Valve has finally lifted the lid on Deadlock, the studio’s 6v6 hero shooter MOBA hybrid that’s been an open secret for months.
The brief teaser trailer Valve revealed on its newly published Deadlock storefront gives little to nothing away, showing a large, shifty looking character standing in front of a supply store. At some point, three characters sneak past an alleyway in the far distance, and that’s about it. However, the Steam page’s genre tags confirm Deadlock is indeed an online third-person hero shooter MOBA.
Due to Valve’s baffling decision not to make players sign a formal NDA or agree to an embargo before inviting them to play Deadlock’s closed beta starting back in May, we’ve known that for a while. For clarity, the game does prompt players to click through a pop-up asking them to “not share anything about the game with anyone”, but it turns out it’s really easy to just click away from it without explicitly acknowledging or agreeing to any terms. In all my years as a video game journalist, I haven’t seen anything quite like it.
The most high-profile not-leak came from The Verge’s Sean Hollister, who wrote up his impressions and shared 24 minutes of gameplay in August after receiving an invite and clicking right past the dismissible pop-up. But well before that, people who had received invites were sharing gameplay clips and describing the game as something of a Frankenstein monster combining elements from Overwatch 2, Dota 2, Valorant, Smite, Team Fortress 2, and Orcs Must Die.
It’s very possible, likely even, that Valve didn’t intend its weird not-NDA to be so easily dismissible, but even if you could only access the game by clicking ‘OK’, that’s still a very unconventional agreement rife for abuse.
To be clear, I’m not making any excuses for taking any sides here. Valve clearly didn’t want people to share information about the then-unannounced game; it’s just weird to me that it didn’t take any additional measures to ensure that didn’t happen. Regardless, Deadlock’s Discord admin Yoshi shared a message Friday that reads, “We are lifting the rules for public conversation about Deadlock to allow for things like streaming, community websites and discussions.”
So, yes, Deadlock is now very much out in the open and we’re all free to talk about it as much as possible. The only information I could glean from its Steam page besides the genre tags is that it’s “in early development”, but if you want to know more about what it looks like, it’ll be even easier than it already was to find gameplay footage online.
Now I have the sudden urge to peruse our list of the best MOBAs. Can’t imagine why.