Despite my experience with League of Legends (the videogame) being incredibly minimal, I've spent years in admiration and awe at League of Legends (the music). Riot has found a real knack for taking its champs and turning them into bona fide popstars, rockstars, and hip-hop stars—bringing in talented and well-established artists across the globe and carving out a space in the mainstream music world with certified bangers fronted by fictional characters.

Some might argue (it's me, I'm some) that Riot Music found the height of its success towards the end of the 2010s with the likes of K-pop girl group K/DA's Pop/Stars and hip-hop group True Damage and their song Giants. The former, in particular, made waves when it released—it topped charts and led to K/DA becoming the first K-pop girl group to be certified platinum. That's not to say it hasn't done anything good since, mind, as 2023 saw Riot convert six of its champs into the boyband Heartsteel, with a distinctly cheeky vibe.

It makes it even more surprising, then, that Riot Music has barely done a thing with any group in the years since. K/DA returned in 2020 with a new look and new EP—which was a banger, by the way—but True Damage and Heartsteel were one-hit wonders, and K/DA has lain dormant for the last six years.

Until now, that is. Over the last couple months, as League of Legends ramps up for its annual Worlds finals, it's been bringing them back from the dead. Heartsteel was the first to make a comeback with the significantly softer Live My Life, and it was… fine. Certainly not my favourite, and the kind of vibe shift I hadn't quite expected from its previous bad-boy persona.

Next came True Damage with Know My Name. It's probably the group that feels closest to its old tone, though I'm sincerely missing Keke Palmer's vocals this time around. The thing that made me more sad with this group's return is its music video—listen, I know Faker is a big deal. But the thing I love with these groups are the champs it puts forward. Having an entire music video dedicated to T1 with barely a glimpse of the champs who serve as a mascot for the song defeats the point of these fictional groups in the first place, at least for me.

But it feels like Riot was saving up all its hype (and perhaps budget) for the return of K/DA. It is still wild to me that the developer has sat on one of the biggest mainstream successes it's seen—I literally only played League of Legends a few months ago, while I've owned the Secretlab K/DA chair for over five years, for example—but the wait has truly been worth it.

It feels like someone at Riot Music really understands what makes K-pop as moreish as it is, because new single Firestarter has been on non-stop repeat for me since it came out. It also brought Fortiche on board for the music video—that's the studio behind both Arcane's animation and the original Pop/Stars MV—for a real full-budget experience.

K/DA is also the only one of the three to get more than one song out of its revival. The group has a four-song EP that just landed, one which grew on me massively over the course of, erm, listening to it on repeat for six hours straight. But it's one that boasts immense production value, as well as the benefit of having K-pop superstars Soyeon and Miyeon from I-dle returning and giving K/DA that much-needed familiar sound.

I think in a battle of the League of Legends bands, K/DA was always going to emerge victorious. It's the one that broke MOBA containment, after all. But with the group sharing the joint stage alongside True Damage during the Worlds finals in New York next month, it's clear Riot has its favourite. And can I blame them? Absolutely not, because K/DA is my favourite too.

Deadlock's most recent round of hero voting amid the City Never Sleeps release has finally come to an end. First we had the one and only Rat King, then Baba, Solomon, Deadman Danny, Violet, and finally, Nurse Harrow, a support with some unorthodox methods.

From the very beginning I've seen some pretty hardcore Nurse Harrow fans, so I was quite surprised to see her take last place, but Valve has revealed that it wasn't actually that close. 110 million votes were cast in total throughout the entire event with just 22,194 players exclusively voting for Nurse Harrow, however, "one player cast exactly 1,000 votes for her", which shows some real dedication.

But Nurse Harrow fans have something that no one else in Deadlock has: skill. "Nurse Harrow voters consistently proved to have a higher win rate over all other hero voters." Well I didn't vote for Nurse Harrow and they've read me like a book, so that seems pretty accurate I guess.

Other interesting tidbits concerning the City Never Sleeps voting round include how the closest contest was Baba vs Solomon for second place. I personally voted for Solomon but I wasn't too disappointed seeing how Baba has ridiculously good mobility, melee, and can turn enemies into pigeons. I really love that last one.

It also turns out that I am one of the 36,236 players who voted in every round and never once picked that round's winner, not including Nurse Harrow at the end because she was the last option left. What can I say? I'm just not like other Deadlock players. In my defence, though, only 847 players managed to vote in every single round and pick that round's eventual winner, so the number of oracles that play among us is almost next to none.

I have to admit, seeing the voting come to a close leaves me a little melancholic. Community events like this are massively fun and really well orchestrated in Deadlock, and who knows when we'll get another one. Valve likes to work at their own pace so your guess is as good as mine.

League of Legends Classic was Riot's attempt to capitalise on nostalgia for vintage-era LoL. It stripped away most of the champions and kits introduced since 2013, reverted to an older version of the Summoner's Rift map, and promised to roll out "new" old Champions at a faster clip than in the olden days.

But the nostalgia Riot must have hoped would sustain the mode hasn't proven sufficient enough to keep it running: the mode will go offline in January 2027, only six months after its launch.

"We’ve seen a lot of players have fun revisiting the olden days with Classic," a Riot spokesperson wrote in a new update. "At this point though, most have gone back to other parts of League."

As a result, the current season will be the last. "We’ll then put Classic back in the box for now, with the goal of bringing it back, likely as an event mode with adjustments and additions."

It continues: "There’s more we’re going to share in the future about what we learned from this run. That includes where we think we got Classic right, where we could have gone more classic, and where sticking too closely to the past may have held the experience back."

Refunds will be issued for Classic content rendered obsolete by the closure. And it's not the end of the line yet: there are at least seven more Champions still to roll out, including Mordekaiser, Yorick, Hecarim and Lucian in the forthcoming 26.21 update, and Vilibear, Urgot and Udyr in future ones.

"This game mode was a true labor of love from so many Rioters, and seeing you all dive back in to reclaim the nostalgia, reconnect with old friends, and relive your glory days made it a truly special moment for everyone. We will keep exploring different ways to play League and as always, we appreciate all of your feedback. Every post on social media asking for Classic, every vote cast in the Council, and every minute spent leashing for your jungler again helped us bring this to life, so thank you very much."

What was wrong with Classic? Back in August, League of Legends esports veteran Alex Chu (also known as Xpecial) offered his thoughts on why uptake might be slow for players accustomed to modern LoL. His words came at a time when a lot of the LoL community were criticising the concept.

Chu then speculated a future for Classic that never eventuated, or at least, likely won't now.

"The interesting part is what happens now that the reins are loosened," he added. "We could end up with a version of League that players vote for things that would never fly with a mass audience. More complicated drafts. The ability to ban a champion for an entire season. Forcing a marksman mid meta or a mage bot meta just because the council wants to see it. Modern League can't do any of that, because modern League has to appeal to everyone. Classic only has to appeal to enough people."

