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Two Point Hospital - Theme Hospital spiritual successor

LESS T_T

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Codex 2014
http://www.pcgamer.com/world-exclus...n-stage-at-the-pc-gamer-weekender-next-month/

World exclusive gameplay of Two Point Hospital will be shown on-stage at the PC Gamer Weekender next month
Use the code PCG to save 20% when you pre-order tickets for our London-based event.


Two Point Hospital got a huge response when it was announced earlier this month. A modern spiritual successor to Theme Hospital is exactly what fans of the old Bullfrog games are looking for—and attendees of the PC Gamer Weekender on February 17 and 18 will be the first to see more of the game. Two Point Studios will take to the Developer Stage on the Saturday at 11AM to show off loads of previously unseen footage of the game, including a world exclusive gameplay reveal of a new in-game illness.

Just in case that sounds serious, it's worth pointing out that existing illnesses in the game include having a lightbulb for a head ('lightheadedness'), evoking the diseases of the Bullfrog classic. Two Point co-founders Mark Webley and Gary Carr will be hosted by community manager Lauran Carter at the Weekender, and they'll discuss the inception of the studio from just an idea to their eventual deal with Sega to make Two Point Hospital. Those at the show will learn much more about one of the year's most exciting games.

You can get tickets for the show here. You'll be able to play some of the best new and upcoming games at the Weekender, plus attend talks presented by some of the biggest developers on PC and much more. Ticket prices start at £12.99, and you can save 20% with the discount code PCG.
 

Norfleet

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Joined
Jun 3, 2005
Messages
12,250
I wonder why after all this years noone made a copy of Theme Hospital.

the same reason why no one made a good copy of MOO 2, RCT,TTD and Dungeon Keeper - no talent.
He's not saying that nobody made a GOOD copy, though. People HAVE made copies of all the games you listed. They were just bad. It's that nobody seems to have made a copy of Theme Hospital, PERIOD.
 

Zednick

Educated
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Apr 19, 2017
Messages
40
And here's the footage. Gameplay starts at about 3:11.

 
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Space Satan

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Looks and feels just like old Theme Hospital. i would rather see them fix the routine when youu have established hospital and had to face problems with shit like radiators bioiling too hard or get your rating up to win the mission. That was annoying because ratings raise SLOW
 

Dexter

Arcane
Joined
Mar 31, 2011
Messages
15,655
I'ma get it, but it seems a bit... off? Too clinical and polished? I remember the first one being more rough and zany with some of the employees looking like cartoonish characters with those googly eyes and big heads and hobos, this one looks like one of those polished mobile games, also no more dirt and janitorial stuff?
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/...itals-take-on-theme-hospital-hasnt-aged-a-day

Two Point Hospital proves that Theme Hospital's formula hasn't aged a day
A reward for your patients.


The tinny music begins, the isometric hospital outline pops up on screen. Your hospital doesn't have any rooms yet, let alone patients, but you need a reception desk. It's angular, purple. You place it by the sliding glass front doors of the hospital lobby, ready for the first people to file in. Now you'll need a receptionist, maybe a potted plant or two. Benches, of course - I like constructing two neat rows, back to back. And so it's on to hiring doctors, building a GP's Office and a Pharmacy, hiring a nurse to staff that. A handyman to water those plants. A vending machine. So begins every game of Theme Hospital - and so begins Two Point Hospital, as well.

If anyone was going to make a successor to Theme Hospital, then why not the team behind the original? Led by Bullfrog and later Lionhead veterans Mark Webley and Gary Carr, startup Two Point Studios has - to this Theme Hospital fan - done something remarkable: made a game which feels instantly familiar, 21 years on. Of course, it has the visual updates you'd expect - those rooms you're building within your hospital drop and plop into place, their walls gently rippling as you set them down (and yes, you can finally edit them on the fly, and make their floorplans other shapes than rectangular), your patients and staff are now little 3D people, and you can see how they're thinking and feeling via all sorts of colourful overlays. But the resemblance to Two Point Hospital's source material is astonishing - right down to those angular reception desks.

