Valve’s third-person hero shooter Deadlock hasn’t even been officially announced yet, but thousands of you heartless fiends are playing it thanks to stolen development versions. Speculation abounds that these “leaks,” combined with Valve’s stubborn silence on the matter, are a calculated publisher psi-op. Are they deliberately letting people play the game early to somehow soften the marketing launch? Perhaps they’re trying to address early player criticism by using the excuse that it’s not being announced? It seems unlikely, but as other writers have noted, this is Valve, the irresponsible old god of PC gaming. I guess we should just be thankful that this isn’t another Half-Life hint.
The scale of the leaks means we have a pretty solid idea of how Deadlock players will play. Specifically, The Verge's Sean Hollister has posted some thoughts after playing a few rounds of the leaked build, thus drawing the wrath of Valve's orbital ban hammer.
The short version is that it's kind of like Overwatch and Team Fortress 2, with more of a MOBA style, lanes and creature elements, and a steampunk setting that reminded me of Dishonored's Dunwall (plus a microtransaction store, but you expected that). It's 6v6 combat, and each team gets a retinue of NPC Soldiers who constantly spawn around your base and attempt to conquer a series of enemy positions. Blast through every fortification in front of you and you'll reach their base and fight their Boss – a giant, flying sphere with arms. The game's heroes (there are 20 in the leaked development build) get light and heavy attacks, and a parry.
As the match progresses, you can trade resources from slain enemies for special abilities—for example: lifesteal, energy barriers, a form of electro-grappling—but you can only do so back at the base. That's where the game's skyrails come in: These Bioshock Infinitesimal fixtures allow you to fast-travel up and down each map lane. According to Hollister, the skyrails are located far from the map's main fire lines, so you can't use them relentlessly to attack from the air.
As reported by SteamDB and relayed by cheerful RPS kids' party imitator PCGamer , the leaked development build reached 18,254 players yesterday. That's almost as much popularity as Europa Universalis IV in the last 24 hours. After 15 years of making this comparison, my mind has grown steadily into a zero-sum hellscape where games compete for my affection like Soldiers competing to smash each other's Bosses – predictably enough, parachuting in for one last Deadlock analogy, because originality is dead in games journalism.
Hopefully Valve will announce it soon so we can write about it without looking over our shoulders for fear of being stabbed in the back. By the way, how about Project White Sands, huh?