Paradox has announced yet another Prison Architect 2 delay, and this time, there’s no new release date on the horizon, so it’s going to be a while before you can play the prison management sim.
In a post on the official Paradox forum, the Prison Architect 2 dev team says it won’t be able to make the previously-announced September release date owing to a need for “time to improve both the game’s performance and its content”. These two areas were, Paradox says, identified by “continuous internal reviews and beta test groups” as places where the team needed to up its game.
The studio says it’s still confident that Prison Architect 2 will be “great”, but that it wants to make sure the sequel “lives up to the franchise’s legacy” and that developer Kokku has the time it needs to make the game as good as it can be.
Paradox goes on to say that it can’t commit to a new release date because it needs to “re-assess the scope of the work needed to be done” before it knows when it will be able to launch Prison Architect 2. That’s also why you won’t be hearing much about the game in the near future; the publisher says it’ll be limiting its communication in order to knuckle down and work on the game.
If you’ve pre-ordered Prison Architect 2, then your pre-order will be refunded, and items that would have been offered as part of that pre-order will instead be included in the base game.
The publisher closes its announcement by admitting that this “is not the announcement [it] hoped to make”, but that it’s “necessary” and that the delay will “result in a better game for you”.
If you’re not familiar with Prison Architect 2, it’s the upcoming sequel to 2015’s successful prison management sim Prison Architect, which was developed by Introversion Software (and then Double Eleven from 2019 onwards).
The second game will bring the management sim gameplay into 3D, allowing you to build prisons with multiple levels, and it’ll also introduce a number of other gameplay tweaks and improvements. Of course, now that we don’t have a release date, we sadly don’t know when you’ll be able to enjoy those improvements.
Prison Architect 2 is set for launch sometime in the future on PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X|S. Will it be canceled like Life by You? Only time will tell.
