As soon as I saw a Prison Architect teaser recently, I knew this was about to come! Prison Architect 2 has now been formally announced from Paradox Interactive with Double Eleven on developer duty.
This was expected anyway, since Paradox purchased the rights to Prison Architect back in early 2019, and then in March 2023 the original had its final upgrade. So of course Paradox weren't going to sit on it.
Direct Link
Features:
- The World’s Greatest Prison Simulation Game - Now in 3D! Use your resources to build, manage, and control your prison in classic Prison Architect playstyle—now in 3 glorious dimensions! Design every corner of your prison and manage everything from daily schedules to policies, and ensure your prison is safe, self-sustaining, and secure.
- Build the Ultimate Penitentiary: Establish all of your prison infrastructure over multiple floors, and use tons of snazzy new tools that allow you to build a state-of-the-art correctional facility. The design of your prison will affect every aspect of your inmates’ lives, so make your schemes accordingly!
- The Smartest Inmates Ever: Unique inmates have schemes of their own – they now form distinct relationships that influence behavior, make decisions based on wants and needs, and plot their paths better than ever. Watch as they interact and attempt to navigate the daily trials of your prison. Remember that every choice you make might either help or hinder your inmates' correctional journey. What type of relationships will your inmates have with your prison?
- The Prison Magnate: Establish and run a true institution from the top, building up unique correctional facilities in a freshly upgraded Career Mode that will take you across a brand new world map. Will your prisons end up being monuments to rehabilitation or retribution? Most importantly, will they pay the bills?
- Every Action has a Reaction: Choices matter and yours will determine the fate of your prison. More control than ever—over inmates, prison policies, architecture and more—means more ways for things to go well… or not! Plan carefully or you may have to cope with escapes, gang wars, and all sorts of expensive and destructive problems.
From the press release: “In Prison Architect 2, our team set out to create the next level in management gameplay. A greater degree of player freedom, impactful choices, and inmate simulation come together to provide an enhanced presentation of prison management, in a 3D world. Much loved features make a return to help you manage your inmates, quell riots, prevent escapes and share your prisons, but now cross-platform! In addition to a new upgrade system, a new Career Mode, and more.” said Gareth Wright, Game Director at Double Eleven. “We look forward to seeing how players get creative with multiple floors and catwalks to finally construct and expand in 3D. And then optimize and balance their prison’s safety, security and self-betterment.”
Currently, it seems much like Cities: Skylines 2 that Paradox also publishes, that the Native Linux and macOS support has been dropped. I've reached out to Paradox PR to clarify. Hopefully (and quite likely) it will run with Steam Play Proton, and if not, no doubt future Proton updates could get it running like we've seen with the tens of thousands of games that run on desktop Linux and Steam Deck.
It's due out on March 26th.
You can follow / pre-order on Steam for $39.99 / £34.99 / €39.99.
Not that the new style isn't good (I like it for most management games, it is generic but nice), but I liked how the old one looked. It was perfectly clear and workable, but also unique and interesting. I liked how you could see the furniture being carried to the rooms being built, and how the top-down view made everything clear when building, and everything was very distinct and clear while also looking coherent together. The tiny sprites had lots of personality and matched the somber and edgy tone of the game (the cartoonish, rounded 3D is a bit too "friendly" in my opinion).
Quoting: d10sfanA shame that they went with Paradox, they release way too many dlcs, and their recent releases have been pretty lackluster.I think what happened is that Introversion made PA1, it was a hit they needed after some financially shaky years, and then it made a complete flop, so they sold PA off. Technically a choice, sure, but I'm fairly positive they were happy about sacrificing PA for a modicum of financial security.
Tl;dr: not the PA1 dev, no experience in the genre (from what they share), and the latest in a slew of (poorly made) games published by PDX...
I'd be cautious.
Quoting: suchNever heard of Double Eleven before, so I started digging... and this appears to be a support studio. Lots of ports, made stuff for other games, published an indie, but nothing remotely suggesting they have what it takes to make a game like this (which is not easy to make).
Tl;dr: not the PA1 dev, no experience in the genre (from what they share), and the latest in a slew of (poorly made) games published by PDX...
I'd be cautious.
They have been working on the first Prison Architect since 2016, initially to port it to consoles (that was before Paradox got the license!) and then were brought by Paradox to update the game and develop new content - I think they made all the DLC released for it (a few mid-sized expansions afaik, haven't played any of them). I'd guess that for all purposes they were the studio that got the PA license after the sale.
So yes they used to be a support studio working on ports and making stuff for existing games - including Prison Architect. So they do have experience not only in this genre but in this very franchise... which is not necessarily reassuring, as they mostly did DLC and the original design came from Introversion which was a very different company.
I am cautiously optimistic. We will supposedly get to see more footage on Friday.
Quoting: eldakingHuh, that's interesting. Not a peep about any of this here, oddly enough:Quoting: suchNever heard of Double Eleven before, so I started digging... and this appears to be a support studio. Lots of ports, made stuff for other games, published an indie, but nothing remotely suggesting they have what it takes to make a game like this (which is not easy to make).
Tl;dr: not the PA1 dev, no experience in the genre (from what they share), and the latest in a slew of (poorly made) games published by PDX...
I'd be cautious.
They have been working on the first Prison Architect since 2016, initially to port it to consoles (that was before Paradox got the license!) and then were brought by Paradox to update the game and develop new content - I think they made all the DLC released for it (a few mid-sized expansions afaik, haven't played any of them). I'd guess that for all purposes they were the studio that got the PA license after the sale.
So yes they used to be a support studio working on ports and making stuff for existing games - including Prison Architect. So they do have experience not only in this genre but in this very franchise... which is not necessarily reassuring, as they mostly did DLC and the original design came from Introversion which was a very different company.
https://double11.com/games
That PDX DLC is much maligned in the community from what I've seen - as stuff just bolted onto the game for no other reason than to sell more of said stuff.
So... we'll see. Hopefully it's good. Worst case scenario I'll try to find the latest Introversion build of PA1. I did play a bit of it back then, so it's been quite some time.
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