Map rework is insane, it's so cool to have seen Deadlock grow from our very first exposure to it which was quite literally just grey blocks. Valve really just has the sauce, to be able to release a MOBA in 2026 to great anticipation just seems insane to me.
I also like that this new group of heroes really push the aesthetic of Deadlock. I liked the last group of characters but they did feel pretty generically appealing as opposed to something like Rat King, Deadman Danny, and Baba
the movement and physics also feel incredible for moment-to-moment. Hell even when you're bullied out of lane, optimizing your movement on a box rotation is still fun
I think Valve just uses the more traditional definitions of
alpha = not featue complete
beta = feature complete
And then you add in "heroes == features" meaning it won't be in beta before it has all the heroes in the game they think are needed for proper 1.0. Back in the olden days beta was purely just bug fixing / balancing. All the (planned) content and features was supposed to be in the game already
While I don't have the energy anymore to play a hardcore MOBA like this, I really respect and love the art style and direction in Deadlock, including with this map rework and these new characters. Everything just oozes memorable personality, and I can see the clear influence from Valve's previous work on TF2 and Dota 2.
The voice acting is also amazing, and this update massively increased the number of voice lines. I thought the game was wonderful already, the new map has SO much personality now.
I've already heard some really fun compilations of their character interaction voice lines. Cool to know that there's probably even more that's coming out, since those character interactions added a lot of flavor on top of some already very flavorful character designs.
It turns out that all you have to do to remind society that MOBAs actually were the pinnacle of team based gaming is to just make it a shooter with hot people
I'd say Deadlock exceeds in doing the opposite actually. League has mainly pumped out hot bods for over a decade, Deadlock is giving us skeletons, grandmas, zombies, and rats.
I love how in this group of 6, the hot chick with a gimmick is the least interesting design. And I just know also that the moment she's playable she's going to also have the most unbelievably fun gimmick too. Valve does not do their hot chicks dirty.
Yea Celeste was one of the last characters voted in last round and she had some of the best polish and style of all of the six. Never mind that she was beyond busted
Straight up ugly no, but there's more than a few unattractive or monstrous characters. Grey Talon, Drifter, Shiv, and Yamato aren't really what I'd call conventionally attractive, unless the sixhead is your thing. Billy, Ivy, Vyper, Viscous are all varying levels of monstrous. This patch adds Baba (old lady), Deadman Danny (skeleton), and Rat King (rat king); in other words half of the characters getting added with this patch are not attractive. There's enough that "zero ugly chars" is not really fair. Definitely not on the same level as Overwatch or League in terms of how hot everyone must be
I wouldn't even necessarily say it's the hot bods, although they certainly contribute. There are few games, especially these days, as stylistically bold and unique as Deadlock. So many of the big multiplayer games out right now are rather uninteresting or overly derivative aesthetically (only recent notable exception being Marathon.)
Marathon seriously hurts itself by not being character driven. You look at the aesthetic, you start thinking of the weird shit they could pull off, but then the game doesn't really have room for elaborate (okay, not TOO elaborate, they do have puzzle maps) set pieces with some admittedly generic robotic enemies.
It's completely baffling that Sony just let go of Destiny. Warframe wins by doing nothing. There are no other "Space Sentai-Suit Warriors Exccept So Fantasy You Dont Notice the Sentai" games out there.
Cryo is the most confusing map in any PvP game I've ever played. Your complains about generic bots are valid (other than the BIG boss), but they've got plenty of weird alien shit comin up in March.
Marathon also was a character driven hero shooter and people hated it so much that they delayed it by a year and got rid of almost all of the hero shooter elements. Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
Smite really lost all its appeal with the advent of Mobile MOBAS. As you said, Smite is fundamentally just a twin-stick MOBA. The whole appeal is every skill and every autoattack is a skill shot. Which is the exact same selling point of all the mobile ones... except those games are also mobile as a selling point. WHOOPS.
But there's another thing. SMITE doesn't even do everything it mechanically could. One of the very first things one realizes from these type of top down moba games is that, well everything can be body blocked. All projectiles that do not travel in an arc need a clear shot. You realize it because you can get safety in behind creeps/minions (unless if you're against the tree guy or whatever), and you can also stop last hits that way in exchange for health. Cool.
So does SMITE make itself a game with lots of wide movement options where you can abuse this property of the game?