Chu's thoughts aside, it's possible that old LoL just doesn't have the nostalgic appeal of old World of Warcraft, old Runescape, or old Guild Wars. Those are spaces you inhabit and they are generally less high pressure and adversarial. They become a kind of home away from home, whereas LoL is always just a hugely competitive MOBA. A good one that you can build a lifestyle around, but a MMORPG it ain't.

LoL also evolves much faster than those older MMOs did. Back in 2013, LoL was receiving new champions every two to three weeks, which could affect the whole experience. By contrast, MMOs at the time generally only received seismic updates on a yearly basis at most: much more time for a game condition to sink in.

Deadlock isn't technically out yet—but it's pretty easy to get into, with invites to its beta being generously granted by Valve and obtainable in plenty of Discord communities if you don't have other mates who're into MOBAs. And boy howdy, have I not regretted a single one of my 350 hours over the past couple years "testing" this game.

I've plenty of glowing words for Deadlock, but its latest update, City Never Sleeps, is like seeing one of the last few hammer-blows of a masterpiece. The entire map's been completely overhauled, with new neutral monsters and a richly-textured remake of its areas, though "remake" doesn't seem like the right word.

Rather than taking what was present in the old map and scrapping it, the new Cursed Apple feels like a deepening of what was already there, adding texture and quirks in the nooks and crannies. The already-bustling centre lane of Broadway has become a glowing neon metropolis full of buzzing signs and advertisements, a miniature rendition of a 1950s times square at its heart.

Greenwich, which was already overgrown with foliage, has been turned into a spooky occult rendition of Central Park, with a university and an arboreal garden. Meanwhile, York, which previously just hinted at industriality, has had its walker arenas turned into a stock exchange and a grit-slathered factory ground.

It's all very, very pretty.

But it's not just the lanes that've been overhauled—the midway points, "districts", have been reinvented with their own flavours, too. Previously these were just extensions of the lanes themselves, but they now each have distinct characters (and neutral monsters, or "creeps", to match).

You've got a theater district full of creepy dolls piloted by phantom hands, floating festival spirits and haunted cabbage pots lurking in Chinatown, a plaza with an ominous demonic Atlas holding a glowing sphere—an Ixian embassy, perhaps?—plagued by decrepit souls and gutter ghouls.

My favourite areas in this map are the library and the haunted lot, especially. The former because it's filled with "past dues", little book goblins that literally attack you with late return stamps. And the latter because it has barrel mimics, my new favourite little guys. They're lurking there with tire irons like an actual organised criminal gang.

This rehash of the Cursed Apple really properly establishes just how supernaturally doused Valve's idea of a 1950s occult New York is. The entire thing is just teeming with creative and inventive design, bursting at the bloody seams with character. I am astonished that the map—which is by all accounts actually relatively small, able to be crossed in a minute or two of efficient movement—manages to feel so sprawling and varied.

All of this is buoyed by two things: Its new characters, and the heap of new dialogue.

Deadlock's character designs are all delightful—but the new roster of heroes is legitimately some of Valve's best work yet. It's kinda telling that the least interesting character, an art student named Violet, is still super charming, with paint smudges on her legs tying the whole aesthetic together.

But these other characters are just delightful. Deadman Danny's a willing skeletal crash test dummy/salesman for Fairfax Industries' weapons, Nurse Harrow is either a lovecraftian entity or a biblically accurate angel wrapped up in a severe, mature nurse that all of my friends are being entirely normal about, and there's the Rat King. Who has over 100 bespoke voicelines entirely calling out his subject's names.

My favourite two designs by far, however, are torn straight from New York's park culture: Solomon, a chess-loving old man who appears to've gained some supernatural powers via all his hours in Central Park, and Baba.

I cannot tell you how much I love Baba. Taking the myth of the Baba Yaga—a witch that traditionally occupies a chicken-legged hut—and reinventing her as an old grandma who feeds pigeons, riding around on a bird-legged park bench? It's just so, so good.

And the already-existing cast has been expanded horizontally, too. The update poured in dozens upon dozens of new conversations and voice lines between the crew, fleshing out characters, hinting at new lore, and—in the case of Pocket and Mina—breaking my bleeding romantic heart.

All of this combined has made Deadlock's Cursed Apple one of my new favourite videogame settings basically ever—so appealing and interesting to me that I almost wish it wasn't wrapped up in a MOBA. However, even if you aren't going to devote the hundreds of hours of masochism required to understand this unassailable genre, I still recommend you check Deadlock out and just soak in its vibes. It's an unfinished masterwork that's almost taken shape.

Valve's latest MOBA might still technically be conducting an invite-only test, but it's nevertheless one of the most popular games of its ilk. Yesterday, right as the game added the latest in its current batch of six new democratically released heroes, its concurrent player-count hit a new screaming high: 262,145 simultaneous players, according to SteamDB.

While that's pretty impressive on its face, it'll be especially noteworthy to long-time fans of Valve's games that this surge of activity brought Deadlock past Team Fortress 2's all-time concurrent player count peak of 253,997.

Though this doesn't include the player numbers TF2 saw on the Xbox 360 and PS3 as part of The Orange Box, which I'm sure were positively through the roof, it's still conceivably its genuine peak given that it was just three years ago. As for how TF2's history of botting issues and idle servers might have affected that number, I can't say.

It's not a one-to-one—PC gaming was a smaller phenomenon overall when TF2 was at the height of its popularity, and its Quake-descended slapstick arguably appeals to a smaller crowd than a hero shooter-MOBA hybrid does today—but it's an impressive showing for Deadlock given that the MOBA space is notoriously hard to break into.

I guess that's the power of having a digital storefront so massive that you can afford to perform mad science experiments on a game for multiple years without making a single cent off of it directly. Not that things always go this way for Valve; remember Artifact?

Regardless, let's all remember that it was specifically the latest hero, the chess mage Solomon, who got the game to this point. His gun is a chess board which players are reporting recreates a different historic game state every time you reload depending on how many bullets you have to load the field with (I'll have to defer to the chess-heads in the crowd on the veracity of that). That sort of novelty certainly plays a role in the test's momentum, which has only seemed to pick up since it first leaked two years ago.

Deadlock is one of the most delightful things happening in videogame art direction. It's a festival of phenomenal vibes: a striking setting, an all-timer aesthetic that bleeds into every scrap of environmental art and UI element, and—crucially—a roster of instantly charming occult character designs.

That roster, however, is missing something—a few somethings, in fact. While Deadlock's heroes cover a broad spectrum of the spooky and supernatural, it's got some glaring gaps where foundational elements of cryptozoology and occult lore are sorely overlooked. But don't fret, Valve designers: I've done your next round of ideation for you. I've prepared some promising character concepts that, I think we'll all agree, will realize the Cursed Apple's untapped potential. Let's begin:

The Summer Mummy (from Heathcliff)

Deadlock's already got draculas. It's got werewolves. It's got a Frankenstein. When you're already this deep in monster mash territory, a mummy's a layup. It's Spooky Stuff 101. The problem, however, is that it's not enough to be just a mummy in New York. New York is where they make cool people. If you're going to hang with the Cursed Apple's finest, you're going to need style.

