What Is Deadlock?

Part 1 of "What Is Deadlock" — a beginner's guide from DeadFrag

You're sliding down a staircase at highway speed, wall-jumping off a building you have no business being on, and ziplining toward a fight you are not prepared for. Below you, a sentient blob of slime named Viscous — whose entire personality is "apologetic pudding" — is dropping a giant green fist and smacking someone into a wall with the enthusiasm of a golden retriever who doesn't know he's 200 pounds. Somewhere across the map, a guy named Lash, whose complete official biography reads "Jacob Lash is an asshole," is grapple-swinging between buildings looking for someone to pile-drive into the earth from low orbit. You have four abilities. You understand maybe one of them. You have never been happier playing a video game.

That's Deadlock. Valve spent six years building it in secret, starting in 2018 under the internal codename Neon Prime, and the result is the kind of game you'd pitch as a joke. Third-person shooter, except it's a MOBA, except everyone can fly, except it's set in a haunted version of New York where two elder gods are having a custody dispute over the city. I've been covering it for months and my most honest elevator pitch is still just "it's really good and I can't fully explain why, and no, I'm not going to stop trying."

The MOBA genre has spent twenty years being the most rewarding and least inviting category of video game simultaneously. Dota 2 and League of Legends are legitimately great. They are also games where the community response to a new player asking for help is, historically, a kind of verbal violence that would get you fired from a customer service job. Every other studio that tried to make a friendlier version produced a game that was friendlier, sure, in the way that a restaurant with no food is friendlier than one with a long wait. Then the servers shut down and everyone went back to Dota.

Deadlock fixed the onboarding problem by not really having one. You load in, you can move like Spider-Man, you can shoot things, and the game is fun immediately regardless of whether you have any idea what's happening. The strategy is there — it's enormous, actually — but it doesn't stand between you and the part where you're air-dashing into someone at Mach 2 and pressing buttons until one of you explodes. The depth comes for you later. It's patient like that.

The Shape of a Match

Here's the shape of a match, roughly. Two teams of six, three lanes, a vertical map that uses elevation the way other games use it as decoration. Little guys called Troopers march down each lane in waves. You kill them and they drop Souls, which is both your money and your experience. One resource doing two jobs. Elegant if you're a designer. Stressful if you're the one watching your Soul Orbs get shot out of the air by the person across the lane who's better at this than you.

That's the denial mechanic — your opponent can shoot the Souls you earned before you pick them up. So laning is simultaneously farming, fighting, and a small-stakes humiliation contest happening every eight seconds. The game communicates most of this through space rather than UI, which means people from shooters learn the mechanics fast and people from MOBAs learn the strategy fast, and both groups spend about a week absolutely baffled by the other half before something clicks and they become the same person.

Items define everything. The Curiosity Shop has over 170 of them and the game provides approximately zero guidance on what to buy. The same hero built for weapon damage and the same hero built for spirit damage are functionally two different characters who happen to share a model. You figure out what works by buying the wrong thing and dying, which is how I learned most things in life.

If all of that sounds exhausting, the January 2026 Old Gods, New Blood update added Street Brawl — a 4v4 mode where there's no farming, no laning, no twenty-minute commitment to a decision you made at minute three. You pick from randomized items between short rounds and just hit each other. A bad buy costs you thirty seconds instead of your will to live.

The Cast

The characters are the part that's hardest to describe without sounding like I'm reading from a fever dream. Silver is a werewolf bounty hunter who transforms mid-fight and whose human kit and wolf kit are functionally two different heroes sharing one health bar. Rem is a small creature in pajamas who toddles into lane carrying a candle, looking like something you'd buy at a gift shop, and then erases you. Pocket is an heir to a corporate dynasty who escapes danger by climbing into a mystic suitcase and whose sentient cloak — the cloak is sentient, not the suitcase, the suitcase is just a suitcase — scouts ahead so Pocket can teleport to it. Lash is an underground pit fighter. His bio is one sentence. Several of these heroes are still running around with placeholder models and animations. They have more personality unfinished than most shipped games have on purpose.

The Old Gods, New Blood update announced six new heroes, releasing two per week. The community votes on the order via a ballot box in the game lobby — you earn votes by playing matches. Rem, Graves, Silver, and Venator have already dropped. Celeste and Apollo round out the six. If you want to know which heroes are actually performing right now — as in today, not five days ago — Zeitgeist tracks pro picks and win rates in real time.

What's Rough

Now, in the interest of not writing an advertisement: the game is a mess. A beautiful, addictive, impressively deep mess, but a mess. It's invite-only on Steam, though the invites flow freely enough that "invite-only" means roughly nothing. The item shop has over 170 items with no tutorial. Patches land multiple times a week and regularly rework heroes mid-season, which means the build guide you bookmarked yesterday might now be a guide to losing. Some of the new heroes shipped with placeholder animations that don't match their kits. The map went from four lanes to three at one point. This is not a finished game. It mostly feels like one until it suddenly, conspicuously doesn't.

None of this has slowed it down. Deadlock hit 171,000 concurrent players in September 2024 when word first got out, went through a quieter stretch where Valve just kept iterating, and Silver's release in February 2026 pushed it back above 116,000. IceFrog — the developer whose twenty years on Dota essentially wrote the textbook on competitive depth in this genre — is reportedly leading the project. The game is technically in "early development," which at this point is the same energy as a restaurant that's been in "soft opening" for a year and a half and has a wait list.

The Competitive Scene

The competitive scene has no official Valve support and already matters. Night Shift is a weekly grassroots tournament running in NA and EU — community-organized, no infrastructure from the developer, just people who decided this game was worth competing in before anyone told them it was. DeadFrag covers it: match recaps, team analysis, player profiles, and the weekly debate about which hero is ruining the game this time. If you want to track your own progress, Statlocker gives you personal match data — hero win rates, performance trends, concrete evidence of whether you're improving or just accumulating hours.

What's Next

This is Part 1 of five. Part 2 covers the Soul economy — farming, denial, the resource game that separates players who understand Deadlock from players who just play it.

If you want to skip the series and just load the game up, that also works. Deadlock teaches you plenty by itself, mostly through the medium of killing you until you figure out what happened. This series is for when you want to skip ahead on that process — or when you want to understand what you're watching when you spectate a match and everyone seems to know something you don't.

Next: Part 2 — Souls, Lanes, and the Economy of Violence.