What Went Wrong? - Hello Neighbor 2 

"I love my lil wiz"

It's kind of crazy how Hello Neighbor is ALWAYS better in the alpha compared to the full release lol

it's actually really impressive how they managed to make a good game twice and then turn it into utter shit later on

The idea of Mr. Peterson's AI advancing past expectations, to the point of breaking his own game to get to the player is so funny to me. It's literally the meme where Freddy Fazbear breaks the window in the office and opens the door from outside.

"Regardless of demographic, quality still matters" it is so unfortunate how little people realize this.

It really pissed me off how Hello Neighbor constantly mentioned MatPat on social media. They were so desperate to have a theory, because they didn't even know what their own game plot was.

The fact that hello neighbour can be defined as a franchise makes me feel hollow

"regardless of demographic, quality still matters" THANK YOU! I hate hearing people use "it's just for kids" as an excuse for poor quality. Yeah, kids media probably shouldn't be held to the exact same standards as something made for an adult audience, but that doesn't mean it has a free pass to be straight up terrible. Just because kids are more likely to accept a poor quality experience, doesn't mean they don't deserve something better.

I can’t get over how every Neighbor game is not only promising more during pre-alphas and alphas, but actively delivering on it. Like, I remember that in Neighbor 1 they promised a localized version of that Neighbor AI- he’d watch how you escape/invade and the next round it would be harder to do that thing. And during the playthroughs of the first iteration I watched, he was already pretty good at it! But despite that being the thing people were excited about, they decided to go the LoRe HeAvY route and tanked the rest. This time… there isn’t even really an excuse? It was promised, heavily advertised, and some features already mostly worked and then they just… vanished.

It never ceases to amaze me how rampant false advertising is in the video game industry and how there's little to no accountability for it.

This went from "these guys were being overambitious but had no ill intents" to "these guys know what they are doing and maliciously manipulating their young audience to get more money"

Apparently the mechanic where the guest would throw you out was extremely buggy for a lot of people. Probably couldn't find a way to fix it, so just axed it entirely. Real bummer

A comment mentioning the Helldivers 2 "balancing dev" Alexus, is this same guy who was responsible for the bugs in this game, brought me here. Hoping HD2 can avoid the same fate

I don't know if is sad or outrageous that the alpha of both games are better than the final product

They went from "cool artificial learning mechanics" to "PLEASE MAKE A THEORY ABOUT OUR 'LORE' AND GIVE US MONEY" real quick

The guest wasn’t “bugged out” on your van, he just climbed up and got to scared to come down.

Game Dev: The alpha is going great! Everyone is having fun and we just need a few more tweaks before it's perfect! Boss: Change everything. Game Dev: ......Do what? Boss: Change....... EVERYTHING.

Words cannot describe how disappointed i was that The Guest was demoted to a one time jumpscare I found them genuinely more interesting and unnerving than the neighbor and seeing something so promising get tossed aside and reduced to a cheap jumpscare was a huge letdown

As far as I'm concerned, TinyBuild isn't a game dev company, they're a marketing company. They're middling at game dev at the best of times, but they're incredible at marketing. Even with how much they soured people with HN1, they still brought people back around on the second game. That "wishlist the game to make the game better" nonsense was just.. chef's kiss. Truly.

Here as research for Alexus because his balances are ruining HD2.

love how the alphas are always so much better than the actual release

The Guest should have been the overarching villain that even the Neighbor is afraid of. That would put an interesting twist on the Neighbor’s constant renovations and adding puzzles, he was trying to keep the Guest out. Plus it would have been an interesting dynamic with the day/night cycles, during the day, the Neighbor is the prime antagonist and in the night, the Guest is the one that is the bigger threat. But nope, jump-scares are cool.

My biggest issue with HN as a whole was that over time they made the puzzles way too complicated compared to the original alpha. Seeing them go from "Watch the guest put in the code, then grab the key from his room" to "learn college level algebra, understand how to perfectly line yourself up to the pin point of a needle, and get the key from somersaulting there from the needle without ever touching the ground... And don't get caught."

