Valve’s upcoming multiplayer title Deadlock has seen a ton of popularity and praise even though it’s still in its playtesting phase, and some players on Reddit have recently shined a light on one major reason for its success.
The gaming community has celebrated Deadlock‘s unique approach to the MOBA and hero-shooter genres since the early days of its playtests, but one Reddit thread recently highlighted a major selling point: every character has a chance at carrying thanks to the game’s open-ended item builds and character versatility. While some fans have their own ideas of a character tier list, Deadlock’s hero pool is relatively balanced compared to other online games.
Each character in Deadlock has a set of base stats—DPS, max health, ammo, and other standard attributes found commonly in multiplayer titles—that help shape a character’s function in a match. There are no predetermined roles or assignments to specific lanes in Deadlock, however, and with no team-drafting process that shows you enemy or ally selections, your builds may vary wildly game to game as you react to the needs of each individual match.
“Yeah, I think this is the ‘secret sauce’ as to why Deadlock is succeeding so well,” one Reddit user wrote in response to the original thread. “Everybody can carry and nobody has strictly defined role, so [there’s] a ton of space for build options and personal skill expression.”
This isn’t the only praise Valve’s new online game has received. Prominent streamers like Shroud also celebrated the game, commending it for its in-depth mechanics. “Yeah, this game is gonna easily—and I mean easily—take over when it comes out,” Shroud said during a Twitch livestream earlier this week. “It’s the first arena shooter MOBA that’s actually good. All the other ones kind of stink.”
Deadlock is home to a variety of advanced mechanics many new players are unaware of: slide-jumping, infinite ammo when sliding, and dash-cancelling—just to name a few. Fans across the community have united in discovering these hidden mechanics and sharing them with newcomers.
Information about Deadlock, which was only confirmed to be in development recently, and its playtest began circulating in May, but the game has already celebrated massive player-count milestones. Before Valve ever publicly acknowledged Deadlock’s existence, the game reached north of 200,000 players earlier this month. At that time, Deadlock was nearing 20,000 concurrents. Now, when online matches are currently offline, the game has 76,000 players on Steam—half of what a mainstay title like Apex Legends has at the time of writing.
Although Deadlock currently lacks a concrete release date, players can gain access to the ongoing playtest by having a friend send them an invite.
