Hi everyone,
We're so pleased to see such a great response to Speedy Recovery, lots of you have been sharing your excitement with us on our social channels and it's been wonderful to read through it all!
Today we wanted to delve a little bit deeper into what you'll be doing in the new DLC. So we sat down with Executive Producer, Andy Barton and Principal Game Designer, Joel Atkinson to talk us through the new mechanics. So grab yourself a big ol' packet of the cheesiest gubbins you can find and let's see what they had to say!
Hey guys! Everyone's really excited for the new DLC, so tell us a little bit about what players will be doing in Speedy Recovery.
Andy: Speedy Recovery’s big focus is the introduction of a fleet of unusual Two Point ambulances for players to build, upgrade and dispatch to emergencies around the county. This new style of gameplay gives us lots of new ways to change the way you play Two Point Hospital and make the game feel more different than ever before. You've got six of these weird and wonderful vehicles to unlock as you play through, all of which are upgradable, and have different strengths and weaknesses for responding to the emergencies of Two Point County in different ways.
As well as dispatching your fleet of ambulances to these emergencies, you’ll also be competing against rival hospitals to get your ambulances to the emergencies first! A key part of the game is saving the most patients compared to these rivals to beat them in our new leaderboard feature.
And then for fans of normal Two Point Hospital gameplay, you’ll still be designing, building and tweaking Hospitals in 3 new locations, dealing with new visual illnesses and building new treatment machines for them.
It's quite a big change from our past DLCs, what was the inspiration for it?
Joel: Responding to emergencies with ambulances has been on our own wishlist for a long while, and we've seen a lot of awesome ideas from the community on how they think ambulances could fit in the game. So the inspiration is really a nice mix of player feedback, as well as ideas we've wanted to implement too. We're quite excited for players to get their hands on it as we know they often prefer it when a DLC offers a brand new experience that changes the way they approach a level, and that's exactly what Speedy Recovery does.
Andy: When we started working on Speedy Recovery our big goal was; how do we change the way players play the game and make this DLC feel different to all of the previous ones we’ve released? By using both the new ambulance gameplay and the new Two Two Point Nav dispatch system we think we’ve got something new for people to play that feels very different and gives everyone a really unique experience.
How did we go from Ambulances to... an Airloovator and such?
Andy: Right from the start of the development process, we knew we wanted lots of ambulances for the player to use and of course we wanted them all to look suitably Two-Pointy and different to what anyone would expect from an ambulance. The art and design team did a great job of concepting loads of ideas which blew us away when we first saw them.
Joel: We could have given players a bunch of conventional looking cars, vans, and helicopters, and I’m sure that would have worked out well enough, but it wouldn’t have been very Two Pointy of us.
Each ambulance was an opportunity to be sillier than the last, and in turn an opportunity to offer players different strategic options. We narrowed down the list of vehicles Gretchen would adapt to the ones we thought were the funniest and had the most interesting gameplay hooks.
The Airloovator, for example, adapted from a portaloo into an air ambulance by way of exotic “balloon” technology makes up for its single-occupant patient capacity and poor diagnostic facilities with unmatched speed. That’s the inverse of the adapted clown car, Pantomobile, which can clear every patient from an emergency at once but takes its sweet time to get there. So it's up to the player to decide which ambulance is best to send to specific emergencies.
How does managing an ambulance fleet change the way players will experience the game?
Joel: There’s a couple of big things that you'll be doing differently. Firstly, ambulances will provide a large portion of your patients and these patients don’t need to visit a reception or a GP. The choices you make in what ambulances to populate your fleet with will also affect the cadence of these arrivals, the level to which they are initially diagnosed, and the demands on your staff’s time (someone has to drive them!), so you’ll find yourself structuring your hospitals very differently.
Secondly, you’re not the only ambulance dispatch business in town, and you’ll be racing rivals like Bungle Tech and Jumbo MegaCorp to collect and cure patients from each region in order to beat them on the Health Ministry’s emergency league tables, so identifying and exploiting the weaknesses of your rivals’ fleet of ambulances as you prioritise emergencies and choose ambulances to assign is essential.
Andy: Normally in Two Point Hospital you’re very focused on laying out your diagnosis and treatment rooms to make an efficient and smoothly run Hospital. Right from the start of Speedy Recovery, we take you outside of the Hospital to build your first ambulance in the new garage. This sets the tone for how you'll be spending more and more time not looking at your Hospital but looking outside of the buildings to your staff running to hop into ambulances and to the flow of patients coming back from each emergency. So something you'll first notice is how the play space of the game has increased and how you're spending much more time moving around and looking around the parts of the level that they might have previously ignored.
As you start to get deeper into a level you’ll be spending more time thinking about your whole fleet of ambulances and strategically deploying them using the Two Two Point Nav system to the emergencies that keep popping up. The experience of moving from ambulance bays to Nav screen to Hospital layout, makes the whole game flow differently.
This coupled with the need to train staff in Driving & Flying and the treatment of our new illnesses means that the experience of the game feels really refreshing to play.
What sort of locations will players be heading to this time?
Andy: We have three new levels in this DLC, revisiting some favourite locations around Two Point County but reimagined to be purpose built to work with our new ambulance gameplay.
The first level, Ailing, is set in the urban heart of Two Point County, right next to Croquembouche. You’ll be taken to a new location in one of our main cities and learn the basics of Ambulance strategy in an emergency packed urban jungle.
The second level, Betts Shore, takes the player back to Pebberley Island to enjoy the beautiful tropical island but in a windswept storm with emergencies both on land and on the ocean.
The third level, Pointy Pass, visits the cold mountainous North of the County to develop a Hospital which only brings new patients in from emergencies and with no-walks in.
Will we be seeing any new illnesses alongside the new locations?
Andy: Definitely! We love adding new illnesses to Two Point Hospital and haven’t just spent our creative energies on new silly ambulances.
Joel: There’s 19 new illnesses including 6 visual, and 3 brand new treatment rooms. The new rooms work a bit like the Ward in that you can place multiple machines to treat lots of patients at once as long as you have enough doctors to staff them, which helps a lot if you’re delivering large numbers of patients at once with a fleet of high capacity ambulances.
We also finally named a meteorological illness “Under The Weather”. Honestly I don’t know how we left that pun on the table for so long and can only offer my sincerest apologies.
You've played A LOT of Speedy Recovery, what's your favourite feature?
Joel: I love seeing which emergencies the rival organisations are dispatching to and sending faster ambulances there to steal their patients and waste their time. You feel like you're sabotaging them, you know, getting them back after all the trouble they've caused your hospitals in the past.
Andy: At the moment I love experimenting with my fleet of ambulances and using different ones for different situations and emergencies. When we started the DLC I hoped there be an extra layer of strategy added to the game and I think we’ve landed that goal well to give players a challenge in learning which ambulances should be used when. Do I go for a cheeky one patient pickup with my Airloovator to beat a rival to the last available patient or do I look to send my slow Pantomobile to do an early rescue at a big new emergency?
So there you have it! A brand new, unique experience for everyone to look forward to. We can't wait for you to try out these awesome new gameplay mechanics and start sending your ambulance fleet across the county. What do you think of everything you've heard so far? Let us know in the comments!
Two Point Hospital: Speedy Recovery is coming to Steam and Windows Store on 15th March 2022, you can pre-purchase now for a 10% discount!