Fun Fact: The Hello Engineer game you mentioned had an all time peek player base of about 20. Given that two of the five chapters haven't been released yet, I'm not particularly confident they'll ever appear.

It amazes me how both games were made, and continued to be built quite well, shaping themselves into promising experiences, but the moment that the developers showed it to the public, all logic started melting out of their ears

They really missed an opportunity, too. Instead of calling it Hello Neighbor 2, they could've called it Hello Neighborhood.

It feels like basically every alpha and beta you discussed here was a different game that they threw out before building up an entirely new one. Perfect is the enemy of good and all that. If they just picked one vision and stuck with it they'd have something so much better than the unfinished mess they ended with.

More horror games should let you beat up the “monster” like that. It’s hilarious and gives you a limited way to defend yourself, where most games in this vein have immortal enemies.

lmao, all the Helldivers 2 people (me included) learning about this Alexus guy and wanting to know how screwed we are. Yeesh.

They actually do not have further plans with the Guest character. In an Xbox presentation, they confirmed that the Guest is literally just the Neighbor in a weird bird disguise for no reason. In the presentation, you can see the Neighbor holding the Guest costume and throwing it into the furnace.

I always liked the idea that the guest and the neighbor were opposites, with the neighbor being slow but conniving and hard to phase, while the guest is fast and reckless but easily knocked over. The Neighbor would rather set up traps for a guaranteed victory rather than commit to a chase which will stop people who try to outsmart or outfight him, but opens the opportunity to simply run away since he's not able to keep up with a fast player. The Guest on the other hand would chase on sight, crashing into walls in pursuit of their target, which would be too fast for simple "run for your life" strategies to work, but hes easily outsmarted and is tripped up by a good box toss.

what's really frustrating is that anyone who knows about neural networks could tell you that this plan was never going to produce anything workable given the degrees of freedom in the game and the amount of play-data required. Not to mention the computational cost

Came here after finding out that Alexus is part of the dev team for Helldivers 2. How the heck this person ended up on another dev team after this is crazy.

The guest was so cool. The weird design, the strange sounds, and the way he stalked you around the map while also being able to _FLY ON THE EXTINGUISHER,_ and they practically cut the poor man out. Despite the fact that there are plenty of other NPCs in the game that replaced the neighbor in various houses, one of which COULD HAVE BEEN GUEST.

@02:14 The line, "One of (you) is secretly a neighbor," really drives home how horror-free this ostensible horror franchise really is.

Im here because that guy "Alexus" is the one balancing the helldivers 2 weapons... now i see why it dosnt make sense

Hello Neighbor is like the Benjamin Button of video game developments.

I've never seen a developer so keen on throwing away substantial amounts of work just to end up with a much more shallow product than they started with. The pre-alpha concept seemed like potential brilliance - taking place in a theme park, having a job to manage while dealing with a stalker and a mystery to solve. Then they decide to... Get rid of that and just re-tread the first game's concept again. But in fairness, it seemed like they were moving the concept forward, changing the puzzles, the stalker behavior, and the consequences for failure. And once again, they ditch that to just end up with a very iterative result that is just the original game but somewhat bigger. I'm fully aware that sometimes you need to cut your losses if executing an idea is more trouble than you can afford, but this really seems like they just radically changed their minds partway through development, like they expected the game wouldn't sell as well if it wasn't more of the same.

I'm kind of amazed more people aren't vocal about how incredibly scummy it is to release more then one DLC when the main game ends with "Hey sorry the games not done yet come back later❤"

37:57 it interesting that these minor puzzles that don't make sense could be fixed if you add to it a bit. Like for the scissors they could be more higher up where you can't reach and only the train could reach, requiring you to solve the puzzle. Or for the Bush, the button could have been deeper inside it and the bush could be made prickly, therefore giving a reason to cut the bush to get the item.

