Valve's in-development Deadlock gets a huge map overhaul

Valve's upcoming MOBA shooter Deadlock has received one of the biggest updates to date, which includes a big overhaul to the map that makes it a bit less complicated. While it's in development access is still locked behind invites.

Before this update there were four separate lanes to ride on the rails and battle through, with one of them being ripped out. Valve have redesigned a lot of the map to bring it down to three lanes, and I think they're onto something here. It's a bit more streamlined, less overwhelming and a bit quicker on the action thanks to it. The game is still pretty deep but a bit less crazy now.

The map layout change includes changes to "visuals, building layouts, pathways, neutral camps, air vents, breakables, powerup buffs, juke spots, mid boss" and so on. There's also a new Explore Map feature, so you can just run around the map to learn it now — very useful.

Another major change is to some of the progression. Much like with Dota 2, you needed to get a last-hit in order to get the full benefit. This has been removed from Deadlock. Now the AI troopers will generate Soul Orbs for XP and currency as long as you're nearby, although you still need to shoot them to get the extras. Additionally, gaining souls from kills now has a visual effect of them flying towards you.

Various other technical additions in the update include support for DLSS, they upgraded FSR2 to AMD's new FSR3 temporal upscaler, Valve enabled NVIDIA Reflex and AMD Anti-Lag 2.0 for reduced latency, various netcode improvements and there's a lot of general smaller gameplay changes too. There's even a bunch of improvements for controller players to make it feel better.

See more in the update notes. Hopefully it's not too far off becoming more open so anyone can just jump in and play.