Paradox Interactive hasn’t had a good week, and the publisher’s situation has become a little worse. The follow-up to the 2015 cult hit Prison Architect has been given yet another delay. The game was supposed to launch on May 7—a delay from March 26—but it won’t happen until September 3.
Despite the fact that Prison Architect 2 builds have been approved for every platform, Double Eleven’s engineers encountered several technical issues that will require some time to fix. A few memory-related problems and failures in the lowest specification configuration surfaced. Even though the team claims that thus far, their efforts to fix those have been effective, some other technical issues have emerged, which has resulted in a noticeable increase in crashes.
Double Eleven will use the extra development time to improve the prison management sim’s stability and to refine some of its features. Paradox says it will also take the opportunity to let players get a look inside the development process via additional developer diaries and streams. A stream is set for April 25.
Paradox notes that console players who pre-ordered will automatically be refunded due to platform policies — they’ll need to buy Prison Architect 2 again to get a pre-order bonus. Steam players can request a refund if they wish.
The Prison Architect 2 delay comes one day after studio Colossal Order said it would refund all players who bought the first asset pack for Cities Skylines 2, another game Paradox is publishing. While the asset pack (which will be added to the base game for everyone) worked, there appeared to be a consensus among fans that there wasn’t enough in there to justify the $10 price. There are bigger issues at play though, as Colossal Order has more work ahead to optimize Cities Skylines 2 after a rocky debut. The studio has also delayed the console release and other DLC as it focuses on fixing the core concerns.