Enter the Summer Mummy, a character first introduced in Heathcliff—the comic strip about the orange cat who isn't Garfield—on August 17, 2023. The Summer Mummy is much like your typical bandaged revenant, except chill and fun. He wears floral boardshorts. He has sunglasses. He eats ice cream (the Summer Mummy gets the sand flavor). He's an instant crowd pleaser, and it's an incredible cross-promotional opportunity. Everyone's trying to tap the lucrative Heathcliff brand.

A minotaur who plays baseball professionally

Just to be clear: No, I didn't come up with this one because "bullpen" is a baseball thing. I just thought a minotaur in an old-timey baseball uniform would look sick. I only realized the bullpen bit afterwards—but as far as I'm concerned, that was me getting a thumbs up from an angel for my very good work.

What was the labyrinth if not the most mythological bullpen of them all? The minotaur might've been warming up his pitching arm down there. Gotta pass the time somehow. Oh! He could throw a curveball that follows a nonsense, labyrinthine path through the air. Call it a Daedalian Knuckleball or something. Give him a bull rush ability called "charge the mound." Stuff writes itself. Put my check in the mail.

The Loch Ness Monster's precocious preteen child

There's a lot to love about this one: First, Nessie is already confirmed Deadlock canon, having arrived on Earth through the Bermuda Triangle astral gate. Second, there's never a bad time for more Scottish accents. Third, they could be buddies with Rem, Deadlock's adorable sleepspace creature.

But what really makes Nessie Jr. (legally, that name might be taken) a winner is the microtransaction potential: Give this kid a character lunchbox, and once Deadlock starts rolling out purchasable skins, people will pay whatever you ask just to see different fictional licensed properties slapped on there. It's infinite money.

Three gnomes in a trench coat

I'll confess: I don't have a lot to flesh this entry out with. Mostly, I just think it would be neat for all of them to have little guns under there. Maybe they're in the mob? A gnome mafia. The Cosa Gnomestra. I don't know. Do your best.

A haunted suit of armor (who is a boxer)

Everyone loves an animated suit of armor. Much like with the Summer Mummy, however, there's some aesthetic work that needs to be done to bring the image in line with Deadlock's aesthetic theme. And much like with the Summer Mummy, I've identified a shorts-centric solution—boxing shorts, in this case. And boxing gloves. A plate armor prize fighter who could play like the third-person MOBA-shooter equivalent of Little Mac.

Now, you might ask, does Deadlock need yet another prize fighter when it already has Lash and Bebop? And to that I'd say: Neither of them has cartoonishly big shorts, do they? It's like you're not even paying attention.

Big spider

There was, admittedly, already an unreleased spider-themed hero during Deadlock's Hero Labs days, but frankly, why half-ass it? Just go full spider. Let it walk on all the surfaces. Give it eight weapons for each of its eight limbs. Is it really a videogame if there isn't a large enemy spider in there somewhere?

Big spider (sexy)

I can't take credit for this one:

Humpty Dumpty

We all know the deal: on wall, great fall, horses and men prove inadequate at reconstructive surgery, etc. But I'm imagining this is the Humpty Dumpty that's had to go on living knowing the world failed him in his darkest moment—a sort of Punished "Venom" Dumpty situation. He's fighting in the Ritual not to restore his own broken form, but to create a world for other shattered eggs like himself. It's the kind of grim antihero that audiences crave.

And he could, like, roll around to attack sometimes, maybe. That's fun.

The rest of the monkey that the Monkey's Paw came off of

That thing had to come from somewhere, right? If the Paw can grant wishes, imagine what all the other parts of the enchanted monkey must be capable of. Surely, it must have been severed from the limb of a sort of simian arch-sorcerer, who possessed a command over magicks so profound as to reconfigure the flow of fate itself.

What I'm saying is he could shoot energy balls from his stump like it was a Mega Man arm cannon and it would rule. And maybe he does street magic in Times Square. For walking around money.

North Pole elf labor rights activist

I think we've all known it for a long time: There's something untoward about the whole Santa Claus operation. We're meant to believe that an entire society is content with knowing no life beyond the ceaseless churn of toy production under the rule of a treat-crazed overlord? Really?

I don't buy it—and that's exactly why there's a hero who's ventured to New York to foster awareness and support for the plight of their fellows still trapped toiling at the Kringle company town up north. They could create a bunch of nutcracker soldiers as their ult, but they'd be nutcracker soldiers of the revolution.

One of the deer from Staten Island, but it was turned into a sapient anthropoid by some sort of cursed amulet and is struggling to adjust to city life on account of antlers making it hard to get into buildings

Label sorta says it all, really.

Bigfoot (he is running for mayor)

It just makes sense. He's a compelling figure. He's all-American. He's privacy conscious and likely has a sensible platform regarding municipal walkability. He's been around long enough that he probably knows a few spells, and he's big enough that he could handle a Lewis gun like an airsoft rifle.

He'd have my vote, is what I'm saying. And the best part is: You'd be able to listen to the other heroes grill Bigfoot about his political stances. That's videogames to me.

Ignore the section tag for this article, because while Deadlock may technically have the DNA of a MOBA or a third-person shooter, it is actually a horror game, and a bloody scary one at that.

How did I come to this hypothesis, you ask? Well, a few reasons come to mind, including one huge one that loves pizza. You see, I predominantly play Rem, and one of Rem's perks is that he can run around the maze of tunnels beneath the map, farming souls and just generally getting up to no good. Until recently I was largely left alone in said tunnels; I hardly ever play against a Calico and Mo and Krill rarely use them.

And then came Deadlock's latest major update City Never Sleeps, which brought six new heroes, the first of which being the Rat King. Ironically I actually voted for the Rat King, and that decision haunts me.

Picture this. I'm skedaddling around the tunnels minding my own business when, in the corner of my eye I see something staring at me from the end of one of the adjacent tunnels. It's the Rat King, he's seen me, and he's running my way.

I throw everything I have at the rat but that still isn't enough to defeat him. I decide my only option is to turn tail and run, the only problem with that is that when you're locked in combat the map closes down the exits and entrances to the tunnels, something I forgot until I ran head first into a grated exit. Needless to say I died in that cold dark tunnel, and there wasn't much I could've done about it.

I have been jumpscared by that bloody giant rat more times than I care to admit. Each time I enter the tunnels now my blood runs cold, marred by memories of him hunting me down and throwing Miguel, Jacques, or Abbie with an I at me.

But the horror isn't restricted to the tunnels. Just the other night I was walking through one of the new districts, Chinatown, and accidentally crossed paths with the enemy Abrams. At first I thought that he might not have seen me. I was wrong. I looked back just once to see him right behind me, before I knew it I'd been shoved into the wall and the enemy Seven appeared out of thin air to solo ult me for some ungodly reason.

Perhaps I'm too horror-coded for my own good, and thanks to this I managed to find myself in terrifying scenarios no matter what game I play. But I'm also of the mindset that any online multiplayer game is inherently scary simply because of the fact that people are unpredictable and are almost always out for blood.

