Prison Architect 2 Delayed Again
| Author: | Brian Powell Jr |
| Date: | April 22, 2024 5:00:00 pm EDT |
| Last Updated: | June 1, 2024 9:01:59 pm EDT |
| Read Time: | 2 min read |
| Tags: |
Prison Architect 2 Gets Longer Delay
The team behind Prison Architect 2 sent out a news release on Steam on April 19, 2024, announcing that the game will be delayed longer. The new release date is set for September 3, 2024. This is an additional 4 months from the original delay release date we covered earlier, and a total of 6 months delayed from the originally planned date in March 2024. A developer stream is scheduled for April 25th, 2024, at 16:30 CEST / 10:30 EST to go over what they will be working on in the coming months. Console players will be receiving a refund due to the delay as per the console platform policy.
In the news release the team cited that in further optimizing the game to make it run better on the minimum hardware specs that the game crashed more frequently. They also mentioned that the current state of the game doesn’t meet their mean time between failures (MTBF) target. To boil down what this means, the game is currently very unreliable/unstable. This article from Atlassian provides a more thorough explanation of what this metric means in a software development world.
Once the issues were identified, we started working on improving Prison Architect 2’s memory usage to mitigate the situation. Overall, the work has been successful, and we have reached a satisfactory level of performance on lower specs. Unfortunately, with such a rework some new technical challenges emerged, as the number of crashes increased noticeably.
– Prison Architect 2 | Parole Session: Delayed, The Prison Architect 2 Team
While I am glad they are taking the time to further optimize the game so it runs more efficiently I cannot help but wonder if they are hurting themselves by supporting hardware that is 8 to 10 years old for the minimum specs. They performance optimizations are only going to really benefit players with dated computers as the consoles supported have more modern hardware. Hopefully, these changes provide better FPS as the game scales up and you have large prisons.