We’ve learned the hard way that ganging up on Deadlock doesn’t make it more digestible

3 days ago 2

But maybe that’s the point

Two Deadlock teams square off in the pre-match loading period.

The mystery surrounding Deadlock, Valve’s work-in-progress MOBA shooter, has largely evaporated. Its freely extendable invite system is about as effective at controlling player headcount as a disinterested football steward, meaning pretty much anyone with a clued-in Steam friend can get in and start poking around its secrets. And yet, being a lane-pushing wizard fighter in the Dota 2 vein, it’s already a vast tangle of interplaying abilities, items, strats, and often unspoken rules, of the kind that even experienced gankists will take hundreds of hours to learn. It’s been too much for poor Brendy, at any rate.

Still, Brendy is but one man. What if we had but four men, working in tandem to crush lanes and flatten Patrons just as Gabe intended? To find out if Deadlock is indeed more comprehensible as a team sport, Graham, Ed, Ollie, and James joined forces, promptly getting fucked up yet emerging from the warlock hospital with a deeper understanding of its workings. Or, at least, if anyone would keep playing.

From Ivy's perspective, a Deadlock team performs the initial zipline rollout from their base.

James: My two most-played games are Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2, so something that combines both should taste like a delicious M&S Yumnut. Something about it isn’t quite yet clicking for me, though – I feel like it’s much trickier to glean a sense of how the overall match is progressing, what with the strictly ground-level, third-person view, while also being harder to make an individual impact on a match’s outcome. Even with a preinstalled working knowledge of stuff like last hitting, creep equilibriums, teamfight positioning and all that good MOBA jargon. Maybe I’m just not gelling with my preferred heroes as well as I think?

Ed: I very much echo similar thoughts to you here, James. I've spent a frightening amount of time with League Of Legends in the past, so I largely get how these MOBAs work. But I just can't quite get a hold of where a match is going in Deadlock or what my role within it should be. I imagine part of that is down to my knowledge of each hero and the game as a whole, but I'm often lost as to what those 'next steps' are. I don't know, maybe I need to adjust to the third-person perspective, cut through the frenzied fights, and learn by doing and/or watching sweaty streamers. But boy, I don't know if I've got it in me anymore. Especially not when a big obstacle lies in the UI itself. Goodness gracious.

Ollie: C’mon, Ed, the UI isn’t that bad… Hmm. Actually, maybe it is, and I’m just too used to it. I do remember being seriously wrongfooted by the health bar being placed just slightly off to the left, hovering nowhere in particular. It took me a good long while to train my eye to look there. Is that something you guys were feeling? That you’d just suddenly die without any forewarning?

A demonstration of Deadlock's messy AI, with loads of info boxes and tooltips filling the screen.

Graham: I died more than anyone, and I was looking at the health bar but it didn't help. The issue was that, even with full health, I could be cut down in certain situations extremely quickly. Which would be fine if I knew why. Was my hero a bad match-up against whatever hero I was fighting against? Did I push too far too soon? Had I fallen behind in the economy/upgrade/shopping curve? I have hundreds of hours in Team Fortress 2 but only six total hours in Dota 2, which means I understand the broad concepts of a MOBA but not any of the particulars - and I am philosophically opposed to having to do 2,000 hours of Reddit homework before I'm able to be good at a video game. It doesn't seem like it's going to be 2000 times as fun as just shooting a Soldier in the head with a Sniper's bow in TF2.

Ollie: That’s roughly how I felt about MOBAs in general when Deadlock came along. I hadn’t touched Dota 2 in about 10 years, and it was more out of curiosity than any particular enthusiasm for another MOBA in my life that I checked Deadlock out. Full disclosure, I’ve played about 120 hours now. It’s got its hooks in me somehow. I play it nearly every evening, and I’m still shite, but I at least feel like I’m past the overwhelming stage where everything seems to end with the question of "Why did that happen?" I actually think I got to grips with Deadlock a lot quicker than I got to grips with Dota 2 back in the day. Some things are definitely more streamlined here, like the shop items, and the automatic sorting of heroes into lanes at the start of the game. But I do concede that even if Deadlock is 20% easier to get into than Dota, that still makes it nearly impenetrable.

In a Deadlock match, Bebop blasts out a Hyper Beam ultimate at a distant enemy.