The Cursed Apple, wherein Valve’s latest MOBA Deadlock takes place, is ‘an urban fantasy setting’ in the same way that Limp Bizkit is ‘an American rock band.’ Sure, the label is accurate, but Deadlock is unmistakably, crucially, and specifically New York the same way Fred Durst is sort of like the living avatar of Jacksonville, Florida.

The latest batch of new heroes just unveiled as part of the City Never Sleeps embraces this aspect of the game and takes it to new heights. Almost all the new characters are the sights and sounds of New York City: old man playing chess in the park? That’s Solomon, a chessboard-wielding wizard. A grandma on a park bench, feeding pigeons? That’s Baba, a cheeky twist on Slavic folklore. What about those giant, slimy rats always gnawing on floor pizza? Enter the literal Rat King, who makes all of da rules.

Just look at this fan concept for a Chinese immigrant and construction worker reimagined as Sun Wukong (who natural law mandates must appear as a playable character in every MOBA). Deadlock’s online community is always abuzz with ruminations about what comes next the same way you can find with games like Heroes of the Storm or Smash Bros., but their enthusiasm isn’t for games they’ve already played or stories that have already been told. It’s for the winding alleyways and wild card denizens of the real-life NYC, pulled through a prism of macabre magic.

Maybe that sounds like a gimmick, but the game is never content to leave these characters without dimension. Vyper isn’t just a slithering sewer lizard with a firearm, she’s a chronic flirt and a dismal career criminal. Seven may be a cackling pulp serial villain, but mark his tender memories of friendly wight Kelvin and his affinity for the naive, almost childlike goo monster Viscous.

It's refreshing because a lot of MOBA heroes are basically action figures: emphatic, unsubtle, function-first designs where narrative is a secondary priority at best. It’s obvious why this is if you know the genre’s history—MOBA progenitor DotA's designs all came from Warcraft, and its successors haven't been able to fully get away from that. Sure, Dota 2’s Disruptor has a unique backstory, and he’s an oglodi rather than an orc, but no amount of reverse-engineering will erase the truth from my memory: he is Thrall, but red.

League isn't too far off from that, taking generic character concepts with rough DotA counterparts and retooling them for a standalone game—one with a narrative that wouldn’t be figured out for years. Heroes of the Storm's Smash Bros. grab bag of Blizzard favorites has its own charm, but it certainly isn't cohesive. Smite draws from a different well, but real-world mythology is even more archetypal and constrained by prior assumptions than Blizzard's fantasy cast.

That’s not to say you can’t tell a good story with ‘Thrall, but red.' Dota 2 actually has a lot of fun storytelling if you look for it. But Deadlock breaks new ground for MOBA-pilled lore fiends simply because it's not so beholden to its forebears.

Deadlock is the rare MOBA with both an original story to tell and the blank canvas necessary to tell it best. Valve has seized this opportunity with apparent relish, and you can see the results of that in the oodles of fan art pouring out for each of the newest six characters, only one of whom is even out at this point. Every time the community gets its hands on unique names for over 100 of the Rat King's unique rat citizens or Valve patches in "over 10,000 non-ping voice lines" in a single pre-release update, playtest enthusiasm renews all over again (it just hit a new all-time concurrent player count peak yesterday, according to SteamDB).

Deadlock's specific emphasis on New Yorkian archetypes also begs the question, what’s next? I need a ghostly muckraker journalist. A witch with a hot dog cart. A greedy, monstrous landlord who charges his enemies soul rent! I’m giddy for what’s to come the same way I am with a crossover fighting game, but there’s not that latent stench of knowing it all doubles as advertising for other products. For every bit it’s a pulpy fantasy world, Deadlock is a celebration of the real one outside. And where other MOBAs are sketching in familiar margins, it still feels fresh two years into its "private" playtest.

Gaming's worst-kept secret Deadlock received a humongous update earlier this week, one that redecorated its entire town and added six new classes for players to sink their teeth into. On the subject of teeth, one of these classes is a tank called Rat King, a giant humanoid rodent who started out as a fan concept before becoming part of Deadlock's official roster.

Rat King loves two things in life: rats, and throwing rats at his enemies. In fact, he enjoys rat tossing so much that he has more than 100 voice lines dedicated to his calling.

According to Deadlock voice line viewer (yes, that is a site that exists) Rat King entered the fray with a grand total of 1534 individual utterances, a similar number to most other Deadlock heroes. Of those lines, 126 of them are dedicated to his power "Rat Swarm", whereby Rat King unleashes a swarm of rodents from beneath his resplendent cape—which leap onto enemies and deal spirit damage over time.

Why so many voice lines for a single power? Well, I suppose the short answer is "because Valve can". But the longer answer is that, although some of the lines are generic power callouts (such as "I got a whole lotta rats, baby!") many of them refer to individual rats by name.

Rat King clearly likes to express support for his subjects, so will yell phrases like "Get 'em Lou!" or "My boy Widget is gonna chew you up!" or "Rabies Ronnie has a gift for ya. Surprise, it's rabies!" Sometimes Rat King will refer to named groups of rats, implying there are whole factions residing beneath his cloak. Rat King's group-based callouts include "The Pantegana boys say hello!" and "Say hello to the McMullen gang!" and my personal favourite—"I brought Gumdrop's whole polycule!"

It's a great example of the huge injection of personality Deadlock received from the City Never Sleeps update (which is not to say the game was short of it before). It's worth noting that Rat King is not the only character to become much more talkative. Alongside the newly introduced heroes, Valve has doubled the number of voice lines for all existing characters in the game.

It's this kind of colour and attention to detail that has made Deadlock so popular despite players having to be invited to the game in order to experience it. How much longer Valve will keep Deadlock (theoretically) under wraps is uncertain, but let's face it, there isn't exactly a pressing financial need for Valve to push the game out of the door.

The votes are in—the first of Deadlock's six new heroes just dropped. The Rat King is here, and one of his abilities lets you throw a bunch of rats at people, like that Eminem meme.

If you ask me, Deadlock's new update is going great, except for the small fact that last night I got jumpscared while running away from a Drifter because I accidentally slid into this here troll. Take a look at this scary guy. What is he doing here? Will we have to fight him in the future? Will he scare me again? The answer's: hell if I know, I hope not, and yes—yes he will.

Don't mind me: I'm just seething over not being able to actually hang out in Deadlock's occult New York for real. As Elie noted earlier today, Deadlock's latest update made its map even more arresting, fleshing out Valve's accursed big apple with new district stylings and reworked lanes.

Deadlock's world is so refreshingly flavorful that not being able to explore it in person almost feels like an injustice. I want to watch the advertised dimensional chess tournament. I want to browse the selection at Salt & Chalk Ritual Supplies. I want to ask the Umbria University librarian about the claw-handed man in the portrait. I want to hang out here, man.

It's almost enough to make me a MOBA guy. Almost.

Deadlock's massive new update isn't a sign of an imminent public release, according to the MOBA's first proper development update. The invite-only game continues to grow in scope and polish, but Valve says there's still a lot of work to do.