"I don't think we wanted to reskin [the original] and make an HD version," Webley says to me. "The character trait system, how you develop people, is designed to make you care about the staff and make them memorable," he adds, suggesting one particular new feature. It's an admirable idea, though there's no time in the hour-long demo I played to linger and really find out if it makes an impression. Just like in Theme Hospital, your first scenario in Two Point Hospital is a basic facility with the ability to cater to and cure only a handful of comedy ailments. Still, the pressure is immediately on to keep the whole enterprise profitable, ensure staff remain happy and, of course, try and keep patients alive. The initial level I played takes you through the basics of managing your hospital simulation and concentrates on just a couple of diseases only. Light Headedness, for example, is this game's version of Bloaty-Head Syndrome. You'll need to build a De-Lux machine to unscrew a Light Headed patient's lightbulb head and twist their real one back on. And again, just like in Theme Hospital, there's a Pharmacy and Ward to build and cure other ailments.

Visual polish aside, the differences between Two Point Hospital and its predecessor are few and far between in this early slice. Staff training isn't yet available, and there's no time to get to know hospital staff. Most of all, there's no way to try out Two Point Hospital's big new addition - the ability to revisit and keep managing your previous hospital projects once you have moved up and on. In the original game, you were stuck restarting everything from scratch every few hours as you were promoted and promptly given harder projects to pursue. In Two Point Hospital, all of your hospitals are still accessible, nestled on a world map which covers the fictional Two Point County. Each location has a three-star rating attached to it - and you'll need to revisit and keep working on multiple hospitals over time to win this.

"Maybe you get the first two stars in a hospital and start struggling, because there are people with illnesses coming in which you can't diagnose," lead designer Ben Huskins, another Lionhead veteran, tells me. "Later on you'll get new tech and be able to. And in fact at the start you can't train people, but when you get to the point you earn your training license you can do that, go back and promote them." The idea of setting the game over a particular area goes further than that, too. It's a location Two Point Studios wants to revisit again, in future games. "I really like the idea of establishing a world with interesting characters, recurring people," Huskins continues. "And even if we never made another game, it makes this more interesting to build into a place with existing people, places." Listen to the hospital radio and you'll hear mention of goings on around the county. Sometimes this will reflect events at your hospital - such as when you have to deal with a sudden major incident - and other times it will be when a local celebrity is in town. Later, they may appear at your hospital, too. It's a way of tying together events which - yes, you guessed it - could also happen in Theme Hospital, so that they now feel part of a more cohesive world.

When you have a game as beloved as Theme Hospital then perhaps there's little need to stray from the formula. But it's still a surprise, to me, to find how closely the formula has been applied. Two Point Studios even tried to hunt down Theme Hospital's original voice artist for the hospital PA ("The hospital administrator is cheating..."), such is their commitment to recreating the original experience. Is it a good thing? As a Theme Hospital fan, I think so - I felt immediately at home amongst the colourful overlays and menus, the game's deeper systems hiding just underneath. I'm intrigued to see how managing multiple hospital simulations on the fly brings to the experience. More, I'm intrigued what 2018 makes of this new Theme Hospital, that brilliant, barmy, game I remember from 1997.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.pcgamer.com/two-point-h...g-the-exact-game-they-want-with-a-few-twists/

Two Point Hospital hands-on: Theme Hospital fans are getting the exact game they want
Manage an entire healthcare organisation in this simulation game from former Bullfrog and Lionhead staff

g3khyqHyXGRgrj9P9swisc-320-80.jpg


My hour with the first level of Two Point Hospital is comforting, more than anything else. Like playing Cities Skylines, or any other modern interpretation of a management sim that hasn't been treated too well in recent years, it's nice to immediately know how to play a game like this then gradually learn the ways it differs.

In Two Point Hospital's case, it's mostly how the structure has changed from Theme Hospital. Instead of building up a hospital, hitting the criteria to beat the level and abandoning it for the next one as per its Bullfrog predecessor, Two Point Hospital has you managing a whole healthcare organisation, comprising of many different hospitals.

For each one, you have a scoring criteria described to me as Overcooked-like—you earn stars depending on the performance of the hospital. One star represents basic completion, and from there you can move on to the next hospital, if you want. You can also complete bonus objectives to unlock two more stars, though. In my demo, these extra stars were earned by making a certain amount of money, curing a set number of patients and levelling up my hospital, which I found simple enough. What these bonus objectives are will vary depending on the hospital's location, however.

