Valve's Deadlock gets a massive update - still a while away from a public release

Valve's MOBA shooter Deadlock just had a massive upgrade with new visuals, new heroes, and lots more. Titled "City Never Sleeps", it makes the game feel quite a lot more complete but the developers have said there's still plenty more work to be done before it's actually ready.

You still need to be invited to play, and we have a new GamingOnLinux Forum Post where you can ask for one.

Some highlights of the new update:

In an announcement on Steam they said:

"We also wanted to take this opportunity to talk about where we are with the development of the game and what to look forward to in the future. Our team has been incredibly happy and surprised with how passionate and supportive the community has been the past couple of years; every day someone shares something cool they've seen from the community with the rest of the team, and we are thankful for the constant support and useful feedback, despite the game being unfinished. We think building a multiplayer game is very hard and risky, and the best way to minimize that risk to make sure that we are able to have it in players' hands from an early state to help us shape it and tell us what is fun and what isn't. So, we wanted to give you all more insight into what we've been focusing on internally, as part of developing this game with your help and guidance.

After the Old Gods New Blood update, we felt that there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself before we moved onto more polish phases of the game development (like updating older hero artwork). Unlike previous updates where our efforts were more singularly focused on the key parts of that update, this year we've been working on several different things in parallel. A good number of those are things you can see in today's update. Some others are things we've been working on in the last few months alongside this update. This even includes things like progression and hero/hideout customizations, as we feel those are features we want to be able to adjust and significantly change based on feedback before the game is fully released. There are also other things we've been working on recently that are more speculative (as in we aren't 100% sure if they will be released or not based on how playtesting goes, though results so far have been promising) like large item redesigns/additions and alternate game modes that expand the scope of the game.

Then there are other things like Midboss (both the model and the layout to a degree), Guardians and Walkers, which we do consider important but just haven't gotten to yet and will be focusing on for upcoming updates. On the other hand, things like hero remodels were in our heads as something we'd get to later, towards the end of early development, after other core aspects of the game were more fleshed out. That doesn't mean we don't think they are important by any means, just that they are more of a known quantity to us that don't necessarily need to be done earlier than other things. That being said, we will likely be gradually working on them in the near future for inclusion in upcoming updates alongside other work.

We hope you will like this update. Thank you all for your continued support so far during development, and don't forget to Vote!"

Since it has anti-cheat it's listed on our dedicated SteamOS / Linux compatibility page.

I'm really keen to see this finally release fully. Valve have been doing some really interesting work with it, and I think they really are onto something. Going by SteamDB charts, it has a very active player-base too, even before this update it was regularly hitting 80,000 players. It's sure to be a hit at release - as long as they keep it from becoming too complicated.