"We think building a multiplayer game is very hard and risky, and the best way to minimize that risk [is] 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," Valve says at the top of the update.

Six new heroes and a ton of visual overhauls came to Deadlock earlier this year in the Old Gods, New Blood update. While not everything in the game was touched, the breadth of the update made it seem like Deadlock was entering the next stage in its development. The level of polish in the map and many of the game's systems reached a point where it was hard to call it "unfinished" as far as early access games typically go.

But Valve can and will do whatever it wants, and in this case that doesn't involve releasing the game to a wider audience. Looking back at that update in this new post, Valve says "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)."

Valve says the Deadlock team shifted away from focusing on specific areas of the game and started working on many things in parallel this year. Most of those things are in the new City Never Sleeps update, like the redesigned map and items, but some are still on their way: "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 alternative game modes that expand the scope of the game," Valve says. The new game modes could include the rumored PvE mode created by former Risk of Rain developers.

Visual updates for older heroes were originally planned to happen "towards the end of early development," Valve says, but it will "likely be gradually working on them in the near future for inclusion in upcoming updates alongside other work."

I'd love to know what prompted the team to move those up in the list because it doesn't sound like Deadlock's "early development" is over yet—or is it? Valve's update doesn't provide any clear indicators for when it expects it to feel finished enough to enter the polish phase.

Right now, it seems like the only sign of that happening will be whenever a bunch of heroes start getting attention. And even then, we don't know if Valve plans to release Deadlock to the public before every inch of it is perfect. If you want a peek at its spooky map or cast of weirdo heroes, you'd better find someone to beg for an invite because I don't think Valve's letting it out of the cage anytime soon.

Deadlock players are eating just about better than anyone else right now, as Valve has finally dropped the huge update we'd been promised and oh boy, it's a doozy.

City Never Sleeps has brought six new characters who are waiting to be unlocked by community vote, a bunch of UI reworks, more voicelines, and a sweeping visual update to the map. The bases of the Hidden King and Arch Mother are unchanged (00:13) but they're still very cool nevertheless. The real fun, however, lies outside, within the three reworked lanes and four new districts.

Here's a look at the new locations.

First up we have York. This may seem pretty familiar as it's kept the industrial vibes of the last map iteration, but it's been polished with vast open spaces, while keeping the griminess so core to Deadlock. It even has the New York Stock Exchange towards the Archmother's base, so if you're feeling particularly evil, head on over there.

Then we have Broadway, the central lane which has had a massive facelift, now being the busiest hub of the map complete with a highway, neon signs, and towering skyscrapers. There are even steam vents which can hide and heal you for a short while. This was the first thing I saw when coming into the updated map, and it sure did surprise me in the best way possible, never did I think this map could look this cool.

Finally we've got Greenwich, my personal favourite. This lane is the prettiest with its earthy witchy vibes, complete with a massive overhanging tree in the centre lane, which you can climb atop for a better view of your enemy or to just admire your surroundings (I will just be admiring my surroundings).

But the best part of the map is no longer on the lanes, it lies between them inside the four districts. Here's the Theatre, Chinatown, Haunted Lot, and Plaza lie in all their glory, and with all their updated Haunts:

I'm a sucker for a pretty map and this Deadlock update did not disappoint—it just keeps getting better.

The City Never Sleeps update is here for Deadlock, which means one thing: It's time to get tribalistic about which strange critter will be making it to the Cursed Apple next. Personally, all of my bones are on Baba. I'm obsessed with her design. Making the Baba Yaga's chicken-legged hut a New York park bench? Incredible work.

I kinda wish Deadlock wasn't a MOBA—not because I don't play MOBAs, you understand. I have a misspent youth of over 2,400 hours in Dota 2 and 340 of the suckers in Deadlock itself. I know ball. Rather, I think Deadlock's universe and characters are so damn charming that I'd love for more people to know about them, and the MOBA genre is kinda unassailable.

And while the recent major Deadlock update has me kicking my feet and squealing at the gorgeous new environments—and I am very excited for Baba—there's one thing that makes me even happier: The voice lines. Not only does the update bring a voice line viewer into the game, it also… well, let me just let the official site speak for itself:

"Pre-match conversations between new and existing heroes increased from over 700 to 1500." It's Christmas, baby. Here are some of my favourites I've found so far:

These samples—the Drifter discovering a Lovecraftian god, Mina and Pocket being the most divorced couple in NYC, Celeste bargaining for her life, and Rem being a freaky little freak—are just some of the excellent conversations I've been flipping through since the update was released. Honestly, I've been digging into them for more time than I've been playing actual matches.

And the new cast of five heroes is only bound to add more excellent dynamics to Deadlock's roster—I can't, for instance, wait to see how the prolifically sassy capital punishment survivor Seven and park bench witch Baba interact, or how the "Be Not Afraid" doctor Nurse Harrow might interact with The Doorman, who could be a lovecraftian kindred spirit, for all we know.

These are just the pre-match conversation voicelines—"over 10,000 non-ping voice lines" have been added, too. It's a tremendous amount of work added to Valve's excellent MOBA, and I can't wait to see the Cursed Apple's final form… whenever that may be.

The cursed city where Deadlock's battles take place just got even spookier than it already was in the City Never Sleeps update. Valve's second major overhaul for the invite-only MOBA marks another major step in its pseudo-early access development, giving it a much stronger visual identity than it had before, six striking new heroes, and a massive list of tweaks to how it plays.

Deadlock's entire map has been redecorated into three distinct themes: a bright city center, a haunted university, and a shadowy stock exchange. All the buildings and creeps that inhabit each street have been redesigned to fit in. There are pickle jars with hands growing out of them lurking in the heart of the map, sentient stacks of books in the right lane, and slimy trashbag monsters in the left lane.

Squeezed between it all are four districts with their own identities, like a theater district infested with literal stage hands pulling the strings on steampunk-style automatons. Atop the Chinatown district is a bell tower where teams can fight over a fountain of souls to try to get a currency advantage in a tight match. Even the wooden crates that players smash for resources are now padlocked and bolted shut.

It's a whole new playground that will take some time for players to fully figure out. In the meantime, Valve has prepared six new heroes who will be released based on a player voting system, just like the previous set. My money's on the Rat King taking the lead because, well, he's the Rat King, a crowned rodent that began as a fan concept a year ago and quickly became a meme in the community.

Don't get me wrong, though, the others look great, too. Valve made a nurse who holds a needle like a gun, a Chess master who seems to float like Overwatch's Zenyatta, a skeleton who found a rocket launcher, a cozy old witch who I do not trust, and a young artist who wields a paintbrush. Two heroes will drop each week with the first making their debut on Friday.