James: 120 hours?! So that’s why we were getting stomped so hard: the ranked matchmaking pitching us against teams of six Ollies. I will say, though, that I feel more inclined to put the work into Deadlock than I do for any current non-Dota MOBA out there. I’ve been wondering whether it really has that Valve magic, that special sauce that makes their multiplayer games feel so smooth and just slightly, satisfyingly... I dunno, chunky? And it does have a little bit of that quality peeking through, even if it’s currently buried under a lot of confusion and messy interfaces. There are still some lovely eureka moments when you figure out, say, that you can snatch an ulting McGinnis as Ivy, and use your own ultimate to fly around while your passenger fires a barrage of air-to-surface missiles. And although Bebop’s hook-bomb-punch combo plays out almost identically to Roadhog's main move in Overwatch (I know it’s more of a Pudge homage, no need to correct me once the comments come back), Deadlock’s version just feels so much slicker to pull off. So there are high points, which I guess are essential to sustaining interest when a game is essentially a long-term investment on the player’s part.

Graham: I like that the creeps have candles for heads and the wax melts as you shoot them. That was a high point.

Ed: Yeah, I must say that the creeps really do it for me, too. And I do like the pop of the currency balloons that rise from them whenever you finish them off. Creeps aside for a second, I do think the meat of Deadlock's fights and the way your hero's abilities play off each other work well, too! I took great pleasure - Ollie can attest to the glee I voiced in the chat - in playing as a little guy who rode on a big pig man, whose wombo combo felt particularly intuitive. I'd burrow under the earth like a predator molesile, spring out from the mud and send enemies flying, activate my AoE health-helper directly afterwards, chuck some sand in their eyes, then use my ultimate to pin some poor sucker down so my friends can beat them up.

Ivy pushes a Guardian, defended by player-controlled enemies, in Deadlock.

Ollie: Yeah, your glee was probably my high point of the whole thing. But again, I’m approaching this from the perspective of someone who already knows and loves Deadlock. I think another big part of learning to click with the game comes with understanding the map’s verticality. When I first started, I would stay very much at ground level, pottering about my lane until someone in chat yelled at me to go somewhere else. Now, as Pocket, one of my two mains (the other being Dynamo, for those interested), my main strategy is to buy Majestic Leap from the shop as soon as I’m out of the laning stage, so I can soar into the air and then keep myself aloft with Pocket’s Barrage ability. With this combo, the map opens up to a ludicrous degree. Highrise rooftops are but a jump away, and the ability to switch lanes in two seconds or just get an aerial view of the situation is immensely powerful. It was probably the biggest evidence of there being any kind of skill gap in our lobbies - I and possibly one other person on the enemy team would be soaring, and the rest would be at ground level. Using the ziplines and the air vents to launch yourself around is also a big deal. I wish there was an extra level of training that dealt with all this, I really think it would make beginners feel less lost.

James: Would it be fair to say that the problem with games like this isn’t so much general incomprehensibility as the lack of a good onboarding process? There’s a lot to take in - maybe too much - but it’s ultimately all based on consistent rules and logic. And there must be a middle ground between simply learning to shoot creeps as Wraith and spending the next five years of your life buried in stats sheets and YouTube tutorials. Since Deadlock is still in this experimental phase, maybe that’s something Valve can figure out before it actually hits the shelves.

In a Deadlock match, Bebop hooks and pulls in an enemy Wraith.

Ed: I definitely think they could have a better onboarding process, but ultimately, I think the best one is probably a mate taking you through the game's intricacies over the course of hundreds of hours - it's inescapable. And I think part of the joy of games like Deadlock are the ever emerging meta and strategies, all of which hooked players want to keep track of. I was once one of those people, but I broke free a long time ago. I wish everyone who takes the game seriously all the very best.

Ollie: The core of Deadlock feels like a genuinely exciting new direction for the genre. But I do wish it also took bold new steps in the direction of onboarding new players, because the first 10 hours you spend can be a real test of one’s resilience. Maybe it’s too early to judge. It’s hard to gauge Deadlock’s completeness, given its bizarre invite-fuelled pre-alpha playtesting structure. Still, I think I’d definitely be happy with Deadlock being the one MOBA that I take seriously. If I had to choose one, I’d choose the one with sliding and leaping and shooting satisfying little bubbles of currency.

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