm, Frank Gibeau, and according to the executive the acquisition will broaden EA's game portfolio in the RPG, action and adventure genres. A cloud of mystery continues to hang over the bulk of these new projects, though EA has confirmed that BioWare remains hard at work on Dragon Age and the DS Sonic RPG, while Pandemic is chugging along developing Mercenaries 2: World in Flames and Saboteur. At least it seems as though the assimilation hasn't freed the developers of independent thought, though granted it does take some time before the implants take hold.

Pandemic Studios is ready to explain why Mercenaries 2: World in Flames was delayed until 2008. In an IGN interview, Pandemic pres. Josh Resnick says they delayed the game so that "every corner of our vast, open-world, highly explosive gameplay is completely polished." He says they are not adding anything else to the game but are merely fixing bugs "to make gamers proud that they own a copy of Mercenaries 2 by making the highest quality next-gen open-world experience the world has ever seen." Well, hopefully Pandemic can own that title for a while before GTA IV comes out around the same time.

Did the multi-platform development cause the delay? Resnick says , "Not at all." He says that all the different version are "shaping up nicely." He also says that the delay has not affected the development of Saboteur and it's still planned for 2008. There's a lot of fluff in the interview, but at least the developers have spoken on the issue instead of just letting the fanboys blame the PS3 for every game with multi-platform development.

Saboteur is a stealth-action game developed by Pandemic studios about a dude who decides to join the French Resistance after Nazi's occupy France. Yeah, you heard right. Nazi's. That means another World War II title. Is it bad to get saturated to the point where the word "Nazi" just makes us roll our eyes in annoyance? Anyway, here's an interview with IGN about the game. We'll give you some highlights.

• About the story: "There are some very specific Nazis that kill Sean's friends and family. Sean goes out of his way to find them and make them pay. He gets tied into the bigger conflict slightly, like the French Resistance and the SOE, and there is this backdrop of this larger global war that's happening. But at the end of the day, we're interested in just telling Sean's story of personal victory and triumph over these Nazis."
• They make big games, but here's a heads-up on the scale for this one: "We're actually modeling both all of Paris and all the way out to the coast, as well as the German mountains, so there is a large territory that we're including."
• Citizens will fight alongside you or avoid you, depending on the morale in France against the battle overall.
• The game will include stealth elements, but will be paced like an action game (we're thinking like the third Prince of Persia from their description). There'll be a few places to hide like rooftops or sewers.

Wow, that was a really boring post. Aren't you guys glad we usually aren't that stiff around here? We're not insulting any other blogs/sites out there, but after re-reading this it occurred to me that writing articles in this fashion just... fail to interest and entertain. Anyway, Saboteur seems like it will both interest and entertain, so we'll keep a look out for it. Hey, weren't saboteurs the little guys in Dune, on the Ordos side of things, that would enter a building and blow it up? How appropriate.

The April issue of Game Informer is bringing word of the latest project from Pandemic Studios (Destroy All Humans, Mercenaries). It turns out it will be a World War II shooter entitled Saboteur.

Another World War II shooter, eh? Before you join us in a collective sigh, Pandemic asserts that this is different than other shooters out there. How so? There will be action, stealth, an open-ended world, and -- here's the differentiator -- a black-and-white color scheme to indicate which areas are controlled by Nazis.

It certainly is artistic, but we can't stop thinking about the film Pleasantville. We like the concept, but we'll reserve judgment until we see, in video, how well they pull off the effect. No word on which "secret project" -- B, Q, X, Y or Z -- this was, but they are all good choices in Scrabble. There's a 2008 release date mentioned but no console specified. Given the developer's history, they might end up playing coy for a good while.