I genuinely think it's kind of disgusting that they have released something so broken and buggy and clearly not paid attention to and then ask people for money for it. It's a real shame when there is potential and that gets destroyed by money grabbing. It almost feels like a scam.

The whole system of each Hello Neighbor alpha being almost a different game entirely was such a freaking mess. Can't believe they carried that over into the second.

I genuinely wonder what actually goes on over at Tinybuild when they look at all the positive reception to the Alpha builds of both Hello Neighbor and Hello Guest and think "let's make it shit"

This explains a lot, since Alexus is the lead game balancer for Helldivers 2 now...

Don’t you just love when game devs spend time designing great features that just end up getting entirely removed for no explicable reason

It has always bothered me that the Hello Neighbours alphas/betas all seemed like completely different games from one to the next. Makes it abundantly clear that the devs had no clue what they actually wanted, and apparently getting bought by a publisher did not change that.

The guest looked really cool. I liked how he crawled around the place like an aminal. I wish there they made an actual game that utilized this character's potential.

Looks like the nerfs aren’t going to get any better, Helldivers

Honestly I'm really sad that the first alpha and the guest got completely discarded, I think this was probably my favorite version of it and I loved the Guest's desing (I dunno it's just so silly it's kinda cute). It really makes no sense to me to discard so many good things like entire animations, maps and mechanics that were well received and liked by the testers, I mean I'm not a programmer or game designer or anything but I simply don't get it :/

Hello Neighbor was originally an amazing game, the first games Pre-Alpha and Alpha 1 are unironically great games with a guaranteed fun not too aggrivating time.

the classic "make a good alpha and neuter every idea created from it". A hello neighbor tradition.

The lead dev, Alexus Kravchenko, who removed most of the features from HN1, is now the lead balancing dev for Helldivers 2. And boy oh boy is he ruining that game *fast *

Amazing how they managed to make alphas that turned out to be better than the final product... *twice!* As a wise man once said, "Fool me once, shame on you. You fool me I can't get fooled again."

It's crazy how they made the claim that their AI will be self learning and then go back on this promise AGAIN. I would say it's even crazier that it once again worked to create hype, but it's safe to assume that the target audience of this game doesn't even remember what the first game promised and failed to deliver

Okay, so, they had a good idea going with the “Secret code you puzzle out in-game for the secret download” thing, but then they went and made it needlessly convoluted for no reason. Like, seeing the clipboard with the website extension, and having to open a mystery door to get the code for the download? I was on board with that. That was genuinely cool. Having to do a whole rigmarole with a teleporter 20+ times just to get that code? What the fuck.

Helldivers brought me here , turns out the designer is now working at Arrowhead Studio

not wickedwiz saying that he'll do a game that went right, then proceeding to vanish off the internet 💀💀

A dubious honor for a game series to have multiple entries on this show

I think they should've leaned into the Hello Guest idea. They clearly want a level of "grandness" with these games, resulting in bigger houses, and now MULTIPLE houses. Meanwhile, the amusement park idea lends itself well to a larger, more detailed setting, without requiring the devs to come up with multiple characters and spend time creating visually diverse, cramped quarters for the AI and player to navigate. The "end of shift" mechanic seems cool too- The store in allows the player to work towards getting a few key items to mess with, without needing to spend time aimlessly searching. An amusement park at night also fits the whimsical yet dark tone the games dip their toes into, and by extension gives the game a bit more identity- especially with the Guest around. It's so strange to me that they hit gold and, for some reason, threw it away to spend time working on multiple houses instead. Not to say the final game's idea couldn't have worked, but they had already started on Hello Guest, so why not just finish that and then move onto Hello Neighbor 2? Their final idea was just too ambitious with little benefit.

"Next time we'll look at a game that didn't go wrong" -> last upload 8 months ago. :D

At least we now know why Helldivers 2 is going down the drain.

