After recently postponing the release of Prison Architect 2 from May 7th to September 3rd, Paradox Interactive has announced that it will be parting ways with its developer, Double Eleven, after nine years of collaboration.
In a statement issued to the Prison Architect community, Paradox explained the reason for the split is that “we could not find a commercial agreement that worked for both parties moving forward and mutually agreed to part ways.”
What's in store for Prison Architect 2 now?
Double Eleven is departing from the Prison Architect project. The developers teamed up with Paradox Interactive during the console port when Introversion Software sold the rights to Paradox in 2019 and have been actively working on Prison Architect 2 over the last few years.
Kokku is taking over the development of Prison Architect 2 in the run-up to its planned launch on the 3rd September, it’s been working on Prison Architect 2 since the autumn of last year with support from Double Eleven.
“After talking to multiple studios, Kokku was found to be the best fit for the game going forward, as they are veterans in the gaming industry and also long-time fans of Prison Architect.” said Paradox in the statement in regards to Kokku heading up development.
Kokku mostly handles asset creation with titles such as Horizon Forbidden West and helped port over the console versions of The Forgotten City and Untold Tales.
“To prepare for the transition, Paradox, Kokku, and Double Eleven have had many conversations over the past few months on the vision for Prison Architect 2, the many possibilities offered by 3D, and the features that could be added to the game in the future,” said Paradox.
“This transition has been a smooth experience for us all, as we share a common long-term vision of Prison Architect 2. We want to build the game’s future with you, the players, and we will continue looking at our Forum’s suggestion board when deciding our focus post-release.”
Gaz Wright, Game Director at Double Eleven, issued a statement of his own on Reddit, if you want to check this out, just confirming the smooth transition and the work it’s been doing with Kokku.
Here’s the original statement Paradox provided when Prison Architect 2 was delayed, just last month:
While we currently have builds certified on all platforms and are ready to release, some issues regarding memory usage and minimum spec configurations experiencing more failures have emerged. Considering the legacy of Prison Architect, and you - our passionate community, we want to ship the best possible sequel to such a beloved game, without cutting corners to do so.
With the release date getting closer, we carried out further testing on the final build using multiple configurations to verify its stability. These tests result in a MTBF (mean time between failure) report, the method used to get this result is playing the game until a failure arises. A failure can mean a variety of things, for example, a crash, freeze, or other play-halting issues. In this report, we noticed that on specific configurations the game was not hitting our MTBF target, with this being particularly true for minimum specs configurations.
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 will be released for the PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5 on the 3rd of September.
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