What an incredible journey this has been! Ever since we announced Hello Neighbor just over a year ago, we’ve seen thousands of YouTube videos, lots of fanart, cosplayers, and whole families checking the game out at conventions. It’s very rare that a game can appeal to both kids and their parents.
Watching the hype was both terrifying and energizing. Initially, our plan was to create a single large sandbox and fill it with these set-piece linear moments in the form of fear rooms. Upon playtesting it was clear though that the strength of Hello Neighbor lies in the actual neighbor, in playing against the AI in a more open environment. So, we took up an impossible task of expanding the game to cover more time periods than initially planned.
This was the biggest secret until launch — that Hello Neighbor covers three different time periods, split into three acts. And we hid this secret in plain sight. We were rather public with all our alphas and betas, and everyone assumed that they were mutually exclusive. That we’d do alpha 1, then throw away its content, then do alpha 2, 3, and go into betas. This was not the case.
So here it is. Alpha 2 is actually the first act (“Act 1”) of Hello Neighbor. Then alpha 1 is the second part of the game. alpha 3 is Act 3. I’m not going to spoil how these acts are tied together. That’s up to you to find out. Therefore, I felt so happy that players were talking about getting Alpha 2 content back. Little did they know that’s how the game opens, kind of. We did end up rebuilding each of the houses from scratch based on playtests from the Alphas, and there are plenty of new puzzles.
Thanks everyone for following the development of Hello Neighbor and we can’t wait for you to start playing it today – we really hope you’ll like it. We’ll also be coming to Windows 10 next week with full Xbox Play Anywhere support — buy once to play on both PC and console.
See the rest of the story on Xbox Wire
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Source: Xbox Blog
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