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Author Topic: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital  (Read 3322 times)

dennislp3

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Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« on: November 01, 2018, 07:58:05 am »

Couldn't find a post for this game (surprisingly) but Project Hospital just went full release.

Link to the developers page: http://oxymoron.games/projecthospital/
Link to Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/868360/Project_Hospital/

I loved Theme Hospital back in the day but was never a fan of the cartoon aesthetic. This one has real equipment and diagnoses. It is a lot more complex in regards to room types, equipment, and medical procedures.

It has a few annoying bugs but I have not run into anything gamebreaking or critical yet. I expect they will patch any of the critical bugs within a few days.

Screenshots so you have an idea what it looks like!
Spoiler (click to show/hide)

Full list of 235 conditions in the game:
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
« Last Edit: November 04, 2018, 05:24:06 am by dennislp3 »
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Yoink

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #1 on: November 02, 2018, 12:34:51 am »

I personally liked Theme Hospital's humour for the most part, but it was a bit too over-the-top at times. This looks intriguing!
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dennislp3

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #2 on: November 02, 2018, 01:53:21 am »

Oh I agree...I like the humor too...and given the nature of medical care being dark at times, it makes it much more accessable and game friendly to be silly and have fun with it.

That being said I tend to prefer more in depth simulations and realism for games like this. This one keeps me much more interested for longer than Theme Hospital has in the past. I am finding myself playing this for a long time without realizing it...always a good sign. I also love the pure control you have over everything...very Sims like building with tons of items (and prefab rooms you can make as we as prefabs that are there by default when you don't want to fiddle everything).
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #3 on: November 02, 2018, 02:53:50 am »

I'm skeptical about the "realism" by default. I think you can't really make a "realistic" game about hospitals and keep it interesting (much like you can't make a realistic medical drama)
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Radsoc

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #4 on: November 02, 2018, 06:32:49 am »

Well, that remains to be seen, but probably the realism part is about patient flows.
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #5 on: November 02, 2018, 06:38:11 am »

I doubt that one as well.  :P
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dennislp3

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #6 on: November 02, 2018, 09:10:08 am »

I'm skeptical about the "realism" by default. I think you can't really make a "realistic" game about hospitals and keep it interesting (much like you can't make a realistic medical drama)

Realism is on a scale...not an absolute. It plays very similar to Theme hospital...it's almost like comparing Gnomoria to DF or something like that...same flavor of game, same general game loop, one is just more detailed than the other.

Most of the realism is based on the fact that there is real symptoms, illnesses, and treatments where Theme Hospital has you popping peoples balloon heads and whatever else. Them Hospital was not a great game because it had cartoon graphics and lots of humor (those didn't necessarily hurt it of course) but rather it was good because it was a good game at its core mechanic wise.
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #7 on: November 02, 2018, 10:36:33 am »

Quote
real symptoms, illnesses, and treatments

I 'unno... my personal POV is that a little realism can be worse than no realism. I guess it's like the uncanny valley. I think I find ... "suspension of disbelief"? a bit harder when something is tried to be passed off as realistic when it's just "loosely inspired by reality" or even worse, something thst the author clearly misunderstood, than when it's delliberatedly unrealistic. For instance, I find it more passable when, say, superman recovers from a kryptonite bullet in a day, than when in a medical drama a main character gets diagnosed with herpetic encephalytis  as the mystery disease of the day, and is just given acyclovir tablets and told to take a week off.
Likewise, I feel I'd probably endure better Theme Hospital's fictional diseases than a flawed implementation of a real disease.


Though TBH while I was writing this I realized that part of the problem is that when I'm playing games I simply don't want to deal with any of this shit :P  I spend enough time at hospital, when I get home and log onto my PC I usually want to... kill orcs, for a change, or whatever. If I wanted more hospital stuff I'd have stayed at work
« Last Edit: November 02, 2018, 10:58:28 am by ChairmanPoo »
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Uristides

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #8 on: November 02, 2018, 05:32:15 pm »

Does the "realism" entail significantly more complex processes to diagnose and treat diseases and more logistics and budgeting to keep the hospital afloat or does it just mean instead of funny fictional diseases I get some mumbo jumbo about hepatic cells and bacteria with weird latin names? Because while the former definitely interests me the latter alone doesn't mean particularly much.
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BigD145

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #9 on: November 02, 2018, 05:43:11 pm »

You or a doctor chooses diagnosis and treatment to some extent.
Spoiler (click to show/hide)
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dennislp3

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #10 on: November 02, 2018, 11:15:50 pm »

Does the "realism" entail significantly more complex processes to diagnose and treat diseases and more logistics and budgeting to keep the hospital afloat or does it just mean instead of funny fictional diseases I get some mumbo jumbo about hepatic cells and bacteria with weird latin names? Because while the former definitely interests me the latter alone doesn't mean particularly much.