"We try and get you to focus on different things in each hospital," says lead designer Ben Huskins. "This is a research hospital, here's a teaching hospital, this one's all focused on hygiene levels and making sure you pass all your health inspections." You might also inherit a hospital that's in a terrible state, where sorting out its problems will be the main objective. An industrial, run-down area might make it hard to hire decent staff, forcing you to train some up. A hot area could have bad hygiene, so you'll need to keep the place cool. If you're struggling to get two or three stars, whatever you research in subsequent hospitals will carry across to your entire healthcare organisation, so you can revisit tricky levels at a later point in the game. The idea is the game can be non-linear, if you want to play it that way.

"As well as being able to keep hold of all your hospitals and revisit them, it's good to have certain things that carry across your whole career as a hospital administrator, and research is one of those things. When you do some research in a hospital, those research points that you're earning, that you make to a research project, that carries across between your hospitals.

"For example, researching an upgrade for your X-ray machine," Huskins says. "Let's say it's hospital four you visit. You might only get halfway through researching that project, but you can jump to one of your other hospitals and think, 'you know what? I'm going to continue that work here'. Because it's tracked at the organisation level, you continue where you left off in the previous hospital, and so you can then finish off that project in that hospital. Now I've got that upgrade for my X-ray machine, I can apply that to any of my machines in any of my hospitals. We like that idea that these discoveries you're making through research, you can start to use them in all of your hospitals, and maybe it helps you get that third star you were struggling with in that earlier hospital."

The other key thing here for me is underlining the sense of player ownership for a hospital. These management sims are ultimately about making your operation run like clockwork, but I'm sure many players, like me, enjoy the act of creating something just as much, and would appreciate the opportunity to revisit their hospitals in a kind of sandbox mode even when they've got those three stars.

"I think one of the things we learned over the last 20-odd years from the games we've made—The Movies, Fable, playing other people's games, and also looking back at what people said they like about Theme Hospital—it just varies," says Two Point Studios co-founder Mark Webley. "Some people really enjoyed making aesthetically pleasing reception areas. Some people just want to be super efficient and make as much money and they really don't care what it looks like, and they'll have rooms right next to each other to maximise walk times. People play differently."

Ward gaming

The opening moments of a Two Point Hospital game feel pretty similar to Theme Hospital. I build a reception desk, a GP's office and a pharmacy. I hire a few doctors and nurses to staff them. I drop in some waiting benches for my incoming patients, plus a drinks machine. From there, I add another GP's office, another pharmacy and a staff room with a comfy chairs and a dartboard. In each room, you'll be required to place certain objects depending on what the room's function is, but you can then spend extra money to add little niceties when you've finished the essentials.

"It's fine at the start of the game to build quite a utilitarian room," Huskins says. "It's the minimum size and has the required items in it. As you progress, we want people to start making a slightly bigger room, a more interesting shape, start putting in things like windows, a plant and put a picture on the wall. Add that little medical cabinet, the rug, that sort of thing, and start to build a more interesting room that'll keep the staff happier and the patients happier as well."

All the objects you place in Two Point Hospital will snap to a grid by default, which lets you build a hospital in almost no time at all. One button, though, lets you place furniture and other objects with lovely, satisfying precision: you can put your benches so close together that they'll take up less overall space, and personalise the placement of items throughout your hospitals.

I then build a General Diagnosis for diagnosing new illnesses, and a De Luxe clinic for curing lightheadedness—namely, when patients have lightbulbs for heads, one of the game's fictional illnesses. When the bins need emptying, I hire a janitor. When people start dying in the corridors and ghosts haunt the place, I hire a more expensive janitor who specialises in capturing ghosts (the spirits of which can ominously be used for research later). As ever, the challenge is how you use the space for the optimum results. But I spend plenty of time just zooming in on the people wandering through my hospital to see what they're up to. There are no oceans of vomit in this hospital, Theme Hospital fans, but I'm assured we can expect puddles of sick from some of the game's other diseases.

The animations are beautifully intricate: my favourite is the Ghostbusters-esque way that my janitor hoovers up the spirits of the dead in my hospital, but I also love how lightheadedness is cured by unscrewing the giant lightbulb on a patient's body and disposing of it. Zooming in and seeing this sort of granular detail makes your hospital and the people within it feel more real. This is clearly where 21 years of progress make a huge difference to the quality of the game. The rounded faces of the characters make me think of '90s claymation in a good way. I like that Two Point County is a warm-feeling world, going in the opposite direction to the sort of cheap-looking character designs often associated with the hellscape of F2P mobile clones.

