Development update
Hi all fellow Neighbors! It has been a good while since we did any official updates on what we have been up to with the game! During the past year, a significant part of our team has been busy working on major updates for Deep Rock Galactic and First Class Trouble.
However, since October 2025, a group of dedicated people has been working non-stop on Neighbors, primarily porting the game to Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 as well as preparing the game with free-to-play features. Porting Neighbors has proven to be no easy feat and to be completely transparent, this is a big cost and risk for us, as a company. We are doing this because we want to give you a good product and to get it out to a greater audience.
What’s new in 1.0
We have not only been porting the game to console but also made new content to the game that we can’t wait to show you!
New Character: Gwen
"She’s fast, she’s fierce, and she brought enough pom-poms to dominate the neighborhood—give it up for the new teen on the block: Gwen!
Don’t let the outfit fool you. This bright and ruthless tactician plays a high-offense support role, pumping up her squad by cheering to boost their damage, while relentlessly roasting opponents to leave them taking extra hurt.
Thought she was just standing on the sidelines? Think again. Her cartwheel spins are downright gnarly to get caught in, and her occasional heavy ground-slams will send the entire enemy team flying.
In short: don't mess with the cheerleader!
New game mode: Practice vs. AI
Imagine if your neighbors across the street were actually deadly, house-smashing robots!
In this new PvE destruction mode, you’ll fend off robot attacks while taking sledgehammers to their home. It’s the perfect playground for newcomers learning the basics, or experienced players wanting to practice new characters and refine wild combos.
Jump in solo or team up with up to three friends—the enemies scale dynamically to match your team size. Defend your home, test your skills, and wreck their house!
New house: Suburban House
Ever wondered how the Snow Peak Cabin would look if it was located in Harmony Lane? Well this is it - the ideal suburban mid-century house that has everything it needs! Play matches to unlock this lovely little residence before your friends!
Destruction redesigned
As many of you know, the past year we have also tried to take the game in a more casual direction with more “party-like” game modes.
After analyzing hundreds of hours of match data and player feedback, we realized that the high access barrier was preventing Neighbors from becoming the accessible, console-friendly, chaotic neighborhood brawl we always hoped for it to be.
We have partnered up with external partners to figure out the best way forward for this casual approach, using regular gamers as testing groups.We wanted to make sure that these changes were fully tested and locked down before making them public. Let us quickly run through what the main changes are going to be:
Streamlining/removing armor penetration: With this change we want to remove the confusion of some items not being efficient at breaking the house.This means the structure-multiplier is gone visually but a few items will still be somewhat less efficient than others and the sledgehammer is kept as an efficient tier 3 shop item.
Reducing Shop Complexity: We have reduced the amount of items and types in the shops to have the players spent less time on trying to figure out what is the right choice and to reduce the amount of “Hidden Knowledge”. The shop will have one tier called “Utility” primarily with delivery-van purchases, trap-crates and barricades.
Removing Resources: During testing players reported being overwhelmed by the minute-to-minute decision-making and were overall confused about what they should do when. In an effort to alliviate this we have decided to remove the resources and have the shop tiers unlock every night for both teams instead. We understand that this is a controversial change, however It is not unlikely that we may see this “fight over resources” in the form of a separate game mode for Neighbors.
Item Randomness & Huge Mystery Drops: With the resources gone and the shop simplification we introduce more randomness in achieving additional offensive items. We hope this shifts the focus away from strict economic snowballing and gives both teams exciting, high-stakes 'turn-the-tide' moments with high-potency item drops. We are introducing “huge mystery drops” at the construction yard as a spiritual successor for resources with high-potency items both in offense and defense. These are purely optional but can give a team a great advantage and turn the tides of the match.
Removing General Perks: We remove the confusion of the benefits of each perk and whatever skill-gap some of the perks might give experienced players. We acknowledge that these perks were not amazingly designed since we were hesitant to make them too powerful to give experienced players a bigger advantage. The character-perks will be kept. The future will tell if we see general perks again in some form or another.
New Starter items & Fists gone: We want all players to have immediate offensive capabilities, so both MJ, Louie and Kevin now have a melee starting item. As a result, the fists/hands are now gone from the game since they are unnecessary complexity.
Pacing & Movement Adjustment: We’ve removed the sprint key in favor of a smooth, standardized increased base speed. This eliminates crazy 'sprint-tackling' metas while making combat engagements, trap placement, and spacing far more readable.
Shorter matches: As a result of the changes above we will see shorter matches of around the 10-15 minute mark, compared to the current ~20 minute average. The whole flow of playing matches will feel more light and casual instead of heavy time-invested matches that feel bad to lose.
We believe these steps are what Neighbors needs to thrive, ensuring full lobbies, fast queue times, and a long future across both PC and console.
When will Neighbors Launch in 1.0?
We are eager to get Neighbors 1.0 out, but we have to respect that some processes take time and resources - hence we are not quite there yet.
BUT, we are happy to announce that the 1.0 F2P build is now done! It is shipped to Sony and Microsoft and is undergoing the certification process. If everything goes smoothly, the 1.0 update will be right around the corner!
That is all for now. Once everything is locked in and approved we will share a more detailed breakdown and feature list of the 1.0 version.
All the best from,
Invisible Walls