Yes. There are over 200 different diseases/illnesses and they are all made up of different symptoms (between 2 and 10 symptoms per illness that I have seen so far, also a ton of different symptoms) and there are literally dozens of different tests. Just the GPs office alone can run about 6 tests and if you have a STAT lab you can run about a dozen. Add in MRIs, CAT scans, X rays etc it gets a lot more complex. A cool thing about this is that you can also diagnose and treat patients yourself (by choosing what tests you give or treatments you give) so it can be much more involved if you want to do that.

When it comes to emergencies they are also handled in a much more "fun" way (in my mind). In TH Emergencies were simply a large amount of people with X illness walking in at once which essentially tested your capacity and maybe your doctors speed. In this game when there is an emergency (either from ambulances or from a patient collapsing in your hospital) they will be taken to the trauma department and then you have to diagnose and treat them as quick as you can; I find the player control system of treating them yourself makes this 100x better because its actually thrilling and when you fail or succeed its a lot more impactful. After the trauma room where they are stabilized you can put them in an ICU room and do more tests, send them to surgery, send them to another hospital if you can't or don't want to treat them etc. Unlike in TH, finding the real issue may be a lot more difficult in some cases...the emergencies are usually just stuff like "got in a car crash" and they may have a broken bone or they could have full on internal bleeding...but you won't know until you run the right tests (having a good doctor helps as interns and lower grade doctors can misdiagnose them or completely miss a symptom and make it much worse).

Budgeting and balancing your expenses is also a lot more involved than TH. One of my biggest issues with TH was that you could just plop a handful of rooms. Get yourself a nice profit margin...and....that's it. No real challenge once you learned the right "formula". This game has been much harder to find the "formula" to just make it work with no challenge. You also get your patients from different insurance companies so you more or less can filter and choose what types of patients you might get if you want to which can play into your budgeting. Employee wages are a big consideration especially at the start.

On a final note, this game also does a wonderful job of balancing micro vs macro management. You can literally place every object like the sims or you can just plop premade rooms (you can also make your own prefab rooms). You can let your doctors handle patients or you can handle them yourself. You can control what types of patients you get (to a degree) which allows you to take as many people and types of issues as you want or you can just run a little clinic and tweak it all day to your hearts content etc.

So long story short, no, it is not just a change of names but rather a much more nuanced system that is a lot more hands on for the player. Where in TH you could plop rooms down and essentially turn the game into a screensaver, that has not been an issue with this game so far.
« Last Edit: November 03, 2018, 12:03:38 am by dennislp3 »
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Zangi

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #11 on: November 07, 2018, 01:32:48 pm »

Jumped into sandbox, you'll go bankrupt if you exclusively use prefabs. 
Though I only used biggest versions of prefabs, cause bigger is obviously better. 
Havn't really got in too far.
Interns are slow little bastards and keep on asking you to pick diagnosis stuff for them.  Maybe chief doctor has to be unassigned to help around.
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ChairmanPoo

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #12 on: November 07, 2018, 02:15:22 pm »

Quote
Interns are slow little bastards and keep on asking you to pick diagnosis stuff for them.
Shit, maybe this game is realistic after all.

Do they also lie to you hoping to get you to go along with whatever bullshit they have thought up?
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Zangi

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #13 on: November 08, 2018, 02:55:46 pm »

Hmm... I just ended up ignoring those intern problems.  They eventually make a decision on their own.

Further playing, it seems that there isn't much room for actually training interns, like attaching them to a more senior and get some experience and hopefully speeding things along, rather then being a dunce.
Only thing is on the job training, which means realistically you can only train them in limited specializations.

They are outright useless outside the first department, since if you throw interns in the diagnoses jobs of other departments, they lose many diagnosis/treatment options and you'll have to manually step in and move the patient to another doctor, but they actually go to the queue system and usually go to someone different or even back to the intern.

Pro-Tip: Don't get into hospitalization until you've built up a warchest.
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Yolan

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Re: Project Hospital: Realism based Theme Hospital
« Reply #14 on: November 10, 2018, 06:26:09 am »

Looks pretty neat, but still a little undercooked? Seem likely that the devs will improve / add features / fix bugs over the following year or so?
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