I'm ngl I feel like the initial concept of "Super Advanced AI Man hunting you in his house while you try to find his secret and solve puzzle" is what lured everyone in and then they were like "Like make it funny and silly".
fr like if they made it serious and less cartoony as well as making the AI better and wasn't just trying to put a mountain of lore inserts it could have potentially been a good and playable game but instead we got... this
Yeah, couldve actually had a pretty dark storyline, but thats not really what happened, i know he killed his child or something but it couldve been better than that.
It was never about being *"GOOD"* in first alpha devs had idea of trainable ai neighbour in front while some secret of his was put behind. But after game theory and other theories they strayed further from original idea and more into symbolism and theories, to the point every theory guy abandoned them. First game had intresting idea and (relatively) easy to understand puzzles, but with each alpha and house expansion they strayed further from it. Even ai performs better in smaller houses compared to bigger ones
I wish they just stuck to one house design. Imagine if you started with a large house, but the developer used a database of instances of every event of the neighbor catching the player in a certain situation, effectively learning a player's general thought process stemming from a simple ai... The ai wouldn't even be too advanced, just drawing from chance encounters, only growing more perceptive as the community plays on. Imagine that, but instead we got... whatever this is.
It's a great example about how being so obsessed with how social media will react to your work (ie theories, lore, etc) than the actual product can sabotage you.
I feel like this is one if those things where people were attached to the idea than the actual game. They saw this and thought "Hey this seems like it has a lot of potential for a good game"
Well, that’s because it did Devs actually really cared about the game during its pre-alpha and alpha days until we got to Alpha three where they got so obsessed with lore that vision changed which caused development to be rushed
Well, that’s because the vision changed and why the alphas are better than the full release is because the vision changed they decided was lore and wacky giant map was important than game development
In retrospect, yeah. The game was _never_ good, but I think the pre alphas are so beloved because it was when the game seemed promising. The initial concept of trying to outsmart an adaptive AI really could've been fun, but then they just _had_ to steer it into an incredibly mediocre puzzle platformer
allpha 3 was where it really lost all potential because they started making it about platforming and stuff instead of the neighbor. especially weird since they didnt have good physics
I remember playing the alphas as a kid and loving them. Until I was so disappointed with the actual game that I then played the original alphas and realize that this game series was always crap
Honestly the more I think about it, I think everyone liked the idea, the potential Hello Neighbor had back then. Janky, not really good, but it had so much potential. Looking back though, yeah uh... They had no idea what the fuck to do or where the fuck to really go with the story or anything. They stopped focusing on the Neighbor, and focused on the fucking house so much they stopped concerning themselves with making sure the Neighbor could keep chasing you.
The alphas being crap was forgivable at the time because they were testing the waters and ... it was an alpha. Too bad they got too impatient and tried to ride on the hype train the moment they gained popularity before they had a solid... anything.
if there's one thing that's decent about the final game it's the cutscene animation work and the music that they made themselves (the guitar tracks that play in cutscenes) so I absolutely agree, everything about this game screams "they only had artists on board for this". Especially if you look at their concept art you'll see that the artists behind it are actually really talented and did an amazing job designing props, character designs, environments, ect. for the game that got poorly translated into 3D. even the neighbor's design which phil loves to meme on is extremely recognizable and, in the right context and lighting engine, could have been an eerie presence. shame that the rest of the dev team along with the publisher are a bunch of hacks who ruined a good foundation for a game by trying to make it "deep" with abhorrent puzzle design
Well, the pre-alpha and alpha one are pretty good a lot better than what we got mainly because the developers got thirsty after Matt Pat started playing and wanted to make it the game focused on lore when the game started dipping in quality
Phil, the master of bugging shit out and Hello Neighbor, the buggiest game to ever buggy. A receipt for a disaster. An extremely entertaining disaster.
Hello Neighbor's alphas were seen as good because they were alphas. They looked like the foundation of a good game. At that point the glitches and bugs were expected, the look being goofy was expected, and everyone's expectations were low of the alphas themselves
I think people just fell in love with the idea of Hello Neighbor. Like, we convinced ourselves that the alpha builds were good because we wanted to believe that we could get the idealized version of the game we imagined existing.