The original idea with the park and the thing on the mountain was really interesting, such a shame we’ll never get a full game/ story

And now Alexus is ruining Helldivers 2. Wonderful

Yeah Helldivers 2 💀🙏 is gone if this m f stayed here #BE_GONE_alexsus

I find it funny that, in this franchise, both the alphas and the spin-offs are better received than the final versions of the main games. Hide & Seek, Secret Neighbor, and even the Engineer game are, at worst, harmless fun, and often better than that, and the books and cartoon aren’t half-bad. And, of course, the alphas of the main games are incredibly well received.

Jacksepticeye had to reset completely while playing hello neighbor several times because the neighbor got too difficult. Frustrating

So bad news The guy who did this controversial update, is the guy who currently making bad balance update in Helldivers 2

It's painful to see games with good premise start declining beyond recover. Hello Neighbor series is like this, but with in-game trivial stuff we didn't even ask for weighing it down in slow motion

This is why you don't pre-order games from any devs making big promises until they show you properly what is in their game.And even then, with a company as shady as the devs of Hello Neighbors, you do not buy the game before what they promised is actually delivered.

The Guest has such a cool Character design. Its criminal that you don't see more of him in the final game.

You forgot to mention that the only interactable items were quest items, as opposed to HN1 where you could pick up practically anything, which made it more of a challenge not knowing if the item was useless or needed. Also HN1 had various ways to complete a quest, ie exit the neighbors yard. Last but not least I felt like stacking boxes & the umbrella were hello neighbor staples, and both were excluded from this game.

Can confirm Alexus is now working hard, or more accurately hardly working shitting all over Helldivers 2 game balence, ig sometimes no matter how good a games idea is, it's failure can often be attributed to disconnected and ideotic game balancing.

honestly, if that AI had been added like it was supposed to be, it sounds like itd be HELL on players who started playing much later than everyone else. imagine years from now, with tons of people playing and training the AI, and some newbie comes along and tries to play. little Timmy gonna get his ass beat by a godly neighbor edit: spelling

all i remember of this game is them repeatedly begging matpat for a slightest bit of attention

Whose here after learning that the hell divers 2 balancing dev was responsible for this game

7 months without a new Wicked Wiz video hurts my soul 😭

I didn't even know there was a Hello Neighbor 2. The fact I'm finding out here probably can say a lot about how it's doing. Wonder how many others didn't know about this.

It's so bizarre how they keep making all these great assets and features, only to immediately discard them. Really feels like they don't understand how alpha and beta builds are supposed to work, like they're restarting from the ground up every version.

The idea of the Neighbor learning from the entire community's play styles sounds to me like a way to make the game not fun REALLY fast - within days, the AI would be too good, getting around it would be impossible. How is that a selling point? I mean, the fact that it was falsely advertised is bad, but how it ever generated buzz instead of putting people OFF from wanting to try it is beyond me. When I play a game, I want to know I at least have a chance of beating it, and the neural network learning model would eliminate any chance of that within maybe two weeks tops. How would that be fun? "Hey everyone, this AI will be too smart to beat a month after this game goes live, doesn't that sound cool?!" No. No it does not, it sounds annoying and frustrating and the opposite of fun. Can someone explain how this idea got people excited? Please?

At this point i think Hello Neighbour wants mattpat to do a theory, not on the game, but on company itself 😅

well the steel wool thing may be something like this: they are originally a company that makes VR games (Security Breach is their first major non-vr game) so they probably hired them for Hello Neighbor VR and accidentally added them to the Hello Neighbor 2's dev list too these type of simple errors are pretty common even for the biggest game studios

The "neural network plus algorithms" thing sounds to me like it's inspired by Alien: Isolation. The Alien has its predetermined paths and strategies, and if the player hides in a lot of vents, the probability of the Alien looking into vents increases. Which is not really a neural network, and likely a marketing buzz word in the case of Hello Neighbor 2? The main difference being that these probabilities are shifted not by a single player, but by all of them. Which, in the long run, probably has the sole benefit of filtering out hiding places and escape routes that no player uses in the first place.