Here's some other big changes I see on the update page:

• Player health bars are bolder and more readable than before
• There are now small indicators to help you see where nearby teammates are
• The kill feed is considerably more clear when it comes to seeing who took out who
• The entire shop interface is way more intuitive and includes filters for finding what you need fast
• There are several new ways to ping locations and objects on the map
• Characters have double the amount of voice lines as before and you can listen to them in a new menu
• New tools let you create bots to practice on and there's a more comprehensive breakdown of combat details for the nerds out there
• There are new accessibility options, like custom UI colors, subtitles, and options to automatically move, mantle, and shoot

All of this is only a fraction of the things Valve has added to the game, some of which it's intentionally keeping a secret so players can discover them on their own. Despite the size of the update, Valve hasn't removed the need for an invite to play Deadlock. One has to wonder how many of these it will take before the game is finally released to the public so everyone can get a taste of what Valve's been cooking up.

The portrait of the man with red gloves is glowing again, which can only mean one thing for Deadlock players: Valve is about to drop a major new update very soon.

Real soon, in fact. The last time the portrait in the main hub started glowing was before the Old Gods, New Blood update, which introduced six new heroes, a new mode, and a bunch of other things that elevated the game from Valve's pet project to a real videogame that might actually see the light of day.

One of the developers at Valve confirmed it on Discord, too, but when we're talking about the community of players who desperately track pizza orders for signs of new updates, they'll take any extra confirmation they can get.

"Heads up we are planning on releasing the major content update early next week," the mysterious developer-ran Discord account Yoshi wrote after weeks of speculation from the community.

In typical Valve fashion, however, it hasn't said a word about what will actually be in the new update, just that it will be big. Deadlock recently overhauled its ranked mode and kicked off its first ranked season. Since then, it's just been small balance updates.

Valve hitting the glowing eyes button sure makes it seem like there could be a new batch of heroes and revisions to the dwindling number of obviously-unfinished bits in the game. Dataminers have dug up new models for Deadlock's version of MOBA towers, which could be part of a broader visual update for the few things that still don't quite fit with its 1950s urban fantasy aesthetic. There's a rumored PvE-focused mode coming, too, but that sounds like it's a ways off if it happens at all.

You never really know what Valve has planned. For all we know, the game could have its invite-only restriction lifted and go fully into an open beta. We're probably not quite there at this point, but it's clear that a lot of work is going into polishing it into something worthy of a proper Valve game.

It's rare that a MOBA comes out, rarer that it manages to stick around, and perhaps rarest of all that it surges back to life after years on the backburner. While Heroes of the Storm never quite had its lights turned off, the constant downpour of new stuff you'd expect in a live service game did wind down. Until now.

At today's Blizzcon opening ceremony, it was announced that Xal'atath, the Harbinger of the Void, will be arriving in the long-dormant MOBA as a new hero—its first since Hogger was released all the way back in 2020. It's the first truly substantial update since 2022, as the game has only received light-touch balance passes and bug fixes since Blizzard announced a shift to maintenance mode.

If you're unfamiliar, Xal'atath is a character from World of Warcraft's Legion expansion who started as a gnawing voice tucked away in the weapon slots of Shadow Priest players. More recently, she's become the villainous face of the current Midnight expansion.

It was also announced that another new hero would be revealed at some point in the future.

Xal'atath will arrive on the game's PTR this Monday, with a full release scheduled for Sep. 28. Follow the rest of today's Blizzcon news on our liveblog.

Making a live service game these days feels like trying to shoot an arrow at a flea while blindfolded. Striking gold with a hot new shooter or other team-based multiplayer game with a quirky twist seems like an exercise in futility, but that isn't stopping developers and publishers from trying to be the next big thing.

Personally, if I was trying to enter an already-volatile market, I'd probably be steering well clear of MOBAs. They're finicky, have a high barrier to entry, and require a ridiculous amount of time commitment to ever be remotely good at them. Even then, dragging a League or Dota player away from their game to try another one is a big ask. Hell, I'm still shocked Deadlock has managed to do it.

So I don't know whether to applaud developer Nirvanana for giving it a go with Project Zeta, or grab the team by the shoulders and give them a good old shake for doing something I perceive to be utterly reckless.

Though, as Nirvanana will maintain, Project Zeta isn't quite a MOBA. As the developer tells me, it's actually a 4v4 multi-team tactical arena battle. Not battle royale, just battle. "We tried not to be tied down to those traditional things," Nirvanana tells me as I sit down to try Project Zeta at Gamescom, though admits the game did start out as a more traditional battle royale.

But from there, it's evolved into a sort of battle royale-MOBA-hero shooter hybrid, pitting four teams against each other as they fight across a sprawling map for victory. I'm shown flashy footage of Twitch streamers popping off after winning teamfights, proclaiming how good it feels to win in Project Zeta—emerging victorious from a teamfight refreshes cooldowns for the winners, as well as resurrecting any teammates who fell in the scuffle.

It seemed all well and good, but I couldn't help but wonder how it felt to be on the other side. Making a victory feel amazing for the winners usually means making the loss feel particularly bad on the other side of things. "In the last test, that was actually the biggest feedback we received," Nirvanana admits to me.

Recent tweaks have apparently made it so that there's "bigger risk" for the winning team. "The more you're ahead, the more you have to seek out other teams and wipe them out … there's a higher chance of you making mistakes, and that's a bigger risk for the winning team." It's something I'm still not entirely convinced of, but it does at least seem like Nirvanana is doing its best to iron out any kinks as it continues to drip-feed playtests to its core audience.

How that core audience will eventually translate into playercounts with the full release, however? Nirvanana knows it's a tough ask. "You have to have a clear message," the developer tells me. "And you have to take the players that agree with that message, and you have to build a community before launch with those players. And I think that's the only way to secure success once the game launches.

"And so, through these continuous player tests, we want to bring in those players that agree with Zeta's message to our team. These people will be the evangelists, basically, that promote the game for us. One thing I can say with confidence is that Zeta is a game that doesn't exist in a genre that doesn't exist, and it has a very clear message. And so we're going to continue to put up the message that this is what Zeta is. It's about team fights, dense team fights, and those who agree with that will be able to come into our community and we will continue to engage with them."

It all seems like a very hopecore way of looking at things, though Nirvanana does cap it all off by admitting: "Games like us failed a lot. The track record isn't good." Well, for Project Zeta's sake, I hope it can carve out a slice of success in an increasingly difficult landscape.

If you're interested in checking out Zeta for yourself, there's a playtest running right now until 12am on September 7. You can sign up on the Project Zeta website.

I don't envy Deadlock players who are dying to see the hybrid MOBA-shooter continue to grow in its pseudo-early access state. Valve is notoriously elusive when it comes to communication and has never made any promises to update it on a regular schedule.

This is the kind of uncertainty that drives Deadlock players to salivate over any new rumor or post by the developer-run Discord and forum account known as Yoshi. It's also what drives them to keep watch over the pizzerias near Valve's Seattle offices for spikes in visitors in the hopes that developers are lining up for grub as they finish the next major update.

This week, Deadlock players were hoping Valve would release its follow-up to the Old Gods, New Blood update, which added six new heroes to the game along with other major changes. Valve previously said a "large content update" was in the works alongside two other smaller updates to its ranked mode and items. But now that the ranked rework is out of the way, players were hoping to see another update before the end of the month.

