Prison Architect 2 delayed indefinitely with pre-orders refunded – Paradox is making a habit of this

Life By You. Cancelled. Star Trek: Infinite. Anything but. Cities Skylines 2. A mess. Now Prison Architect 2 – the sequel to the beloved original will not now hit the original September deadline for launch. Nor has it got any kind of future release date. The last time this happened – to Life By You – the project was taken out back and shot just a few weeks later.

In a post on the Paradox forums the Prison Architect 2 team said: “We have some difficult news to share: unfortunately, we will not release Prison Architect 2 on September 3rd because we need more time to improve both the game’s performance and its content. Our continuous internal reviews and beta test groups have highlighted areas that we need to focus on more, mainly performance and content, which we need to address before launch to ensure that you, the players, get a good experience in the game. We need to raise the quality a bit more to meet the standards we’d like to achieve with this sequel.”

More worryingly the post included news of refunds for those who had pre-purchased, suggesting this is certainly not going to be a short-term thing. “With this indefinite delay, preorders on all platforms will be refunded, and the preorder items will be added to the base game.”

“At this stage, we can’t commit to a new release date as we need to re-assess the scope of the work needed to be done before the game is release-ready. Over the next few months, we will focus on improving the game and building a more robust release timeline. This also means we will be limiting our communication with you all until we have a timeline we feel comfortable with.”

I shouldn’t need to be the one to point out that the above does not justify limiting communication, should I?

Prison Architect was a month away from launch (September 3rd), If, as is being explained away here, the game is so far from completion nobody can even talk to us about it anymore, this is not something that just got spotted this morning.

Another line in the statement says, “This decision aligns with our commitment here at Paradox to reviewing and improving the quality of our released content.” and with a trend developing since the Skylines 2 debacle it would be useful to be a fly on the wall at these meetings where games get delayed or even cut so late in the day.

So that’s that. There is no chance of escape from PA2 any time soon. Hopefully, it does not go the same way as Life By You, which was also only a few weeks before entering Early Access.

Strange times indeed.

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