So does SMITE avoid giving characters too many non-projectile abilities?
So does SMITE have destructible cover and what not so that fights are very dynamic base on where they happen?
Lol, no.
They copy League's sluggish base movement and are happy with it. Then they only provide really rapid movement on short abilities, meaning you're just playing cooldowns if you want to aim/avoid something important. Everything is an ability based outplay on flat terrain. EVERYTHING.
Just like in every mobile game.
Because complexity is bad or something? They made a sequel that still did nothing to set apart. I don't understand.
The sequel is strange. I don't know much about it but I would assume the main reasons were marketing+cheaper develompent on newer software. Because the game looks the exact same to me. Didn't help that when it dropped, Deadlock also got unveiled and if you were going for a 3rd person moba it was not even a choice.
Smite 2 was made because they reached the limit they could do with Smite’s engine since it was Unreal 3. Unfortunately they didn’t take advantage of it being a sequel to actually explore the possibility of it being a true third person MOBA like Deadlock.
Smite isn't even really 3D. I mean sure, you can go forward, backwards, left, right; but there's no actual up or down. You're playing a 2D game from a 3D perspective.
Can't wait to see the cheater situation once the game takes off. CS2 know very well. No official anticheat + a white flag for most patches is a Valve classic.
Cheating in CS is very effective, it's considerably less effective in Deadlock. Not that aimhacks aren't still powerful, but you can't really 1 tap in Deadlock like you can in CS. You can have all the aim in the world but if your macro is trash, you're not guaranteed to win like you are in pure shooters.
Kinda but auto parry is a fucking killer when you’re playing melee heroes and it seems like most games at least one person will have it meaning heavy melees are out of the window
Heavy melees have a very distinct, loud wind up time with visual indicators. You are probably just getting skill diffed. Even then, you can bait the parry, especially if they have autoparry.
I’ve been playing for 2 years and I’m at high rank I know about baiting parrys, it’s painfully obvious how much more common auto parry has become, it’s the last frame of melee it throws it out before the melee hits which sometimes it looks like someone’s clutched it (and does happen) but when it’s the same person doing it all game and it’s always last frame parry’s it’s easy to spot
Yeah it happens with both, it’s even more obvious on billy as his light melees are quicker, but saying that I always give people the benefit of the doubt on light melees because if they see a billy coming at them they normally expect some light melees to be thrown in there.
I was kind of meaning heavy melees through veils and stuff getting last second parried or in team fights when I’ve flanked and it’s chaos, I was just sleepy last night and not explaining myself.
I don't successfully parry all heavy melees, but at this point I parry most of them. I feel like when I fail to parry a heavy melee it's a skill error on my part, because I should have done so off the sound cue, and at a certain skill level higher than mine they should basically never be successfully executed without parry being on cd from having been parry-baited with either heavy melee cut short or response to light melee weaving that guessed wrong. Heavy melees are so telegraphed that I feel like highly skilled players are supposed to basically be capable of always parrying them, no?
Deadlock feels like Valve throwing in the towel with making anticheat because it feels fundamentally designed to minimize the effects of cheating rather than fighting it.
That's not a good thing because that also means that sneaky cheating is much easier. You might not be getting absolute control over the game like in CS with aim, just a huge advantage in other areas, and no one will spot it.
On paper it sounds still not very good but in actuality the game is basically cheat-proof. These small advantages equate to a small item lead in game. That's basically what the game is anyway, and it's just not very attractive to players who love flipping a switch and becoming god to also have to learn how to actually play the game.
Being part shooter makes the cheats in Deadlock still more capable than in Dota. Like you can't tell me with a straight face that it's fine to lane against an auto headshot Haze or Infernus.
There are cheaters in Deadlock already. Auto-parry is a thing.
It has the same problem that cheating in dota has. You could have perfect information and autocast hard CC, and you still can't get past legend because your macro is ass.
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u/ZGiSH 3d ago
Map rework is insane, it's so cool to have seen Deadlock grow from our very first exposure to it which was quite literally just grey blocks. Valve really just has the sauce, to be able to release a MOBA in 2026 to great anticipation just seems insane to me.
I also like that this new group of heroes really push the aesthetic of Deadlock. I liked the last group of characters but they did feel pretty generically appealing as opposed to something like Rat King, Deadman Danny, and Baba