The sense of humour is spot-on for me, too, and pretty similar to the tone of Theme Hospital. There's a few jokes I enjoyed from the game's radio: one fictional song is called 'Nice-Smelling Face', which is a bit Spinal Tap, and there's a reference to Looper as the DJ explains how his arm just vanished, possibly as a result of the actions of his future self. Crucially, it's not too tryhard and there's not too much of it, which is often the case with in-game radio stations that attempt comedy.

It's a county radio station, rather than a hospital-only one. Huskins explains why. "Two Point Radio station is this great way of just giving you a sense of what's happening in the wider world, and giving you little hints at things you'll encounter later in the game, and characters that you'll encounter at some point, places you'll end up going to. So that was a big part of it as well: giving you a flavour of the world you're based in." The radio will also occasionally react to what happens in your game.

There's a secondary currency that lets you unlock new items to buy for your hospitals. After I'd got my hospital up to three stars and had cash to burn, I added two Sega arcade machines which show a little clip of Sonic running on them when you zoom in, as well as a newsagents and an energy drinks-specific machine, as an ode to a terrible past habit of mine. With mod support planned for shortly after launch, I'd like to see what other interesting objects people will put in the game to help you personalise your hospitals, and most importantly, if someone can swap Sonic on those arcade machines for Dr Robotnik's Mean Bean Machine. I'd also like to hire Dr Knuckles as a GP.

While there are many simulated elements in the game, the UI deliberately keeps it nice and simple. It's easy for hardcore players to access the stats of their staff and finances, but also simple for new players to spring up a working hospital in no time. Crucially, while it does feel a lot like Theme Hospital to me when it comes to the basics of managing a hospital, the dynamic of a larger healthcare organisation could be a very different challenge—though naturally I don't get a sense of it in this one-level demo.

This opening experience, though, will give Theme Hospital fans exactly what they want. That is, a management sim that starts steady, gradually escalates and reminds you of a game you used to love—a comforting experience.
 

Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2018/05/09/two-point-hospital-preview/

Theme Hospital successor Two Point Hospital is very much 1997 wearing 2018’s clothes

two-point-hospital-4-620x330.jpg


The main thing I thought as I began to play Two Point Hospital, spiritual sequel to 90s medical management hit Theme Hospital, is that I barely had to think at all. Some alchemy of 90s sim game muscle memory and slick, thoroughly 21st century building assists meant I hit the ground running, immediately in my happy place of dragging out room sizes, rotating machinery and the time-honored architectural Tetris of making all this fit inside a finite space. It felt good – but how much of this was this the placebo effect of nostalgia?

Developers Two Point Studios – led by original Theme Park alumni Mark Webley and Gary Carr – have been at pains to argue that Two Point Hospital is not a straight-up 2018 version of the 1997 hospital design and management simulation. Based on my hour-and-a-bit with the game’s introductory level, I’m not ready to endorse this sentiment: that opening salvo is almost exactly what you’d probably picture if someone said ‘Theme Hospital remade today.’

Which is to say, the gradual creation of a – hopefully – lucrative private hospital, with an ever-growing sprawl of specialist rooms to treat an ever-growing array of fictional ailments, with all the hiring, spending and agonising about where to place toilets, vending machines and reception desks that entails. It’s as natural as breathing and as familiar as Drs Greene, Ross and Carter to any PC gaming child of the 90s.

two-point-hospital-3-620x349.jpg


Clearly, memory plays its tricks, and though concepts and mechanics remain, Two Point isn’t stranded in the era of Noah Wyle when it comes to presentation and interface. The blocky smudge of 97 wouldn’t hold up well against Two Point’s crisp cartoon style and deftly-animated sense of bustle. More importantly, there’s pretty much every quality of life improvement you might care to mention – grids snapping chummily into place, objects rotating to align with walls and the casual ease of mouse-based scrolling, zooming and rotating. This is what I mean when I talk about hitting the ground running: Two Point understands what we need in 2018.

