First of all, a massive thank you for your support during these first few days of the Neighbors: Suburban Warfare Early Access release.

We launched Neighbors: Suburban Warfare into Early Access because we need you to be part of the journey and help us make this into something special. While the majority of you have recognized the potential and shown your appreciation of the world we are building, it is clear that we need to address the initial state of the game.

Your feedback through this first phase has been invaluable. Over the first couple of days we released a series of hotfixes that addressed some of the early balancing issues while also trying to mitigate issues with lag and matchmaking. However, we are far from done, we know.

Instead of presenting our Roadmap we recognize there are some fundamental areas we need to set straight first.

HERE ARE THE THINGS WE WILL FIX FIRST

It quickly became clear that our matchmaking didn’t work effectively in grouping new players and experienced players. This, on top of a game that has a noticeable learning curve and still lacked proper balancing clearly ended in a lot of players having a rough time. We are currently working on:

• Improved matchmaking and a “New Player” experience where you are only grouped together with other new players.
  
• Simplification of “Resources” to reduce complexity, snowballing effects and make the game more intuitive in general
  
• Re-work of traps and movement impairing effects to reduce frustrating game moments
  
• General Balancing and tweaking of perks to reduce advantage through progression and instead focus on evolving gameplay styles.
  
• Introduction of an “Item Bar with Hotkeys” to make item handling less convoluted

A lot of players have reported fundamental issues with Hit Registration, Lag and/or Game Feel. We are hard at work at this and while this will be a continuous effort we hope we in our next few updates will be able to solve the majority of reported issues by.

• Improving region matching
  
• Tweaking of projectiles and charged effects
  
• Improving Item Switching

Finally - we have run into a series of challenges where our attempt at mitigating cheaters unfortunately lead to a lot of players getting a black screen instead of being able to launch the game. We are constantly looking into this since day one and we hope we have finally managed to solve the black screen issue. However, we recognise that cheating is increasingly a problem. For this reason, we will try to get the following into our next updates::

• A report system to help us collect information on cheaters
  
• Improved Anti Cheat

WHAT'S NEXT

Above improvements are our highest priority for now, but rest assured we are also working on bringing you more content in the form of maps, game modes and Neighbors.

We want your thoughts, questions, weird screenshots and chatter. Please head over to our official Discord channel[discord.gg] - it’s the best place to:

• Share feedback directly with us
  
• Get early info on upcoming patches and events
  
• Scream about the jackhammer with us

From the whole dev team, thank you again for your trust and energy. This is just the start - we’re in this together and we can’t wait to build the future of Neighbors with you.


Hope to see you in game soon!
Invisible Walls