Neighbors: Suburban Warfare Interview – “How can we make these people hate each other?”

Danish studio Invisible Walls has been creating games for over a decade. In 2017, the team released Aporia: Beyond The Valley, a first-person walking simulator that began as a student project at Aalborg University. First Class Trouble was launched a few years later, a social deduction game reminiscent of Among Us where you work as a team to complete tasks and find out who is a fraud.

While both games received good reviews from critics and players, their success was modest. With their new upcoming project, Neighbors: Suburban Warfare, Invisible Walls wants to try something new. This is a multiplayer game about destroying your opponent's property while defending your own house.

Depending on the character you choose, you'll use vacuum cleaners, frying pans, golf clubs, boxes of fireworks, hammers, slingshots and baseball bats, among many more items to wreak havoc on the enemy team. You also need to improve your house's defenses and set up traps like the video game version of Home Alone to make it difficult for your rivals to break in.

“Taking the social setting of being with your neighbors is something that's very intimate,” explains Invisible Walls CEO and founder David Jean Heldager. “You all have an intimate understanding of what a neighbor is and how you are in society. So, how can we make these people hate each other? Just keep pulling the strings of tension and irritation you have with your neighbors. We see these tensions in our own lives. How can we make it a game?

The game will have voice chat enabled for both teams, and you will be able to talk to your rivals while you battle them. Heldager tells me it's “an integral part of the game”.

Neighbors: Suburban Warfare has the usual Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag modes (hilariously called Capture the Deed here because you have to steal this document from your enemies), but its main mode is focused on protecting your home's “essential items” while destroying your enemy valuable items. This creates a unique dynamic as your team is always defending and attacking at the same time, so you have to communicate and strategize to find the best moments to strike.

Heldager explained that the hard part of this came with creating “stop time zones” for this dichotomy. You and your time need to take a break every now and then, a space that allows you to think about your next steps and how to move forward. That's how the day-night system was intended.

“During the day, your dog or whatever pet you have comes out and defends your house and makes sure that when someone breaks in, they're killed immediately. This forces people to say, 'Hey, go back to your house, defend, talk, relax off and have fun'.”

Something that stood out to me when talking to Heldager is that the team seems to be having the time of their lives coming up with ideas for items. He talks about some of the most powerful weapons and gadgets out there, like a remote-controlled seagull that you can use to drop poop on your enemies, or a van that plays loud funk music in front of their property. “If you order ten of them in a row, you're really messing with people's brains,” he says.

Neighbors has a visual identity that is refreshing from the typical shooters we see in the market, with a cartoonish vibe and unexpected character designs, like an old lady using boxing gloves, or more typical ones like the annoying kid with a slingshot. The team also finds joy in adding things or people from their own lives, like Heldager's dog, which is the guard dog that protects your house, or having the developers' names on the various cars you see on the streets. There are even some character designs based on real people, like one of Invisible Wall's bosses.

“I still haven't quite worked out whether he likes it or not, but he's saying to the other companies, 'Hey, I'm in this game'.

While the game will have its default modes at launch, Heldager emphasizes that he wants players to play it however they want. “What Neighbors is all about is creating the tools for you to have fun,” he explains. “We've created a game where you can play 1v1, 2v2, 3v3, 4v3, 5v5, whatever you decide.”

However, this does not mean that Invisible Walls will not work hard on balancing the game. Heldager explains that the team will listen to player feedback and make decisions based on that.

Launching an online-only title is always a big gamble in the current market and Invisible Wall's CEO knows it all too well. He remembers having trouble with publishers who doubted the success of First Class Trouble, a game about lying and forming alliances, because of its need for microphones. “People don't have microphones, this will never take off,” he was told. And so happened among us.

“It's such a competitive market. I feel like we're not like the others, we're not yet a hero shooter,” explains Heldager. “We're not built on big systems for monetization or anything like that. We just want to give players the opportunity to have fun. When I look at these multiplayer games they are the same. They're all based on Fortnite and Overwatch, and I feel like we're hitting something different in this world.”

Along these lines, Neighbors will not have a “pay-to-win” system and its monetization will run exclusively on cosmetic items, such as skins, which will not give you any advantages during matches. Heldager also says that they have learned from the mistakes made with First Class Trouble, a game with expensive dedicated servers, and will use a peer-to-peer system this time around.

Neighbors: Suburban Warfare doesn't have a release date, but the team is aiming for an early 2025 launch. “I just hope they'll play the game,” Heldager says when asked what he expects for the launch. “We listen to our players, then we give them what they want. That's how we develop games.”