I ran into remarkably little downtime, too – outside of the brief but not too brief tutorial, it didn’t seize the controls away from me or parachute cutscenes over my hive of construction, hiring and grumbling patients. Scene-setting is handled by intercom announcements and an in-game local radio, which flit between missives about successes or calamities within your hospital, foreshadowing later events such as outbreaks or visiting celebrities, and outright comedy.

Your feelings about the latter is probably going to depend on your gut reaction to a phrase like “classic British comedy”, I imagine. There’s an ongoing theme of sardonic gags about how patients are a massive nuisance who barely deserve basic human sympathy, but it’s more Hi-De-Hi than it is edgy. The comedy diseases, meanwhile, could probably slot comfortably into an episode of Wallace & Gromit – gentle wordplay and sight gag amusement rather than lightning wit as such. In fairness, the devs are keeping most of these under wraps for the time being, so my North Star for the illness gags remains the already-revealed ‘Lightheadedness’, in which affected patients have an actual lightbulb for a bonce.

two-point-hospital-1-620x330.jpg


Again, it’s all very in keeping with the eyebrow-waggling cheer of the original Theme Hospital – anyone hoping for a vicious laceration of health insurance, pharma price-fixing and privatisation should probably look elsewhere. Your old mate Captain Grim here doesn’t have the greatest tolerance for the broader end of the comedy scale, but I’m happy to say that the ceaseless spray of gags didn’t actively annoy me. Whether that’ll still be the case eight hours on, I can’t say.

What I can is that I have an answer to the most immediate litmus test, which is whether or not I wanted to keep playing when my time was up. It’s a definite yes: comfort food this may be, but it didn’t come across as overtly old-fashioned, and under-the-hood UI and UX skilfulness made the raw act of building wards, offices and staff rooms feel fast, fluid and fresh.

My only slight reservation – which could well be corrected by more time getting to know the financial management screens – was that it didn’t seem as straightforward to identify choke points and shortfalls as it did to build a room full of silly medical machines, and that the solution to most problems seemed to be “build more copies of room x,y, or z.” I’m hopeful that latter will ease as later levels introduce more diseases, more remixes of the core ‘make a lot of people better!’ scenario, and with ’em more of a sense of picking the right tool for the right job. The devs also told me that there’ll be options to make your hospital specialise in certain treatments, which introduces of a meta-layer of selling and marketing your own drugs and services to further increase the flow of pharmaceutical lucre.

two-point-hospital-2-620x330.jpg


As I say, I didn’t detect too much of the wonder-drug known as The New pumping through Two Point Hospital’s veins, but it’s that treatment specialisation/mercenary monetisation that gave me the strongest hint that it might ultimately find its own identity. Even if it doesn’t, I’m not convinced it particularly needs to. Management sims have found their way back into the PC mainstream in various more experimental or ambitious ways lately – look to Factorio or Frostpunk – but there remains a surprisingly large hole with a sign next to it reading ‘Bullfrog-style charm and cartoonishness.’ Two Point Hospital would seem to be picking up that baton almost effortlessly.

We’ll have more on Two Point Hospital, including some footage and dev interviews, tomorrow. The game’s due for release later this year.
 

Stefan Vujovic

Educated
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Feb 6, 2013
Messages
93
I am a Bullfrog child. I started PC gaming around the time when Syndicate was released. And then came Theme Park which was my favorite game of all time until the year of 1997. My oh my what a year to be a gamer, my top 10 list would probably be composed mostly of games from that time period (Theme Hospital / Dungeon Keeper, Fallout, FFVII, Castlevania SOTN, Blood, Total Annihilation, AOE, Myth TFL, Quake 2, Yoshi Story). Watching this videos it seems like they finally realized what the fans want from their favorite game remakes. Update the graphics, add more stuff to build / do, and don't touch the game play ( Since we don't give a fuck about your re-imagination of the old classic which you probably hated but was forced to remake). Am super hyped for this one and probably my most anticipated game of 2018.
kgwX5J

0TNxIa2

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Infinitron

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Codex Year of the Donut Serpent in the Staglands Dead State Divinity: Original Sin Project: Eternity Torment: Tides of Numenera Wasteland 2 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2 A Beautifully Desolate Campaign Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire Pathfinder: Kingmaker Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture I helped put crap in Monomyth


Coming August 30th.
 

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