According to a new post from Yoshi, the update is taking longer than expected. Yoshi doesn't specify if they're talking about the item update or the large content update—it almost implies they've been combined into one patch—but said it's going to have to wait until "late September."

"The delay is mainly due to the regular process of playtesting and iteration sometimes taking longer than expected, rather than a change in the scope of the update itself," they wrote. "We hope you will like the update when it comes out, and we'll make sure to give you a heads up (or order a ton of pizza) when things are a few days away or so."

Even though Valve has kept Deadlock an invite-only game since its debut, the last year of updates have gotten it to a place that feels like it could go fully public as an open beta. You never know with Valve, a studio that has spent years on projects only to quietly abandon them before. But the Old Gods, New Blood update was the first time it made a big deal of a new patch, creating an entire webpage dedicated to it and letting the community vote on the release order of the new heroes.

It was an unprecedented level of effort that seemed to suggest Deadlock had a relatively large amount of weight behind it for a Valve project. Since then, the updates have kept a steady pace.

Whether or not Yoshi's acknowledgement of the pizza thing is tongue-in-cheek, it does make it seem like the team behind Deadlock is aware that players desperately want more from the game and that it plans to deliver on that as fast as it can. I hope it also means Deadlock is closer than ever to opening the gates for everyone to try its sharply-designed mix of MOBA and hero shooter mechanics.

"Built like a brick wall on roids." That's the passive ability Lee Sin—err, Xizun, the blind monk, used to have in League of Legends, which itself used to be a very different-looking game called Onslaught: War of the Immortals. It certainly looks like a game that was pitched the same year Finger Eleven's "Paralyzer" was a charting single, and now we can take a closer look at it than ever thanks to League 'tuber Necrit and Riot's Paul "Pabro" Bellezza.

The full story here is outlined on a video Necrit uploaded last Thursday, but the basic rundown is that he asked to see League at its most primordial and Riot delivered in the form of an ancient investor pitch: a mix of video footage, design documents for a few champions, a lore breakdown, and screenshots. While leaks had revealed some of this stuff in the past, there's plenty of new details to comb through.

The game is barely recognizable. Rather than the empty field that is Summoner's Rift, it takes place in a cartoony cityscape split between "order" and "chaos" realms. Players would take the role of customizable immortals they could temporarily bring to the fight in climactic moments, and certain heroes were even exclusive to one of the two realms—an allegiance players would have to declare when they began playing.

It's easier to point out what's familiar than what's new. Annie is here and still has a flaming teddy bear minion, though she and most other champions look very different; Sion has a beard, for God's sake! The only character who truly hasn't changed much is Singed, though his name is Zij for some reason. These days I only call him that if I have a really bad cold.

My favorite bits are about the old lore, since it's edgy in a way that's both typical of the era and sort of precious in 2026, despite the cartoony art style. It's a world where the two factions existed on neutral terms until "an antichrirst of sorts" was born and tore a hole in reality so big chaos now threatens to consume all existence. Riot's logo is also drenched in blood in the pitch video.

League of Legends Classic has been a big hit with me so far, but I think after seeing this it's plain to see we didn't go back far enough. We have not achieved true classic-ification until Sion has a highlighter-orange beard and nobody recognizes a single aspect of the game.

Despite Valve warning them that matches will be "very rocky" to start, Deadlock players are struggling to adjust to the MOBA's new ranked mode.

Late last week, Deadlock finally got a proper ranked mode, replacing the rudimentary version that existed for the last couple of years. Valve reworked the matchmaking system behind it, added a bunch of rules for how you climb the ranks, and created a new standard mode for casual play.

Valve warned players that "the next week or so" would be turbulent as everyone settles into their correct ranks, but it seems like people weren't ready for how severe it would actually be. The Deadlock subreddit, as well as my YouTube feed, has been full of people discussing whether or not the new update was a miss.

Some of the criticisms don't surprise me: Players are discovering what it's like to be forced to play a casual mode while they tally up enough wins to play ranked. Valve decided that you need 15 wins on a hero to play them in ranked, which is, by many accounts, a Sisyphean effort in the chaos of the standard mode. It's even worse for all the people who spent their Deadlock careers maining a single hero and are only now trying to branch out.

Players cannot fathom why nobody is shotcalling over voice chat or playing like experts in a mode made to be a casual alternative to ranked. While my experiences in Overwatch make me sympathize with them a little, it also sounds like what you'd expect from playing an invite-only game that isn't finished yet. Not everyone cares about optimizing their strategies like their life is on the line and the small pool of players means the match quality will waver more than it does in bigger games.

Maybe the requirement for ranked is too high, but you have to draw the line somewhere so it feels like a place for people who take the game somewhat seriously. It also doesn't help that ranked players who were previously in the highest tier are finishing their placement matches three or four levels lower. This has made even ranked matches inconsistent, according to the people who have been in the mines for the last few days.

Like other games, Deadlock tracks your progress to the next rank through a points system and the numbers can fluctuate based on the skill level distribution of the players in a match. You can completely stomp a team and come out of it with almost no progress, for example. This has confused a lot of players as they struggle to reach the same rank they had before.

Given how much Valve has changed in the update, I suspect we might be seeing the result of a ranked system in the middle of recalibrating what each rank represents in the first place. It's very possible that a high-ranked Eternus player who only played Mina before is now only an Oracle player when forced to flex to other heroes or when put on teams with a wider spread of skill levels (potentially due to the fractured player based across modes now)."People need to remove their expectations and just enjoy the game," wrote one Reddit user. "If they can't enjoy it because of their rank then that's their problem not a problem with the game."

All I know is that matchmaking systems are extremely complex and extremely delicate. Small changes can feel huge to certain sections of players. Deadlock is a game with a lot of barriers to entry that is probably exacerbating the frustrations that normally come with any kind of rank reset. So far, Valve hasn't made any drastic changes, but I'll be curious to see how things shake out in the next month or so.

After much anticipation, Valve has finally given Deadlock a proper ranked mode, and with it comes a major overhaul to how the game balances each match—a substantial enough change that might make playing it a little chaotic for the next few weeks.

Before today's update, Deadlock's ranked mode was pretty straightforward as it was the only standard way to play it (as opposed to the over-the-top Brawl mode). You picked your favorite heroes, queued up, and climbed up the ranks.

The basic structure remains the same in the new system, but there are a lot more rules in place to help keep the quality of matches more balanced than before—which is something that started to become a problem as the game's popularity has fluctuated.

First of all, the new ranked mode isn't the only way to play a normal match now. Standard mode is for anyone who wants to practice or avoid the stress of ranked. It's also where you'll need to earn the right to queue up for ranked by winning 15 matches on at least three heroes.

Once you qualify for ranked, you can queue up to see how the system thinks you measure up against other players. The old ranks have been thrown out for 11 new ones, each with subranks to work through before you've earned a promotion. Every match will update you on your progress toward the next rank up until you reach the highest echelons where the thresholds you have to meet will change daily due to the relatively small number of players up there.