It's like they treated the "alphas" as separate games with an attempt at a continuous story? With one ending being that the main character gets buried alive, and the new opening cutscenes with different 'lore', like new people are moving in and the house is being built upon every time. Or they just cannot plan one story for a game to save their lives and just restarted every time - neither option is how alphas are meant to work so it's bad either way. Also that Bendy filter is awful lmao, like one of the draws of Bendy is its unique art style - why would you release a version of your game and set up a comparison when you know it looks that much worse than the game you're trying to emulate?
Love how the games, that tinybuild publishes, either don't take themselves seriously at all and are amazing, or try to be deep and turn out some of the worst shit ever.
I get such a weird feeling from watching videos of the old pre-alphas. There's nostalgia there too, for back when I thought this game had at least the *potential* to be good, but this is something else I can't quite describe.
Pre-Alpha Hello Neighbor is actual nostalgia material, the fect that this version is significantly better than the actual full release is honestly insane
I agree I think it it’s around Alpha three with the vision changed and they were more focused on other things than actually developing the game they wanted
The funniest thing to me is thinking back to when JT Music make "Video Game Legends" raps, and Hello Neighbor was featured in one of them. _This man actually thought he was on the team._
7:44 for context, they are referring to the Alpha 1.5 footage that was made before the pre alpha released that featured a more realistic artstyle, but in later builds they went with a more cartoony look, which was shit
They had a thing in pre alpha But then they decided to do a big shit on the concept and make a promising concept go into the incinerator so that you could have “deep lore”
I have a game suggestion. Can you play hello neighbor alternative reality by nate emg? It’s a better hello neighbor game and it resets your progress when the neighbor catches you.
The series itself had such promise with the first versions, the company did as much as they could but the latest products could have been just a bit more modified to a more stable standard overall! Not sure if we will get more content on the game series in the future, but it would be sad if it just ends in the way that it already is!
“Wait, it was never good?” *“Never was.”* In all seriousness, I remember seeing the first alphas and betas and whatever versions of the game, and my first thought was “yep, that sure is a game” and proceeded to forget about it until Pastra’s video on the game… which is coincidentally the video that made me a fan of you and your channel… talk about coming full circle.
Watching the development of the alphas and betas as the devs made the game was fun and cool. How every many years ago that was. But as that happened the thing that actually made the game interesting initially was completely lost turning the game from an interesting stealth break in game to a confusing puzzle platformer with a story that became the focus when the gameplay should have been from the start.
Saying this since I've seen nearly nobody say it: There was LITERALLY NO LORE in the first alpha-or-so, in fact, the devs were actively putting some red herrings to make the game more confusing! (That's all confirmed stuff, by the way)
I feel like first couple alphas had the potential. Alpha 1 in particular had some good ideas I think. For people who just wanted to play the game, you would find the lock pick and the crowbar and break in properly, and then for people who wanted to find dumbfuck confusing lore there was the series of bullshit you had to do to get the actual key. Obviously it still needed a lot of work that never got put in, especially on the ai for the neighbor.
Ngl when Alpha 3 of Hello Neighbor came out I was interested in the premise, lore, and the dream-like appearance of of the neighbors house, but when I finally got the game I quickly realized that the gameplay was boring as hell and had very confusing platorming beyond the start of Chapter 1, also BatIM hyperfixation having me by the balls didn't help either. I actually had no idea that HN had a BatIM pandering update
10:21 A is for Fruit B is for Fly C is for Automobile D is for Canine E is for Planet F is for Rose G is for Zebra H is for Cap I is for Milk J is for Invertebrate K is for Dart L is for Insect M is for Rock N is for Acorn O is for Bird P is for Halloween Q is for Crown R is for Bunny S is for Ball T is for Autumn U is for Rain V is for Instrument W is for Mammal X is for Bars Y is for Ship Z is for Giraffe
