Deadlock, perhaps the worst kept secret from Valve, has now been softly revealed as the latest game from the maker of Half-Life, Counter-Strike, Portal and Team Fortress 2.
Even before it was officially announced, it managed to pull in over 44,000 concurrent players during their secret (but not very) invite-only play-testing. We know this thanks to public data from SteamDB, which tracks everything on Steam, and Deadlock itself has been on there for quite some time before being announced.
Technically, Valve haven't really announced it yet. They made a store page, which is incredibly light on details, a Twitch category, and they have posted in their official Discord to note people can now talk publicly about it:
Since it's still invite-only, you'll have to find someone who has access.
Previously, the game would give you a warning when you first load in, asking you clearly not to share details publicly, which some (hi The Verge) decided to ignore. This has now been replaced with a simple reminder that it's in early development and feedback is welcome.
So what is it? Well, that’s a little complicated to answer. But, I did have access pretty early thanks to an invite so my best attempt at a simple explanation: it takes the lanes, towers and AI creeps gameplay from Dota 2 and turns it into a third-person hero shooter with rails in the air you can jump on to travel across the map quickly. It’s definitely peculiar and much like Dota 2, it’s easy enough to get into but really takes a good while to learn properly.
With its two 6 on 6 teams, each team fights across defined lanes in the map that have guardians at specific points you need to destroy. You push through each lane with the help of your teammates and your AI creeps. Gradually, you push the enemy team back by taking down different types of guardians to eventually make it into the enemy base. Inside the enemy base you take down their Patron, which is like a multi-stage boss battle, while also trying not to die from the enemy team madly firing off every single ability they have at you.
You’re not forced into any particular lane though, you can run or rail across the map and go wherever you like. It’s a team game after all, but leaving a lane empty is of course not a good idea. The rail system definitely adds a nice spin to it, letting you quickly zip across the map from your base. You can get a fast speed-boost from it too, but once used it goes into a cooldown. Additionally, the rails for you only work in your territory, so once you push past an enemy guardian, your team's active rail length will expand.
It has a pretty fun character movement system too where you can dash, double-jump, mantle over things and slide too. So it's reasonably fast paced, especially during combat between players when you're all jumping around trying to avoid all the abilities going off.
There’s quite a number of characters already, all with their own set of abilities, much like Dota 2 or any of the various hero shooters out there. So learning it can be quite overwhelming initially, as you not only need to learn your abilities, but how to deal with whatever characters the opposing team picks. Thankfully, a good few of the characters are super-simple to play as.
It's not just the characters though, you also need to keep upgrading as you go through a match and learn what works best for each character. And here's where it's once again like Dota 2. You have to earn a currency, souls, and then run along to a shop to buy up character upgrades. Thankfully, there's a suggested build system you can follow and anyone can make one and publish it for you to follow.
Valve seem to be learning a clear lesson from the failure of Artifact here, building it up gradually with a growing community and tweaking it constantly based on player feedback. The secrecy around it, along with the invite system, has attracted a lot of attention and even though it's been leaked constantly, this plays quite well for free advertising for Valve.
It will be interesting to see what happens with it when Valve open it up fully. Will it have the staying power of other popular Valve games? Will it end up eating away at the numbers of CS2, Dota 2, TF2 and others? Who knows. It's a weird one, but it can be a lot of fun.
Currently, there's no Native Linux version, but I can confirm it works really nicely on Desktop with Proton. I have yet to try it on Steam Deck but will soon.
You can follow it on the Steam page.
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
I guess they know exactly what demo they're going after. Knowing Valve, it'll be extremely polished so I hope people can have fun in it! I do wish someday they'd do a proper rpg. Just thinking about the quality they could do in that genre is mind bending. But seeing as the pace of development at Valve seems to go in super duper ultra slow motion, i'm not holding out much hope.
Quoting: TheSHEEEPA ... team shooter. Yawn.
*goes back to sleep*
agreed, but it is where all the money is right now so financially it is a perfect move. But some day this fad will die out.
Last edited by F.Ultra on 24 August 2024 at 5:04 pm UTC
Fester_Mudd Aug 24
You can only quit following games through Twitch mobile app and then add new ones. Dropping even 20 games won't do anything on desktop/browser
Basically Twitch is a one big headache in so many aspects nowadays and they don't seem to care at all because they're ultra rich and there is no real alternative if YouTube is not counted. Kick is in such infancy its even worst than Twitch.
Quoting: sonic2kkThere is also no FPS limiter built in so to limit the game to 60fps instead of 120fps without using vsync (which increases GPU load by a lot in this game for some reason) you'll have to use the likes of MangoHUD. Dota 2 does this as well I think, very annoying.
There is no GUI option, but you can pull up the console (F7) and use the`fps_max` and `fps_max_ui` cvars to set the respective frame caps.
I loved Paragon in it's multiple iterations - each had it's own good sides. It was, basically 3 or 4 different games at different times. But the first major problem that they had not been able to solve for a long time was fast travel. The first map was HUGE and it took very long time to travel it, so they introduced the fast travel thing - you can activate it anywhere and almost at any time to move faster (but not attack) and it broke the metagame, because it's very effective to run with the whole team across the map and just kill opponents from the start. This thing alone cost them many month of making a new map and a complete redesign of the timings and other game mechanics. Some things they've just scrapped in the end.
So, seeing this stupidly... just looking absurdly easy fix to that problem here is kind of funny and sad at the same time. Oh I hope they'll deliver!
Quoting: Mountain ManSo no Half-Life 3.
Why not? They can work on multiple games at the same time. Remember the Orange Box?
ElectricPrism Aug 24
The map is divided into 4 railways each with a different color.
You press space to jump and ride the rail.
In character selection you select 3 characters you are interested in playing. The black man with the red cap and red vest in the screenshot is my favorite so far. He's pretty fun -- he shoots bullets from his fingers.
The aesthetic and artwork are very Bioshock-esk, which is extremely refreshing and unlike anything else at this time.
You can ride the rail home IIRC, and there are 2 giant stone looking guardians on the way to the enemy "Ancient" you have to defeat first. They are really cool looking.
There are pockets of areas inbetween the lanes with pots and collectibles you can use to buy things at the shop like collecting gold in the DOTA jungle.
I immediately thought of TF2 when I saw the artwork, and never really was a TF2 player but I do like this game.
When you jump in the air you press Ctrl or Shift or Alt can't remember and you can air strafe in all 4 directions as an evaside manuver (at least as that flame character).
Right now is your ultimate is you explode like a Phoenix and come back after.
The shop is a bit confusing. I think it works like this. You have 4 different stats in the bottom left of the UI as indicated by the 4 boxes with 4 slot.
You can buy up to 4 items in the shop for each stat, some are early game, mid game, and late game and you may want to buy some stat buffs in the early game and swap them out for better ones later.
Hero abilities are like DOTA, [Q] [W] [E] [R]
One of the ice heroes iceskates on a self created bridge which blocks attacks up to the sky. One has deployable turrets (Techies?), one of them flies, the electric mortal kombat looking one is pretty cool.
The heroes do make the game for sure and I'm still a noob but Valve still got it making interesting gameplay experiences.
One other difference from DOTA is that when you do get to the enemy base their "Ancient" is actually a boss you have to collectively battle which is pretty smart and fun if you think about it instead of just wailing on a castle.
Once I can, I'm definitely going to be trying this at the LAN.
I am especially estatic about the 1920s gangster Chicago Bioshock Aesthetic, it definitely provides an escape from the modern day BS of IRL.
In my opinion this game is a solid winner, it's going to be interesting to see what happens next.
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