I'm here to ask if 'Alexus' is a guy that helped ruin HN2, and if he is the same guy 'balancing' Helldivers 2? How about it Wiz?

Thank you for the video. As a Helldivers 2 player I've heard all about the "Hello Neighbor 2" shenanigans by the infamous 'lead dev' and wondered what all the fuss was about. This lays it all out nicely. Pretty surprised he ended up at Arrowhead. But it explains a bit better everybody's serious concerns about his input on HD2...

History has told us that fans are very accepting to studios being honest and transparent. By not talking about hurdles and problems, fans are left thinking it's pure laziness or malevolent behaviour. There's really no reason to withold information like this, unless your hands are tied by higher up's. Fans will understand, and the reputation will not suffer as much. It's a shame to see studios still take the complete silence approach, still..

The man came right on time with 50 mins of CONTENT. Thank you, good sir.

From HN2 to HD2 … I really hope that things don’t go the way it’s looking like it could go…. 👀

Timestamps: 0:00 - Intro 0:43 - Self Promotion 1:13 - Background 4:30 - Mayak Event 7:11 - Pre-Alpha 12:04 - Alpha 1 15:45 - Alpha 1.5 20:00 - Advanced AI 25:50 - Beta 30:16 - Full Release 42:13 - DLCs 48:51 - Outro

I can understand cutting some things (not justify but understand why they would want to) but it seems they constantly cut things that wouldn't be a hassle to keep in for some reason. Like they purposely remove features or things that fans like. For instance, The Guest. You'd think they'd double down on him being so popular. He should be as easy to keep in as any other NPC The dev team's decision making is baffling tbh. Like two entirely seperate studios create the betas and the final game.

The development process for their games is definitely the most bizarre to me, since I've never really seen it before. They make an alpha showing off some puzzles and features, all that have very solid foundations. The next alpha, instead of polishing those puzzles off in some way, and then adding more, they instead move the goalposts. Instead of expanding the number of objectives, they make the distance between those objectives LONGER without preserving anything that made them functional. If they were worried about people getting bored because they know all the answers, then they should just do what any other game does... restrict the alpha's content until the final release.

You can tell how little they care about making genuinely good games. Once is a mistake, twice is stupidity, three times is malicious intent

Watching 80% of this story across two videos: "Man if i didnt know better I'd say this was all just an elabotate scam, but surely there is love for gaming in there somewhere, look at those neat ideas!" Learning about the day 1 dlc: "Oh yeah okay nevermind these guys are 100% con artists planning to rob children."

The weirdest thing about Hello Neighbour for me personally was that the official account started following me. Back then I posted mostly homoerotic W40k art, which is probably one of the most niche things to draw.

I genuinely wish they stuck with the amusement park as the map, that was so cool!!! I loved the guest and its sad to see them default to "invade a house"

Helldivers 2 brought us here🥲

they actually put the bird man back in a halloween update, being in a area accessible by a tunnel, it looks kinda fun

Remember everyone, there is no game that is good or promising enough to preorder. There is little to no benefit as a consumer to preorder. Make them earn your dollars.

The thing is, that tiny build can make a coherent designed game. Graveyard keeper is actually a very good pixel art/indie game with a lot of charm. Very grindy at late game, but still good.

It's like they made multiple games. Each game getting a more and more overcomplicated map and overly complicated puzzles. Like- Hello Guest sounds like a fun and simple game with some interesting concepts. The first Hello Neighbour 2 build seemed to have some really cool features with the whole drag mechanics- it looked like it put a lot of focus on the little bird dudes mechanics. Then it kinda looks like they started doing what they did with the first game- expanding out the maps to the point where the AI's aren't really able to keep up with it and either isn't updated or get's features cut out. Bummer- I really liked the Guest's design.

Thank you for pointing out that interview with the CEO. It really sheds some light on what a contributing factor to the game's poor quality is. He did what was right, and put his employees' safety first. That's earned my respect.