- No way to ban certain prisoners from performing certain/any jobs, for instance known tunnelers from working in the workshop, or known drug addicts from cleaning. Prisoners can simply steal back any contraband they are caught with because you can never prevent them from going back somewhere they have proven themselves untrustworthy to be in.
- Bookshelves are still decorative even after the library was added to the game!
- Lights remain on during Sleep time even though the tooltip says they go out.
- Prisoners will never call hits on anyone who is not a Snitch, Ex Law Enforcement, or Ex Prison Guard, even though the mechanic for doing so and detecting such exists.
- Barring only certain security levels from areas of the prison.
- Any way for prisoners to escape your prison, at all, except through tunneling. No fence climbing, no sneaking out in the night with stolen keys, no spontaneous cell block uprisings.
- Something being punishable, or the severity of the punishment, has no impact on a prisoner's decision to do it.
- Being punished for something in the past has no impact on a prisoner's decision to do it again.
- No acknowledgement by prisoners of other prisoners in any way except as valid targets for a destructive rampage, except through Gangs. No prisoner relationships, interaction, or cliques.
- No way to downgrade prisoners' security level through good behavior. Only possible as punishment for something (seriously, what?!).
- No way to assign cells/blocks specifically to separate certain prisoners from each other, except by security level.
- No mechanic preventing guards from being spawned wherever they are needed at that moment.
These are just the things that one would expect to happen based on the systems already in the game. You may as well have no punishment for anything your prisoners do because it will not stop them from doing it again as soon as they get out of solitary. The game has hints that you should pay attention to individual prisoners and makes a token effort to encourage micromanaging with Protective Custody, but lacks any sort of complexity to encourage it beyond prisoner intake because it doesn't matter. Prisoners will not fight with each other based on personal grudges. They will not band together in little groups to work to escape, protect each other, or target their enemies (of which they have none). You may as well not even bother preventing escape tunnels because you can simply drop a load of armed guards on top of them as soon as they pop out of their tunnel. Most of the gameplay in Prison Architect is merely an illusion to fool journalists who do not have time to play it any other way than expected, and wears thin on gamers who try unorthodox prison designs. The most compelling aspect of Prison Architect to most people is not the simulation of prison life, or the stories that the game generates, or the minute lives of each prisoner. It is creating a well-oiled machine that shunts prisoners from their cells to their activities and then back, in as elegant a design as possible. Arguably, this plays into the "Architect" part of the game that's right in the name, but Prison Architect bills itself as more than just a building game, or else it wouldn't give you control over things like parole cutoffs, punishment severity, security level reassignment, and all the other things that are firmly in the category of Warden. You would just design a prison and then watch it as it runs, unable to make any changes.
Introversion has said that they want Prison Architect to be the kind of classic simulator game that is still played 10 years down the line, but the sort of attention to detail inherent to good building games is completely absent from Prison Architect. I've put 100 hours into it, and already I can see the flaws in the stonework and the missing bricks. The idea that the devs have completely given up on adding any of this to the game is very discouraging to my continued playtime, more than anything. When I played during the alpha, I enjoyed it because I thought that anything I thought was lacking might be added in a future build. Now you have decided you are done, and I'm willing to bet you haven't implemented even half of the things mentioned in the Game Bible pages. I guess you are as concerned with your Bible as a modern Christian! I understand that the big names behind Introversion want to move on and create new things, but to completely cut off new features from Prison Architect seems irresponsible. Do you not want to let an independent team work on the title because you want to maintain complete creative control over the project? How do you reconcile that? You can't have your cake and eat it too, and you are doing a disservice to your players.