Neighbors: Suburban Warfare Interview – “How Can We Get These People To 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 started as a student project at Aalborg University. First Class Trouble 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’s an imposter.

While both games received good reviews from critics and players, their successes were modest. With its 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 you defend your own house at the same time.

Related

Suda51 Says Shadows Of The Damned Is Super Mario Plus Hell

We sat down with game creators Goichi Suda and Shinji Mikami to speak about the upcoming remaster of Shadows of the Damned and their careers.

Depending on the character you pick, you’ll use vacuum cleaners, frying pans, golf clubs, boxes with fireworks, hammers, slingshots, and baseball bats, among many more items to bring mayhem to the enemy’s team. You also have to improve your house’s defenses and put 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 get these people to hate each other? Just keep pulling on those strings of tension and annoyance that you have with your neighbors. We see these tensions in our own lives. How can we make that into a game?

Neighbors: Suburban Warfare has the usual Team Deathmatch and Capture the Flag modes (here hilariously called Capture the Deed because you need to steal this document from your enemies), but its main mode is focused on protecting your home’s “essential items” while destroying your enemies’ valuable objects. This creates a unique dynamic because your team is always defending and attacking simultaneously, so you need to communicate and come up with strategies to find the best moments to strike.

Heldager explained that the difficult part of this came with creating “downtime zones” for this dichotomy. You and your time need to have a break from time to time, a space that lets you think about your next steps and how to proceed. That’s how the day-night system was conceived.

“In the daytime, your dog or whatever pet you have comes out and defends your house, making sure that whenever someone is breaking in, they’re instantly killed. This forces people to say, ‘Hey, go back to your house, defend, talk, chill out, and have fun’.”

Something that stood out to me when speaking with Heldager is that the team seems to be having the time of their lives when coming up with ideas for items. He tells me about some of the most powerful weapons and gadgets available, like a remote-controlled seagull that you can use to drop poop on your enemies’ equipment, or a van that plays loud funk music in front of their property. “If you order ten of those in a row, you really wreck 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 brat 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 devs’ names on the different 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 really figured out if he likes it or not, but he does tell the other companies ‘Hey, I’m in this game’.”

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

Launching an online-only title is always a big bet in the current market and Invisible Walls’ CEO knows it too well. He remembers when he had issues with publishers that had doubts about First Class Trouble’s success, a game about lying and making alliances, due to its need for microphones. “People don’t have microphones, this will never take off” he was told. And then Among Us happened.

“It’s such a competitive market. I feel like we are not like the others, we’re not another hero shooter,” explains Heldager. “We’re not built on big monetization schemes or stuff like that. We just want to empower the players to have fun. When I look at these multiplayer games, they’re all the same. They are all based on Fortnite and Overwatch, and I feel like we are hitting something else in this world.”

Following these lines, Neighbors won’t have “pay-to-win schemes” and its monetization would run exclusively on cosmetic items, like skins, which won’t give you any advantages during matches. Also, Heldager tells me that they have learned from the mistakes made with First Class Trouble, a game with expensive dedicated servers, and they will be using a peer-to-peer system this time.

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

Systems

Developer(s)

Invisible Walls

Publisher(s)

Invisible Walls

Multiplayer

Online Multiplayer