Valve says the new matchmaking system underneath all of this will do its best to create balanced matches while also letting you play your desired hero. It won't always work out perfectly, which is why it's also introduced a way to swap heroes before the match begins.

The new ranked mode is available to play now, but Valve warns players that they should "expect the next week or so to be very rocky as the ranked matchmaking pool will start off very thin with most players not having the unlock requirements done yet." Queue times will be longer and match quality might take a nosedive as the system works itself out. "Given the large rewrite involved with this update, we are also expecting that it will take a couple of days to iron out bugs," it added.

This is another big step toward the presumed, eventual launch of an open beta for Valve's not-so-secret MOBA. The last few major updates have started to polish parts of the game that have been stagnant for quite some time. Some things are still being reworked on a weekly basis, but it's starting to feel like this thing might be ready to go public instead of invite-only soon.

Lee Sang-hyeok, better known to his fans as Faker, is perhaps the most enduring and successful esports pro of all time, with—among a great many other honors—a record six League of Legends world championships to his name stretching back to 2013. When he re-signed with T1 in 2022, the team called him the "Unkillable Demon King," and fair enough because he went on to claim three of his six world titles—among a great many more honors—in an undefeated three-year stretch from 2023-25. Time included him in its 2026 list of the most influential people in sports; he's a member of the ESL Esports Hall of Fame and Riot's own LoL Esports Hall of Legends.

Also, he's a cop now.

No, he's not out there packing heat and walking a beat. As reported by the Seoul Economic Daily (via Insider Gaming), Faker has been named an honorary police officer by the Korean National Policy Agency and will serve as an "ambassador for cyber-gambling prevention." He'll appear in promotional videos and posters for the "Youth Cyber Gambling Voluntary Reporting System."

"I feel honored to be appointed an honorary police officer and ambassador, and I feel a great sense of responsibility," Faker said. "I will actively participate in ambassador activities, such as widely publicizing the dangers of cyber gambling and the voluntary reporting system to young people."

"For youth cyber gambling, it is important to detect it before the problem deepens and to promptly begin counseling and treatment," Korean National Police Agency acting commissioner general Yoo Jae-sung said. "We hope Faker's positive influence will instill the courage in young people who need help to report without hesitation."

The reporting program launched in May and will run until August 31, recording 806 self-reports thus far. Those who turn themselves in receive counselling and a "gambling addiction assessment" before being placed in a treatment program; the report says the police plan to grant "maximum leniency" to self-reporting cyber-gamblers, "taking into comprehensive account the gambling amount, degree of remorse, and treatment progress."

The World Health Organization reported in 2024 that roughly 5.5% of women and nearly 12% of men globally "experience some level of harm from gambling." In 2025, Riot itself embraced sports betting sponsorships for Tier 1 League of Legends and Valorant teams in the US and EMEA. More broadly, sports betting has surged in popularity in recent years, and the rise of prediction markets in the US have lawmakers "weighing where financial markets end and gambling laws begin," says The National Conference of State Legislatures.

League of Legends Classic, the new mode which remixes the MOBA by deleting most of the roster and restoring all sorts of old builds and character kits from 2013 and prior, has hit Riot's public test environment.

It's been met with mixed reception since then, in part due to its approach to old visuals—when the PBE version launched, players had modern character models, voice work, and spell effects by default, with "classic skins" unlockable with earned tokens or real money. A thread from user prime_desire with over 6,000 upvotes on the League of Legends subreddit called the mode "League 'not so' Classic," saying "honestly I would be embarrassed to release something like this. Charging for Classic Skins is genuinely wild."

That was reversed within a few days, with Riot's Brian "FeralPony" Feeney addressing feedback concerning the skins and more in a video blog July 16. "Feedback received," he said. "If you're on PBE, you probably already noticed that all classic skins are unlocked for all champions that have one." They've since been made the default option, replacing their respective champions' modern appearances.

He also addressed negative feedback regarding the mode's "greatest hits" approach, clarifying why Riot decided to mix a bunch of old patches together rather than pick a single patch from the game's history and stick to it.

In short, player surveys were all over the place and Riot wants to cast as wide a net as possible. "The answers were almost identical. League was classic the year they started playing, League was best the year after they started, and League was too old before they started." That said, changes will be made as players vote on new patches once the mode hits standard servers.

Other Riot devs have been on social media assuring players the mode is being changed to look even older by default. "It's been fun to basically undo my years of work," said senior VFX artist Sirhaian in a post on X.

What's old is new in League of Legends Classic, which was teased a couple of weeks ago in the wake of leak after leak. The full reveal came during yesterday's MSI Finals, where the mode debuted in a showmatch starring pros like Doublelift and Cpt Jack. It's a Frankenstein's monster of different eras with a huge emphasis on season three: a bunch of old kits are back, but some of the art has been modernized and various late additions like ward trinkets have made it in.

More details can be found on the Riot Games website, which reveals that the mode will release later this month on July 29. It names a bunch of old, busted builds poised to make their triumphant return: ability power Master Yi (God help us), pre-rework Sion (God help us), any mage with Deathfire Grasp, and so on.

But unlike, say, World of Warcraft Classic, it won't split itself up into era-locked versions—the mode will change with the times as voted by the community, similar to Old School RuneScape. If we, the common MOBA proletariat, can vote the 3v3 map Twisted Treeline back into League of Legends, it might just restore my faith in democracy.

And yes, the old upgrade systems are back. Runes and quintessences will let you pile on incremental stat upgrades, and the old mastery pages will simplify the system back down to three talent trees. Old summoner spells are back too, so if you've been missing the likes of rally and revive, you're in luck.

If you're hungry for more details, RiotMeddler has been on Reddit confirming various factoids. For instance, more old-school champions will be added over time—Graves and Urgot were examples he gave of characters he was particularly excited for, and others like Sion will be there day one. And if you're hoping to hear that sweet champion select song of auld, it's coming back.

Player reaction online seems mixed, especially with regard to the mode's 'era mashup' approach. "They really should remove the modern mechanics (trinket, base gates) and the modern models should AT THE VERY LEAST be toggleable into the old base skins," commented Reddit user WitchySofia.

The art style seems a prominent point of contention: "I want Meddler to tell me why they had an artist spend time making a brand new, never before seen health bar graphic that's uglier than the old health bar," said Reddit user TheScyphozoa on the same thread.

Comparisons, like this one from Reddit user JaxIsBadDontPick_ indeed suggest that the game version used in the showmatch has more muted colors and newer character models than League actually had a decade and a half ago.RiotMeddler confirmed in a different thread on Reddit that a dev blog with "a range of details" will go up Tuesday.

Once you've lost a few thousand hours to a MOBA, it's easy to forget how hard it was to learn. A game like League of Legends has well over a hundred playable characters, all sorts of items and jungle monsters, and even the basics can be fussy. One of the most crucial is the zen practice of "last hitting," or swinging at a hostile creep right as it's about to die to get credit and gold for the kill.

While it's hard to get the hang of, Riot has been toying with a way to make last hitting easier for new players: last hit indicators. These indicators show the threshold at which a creep will be killed by one of your hero's autoattacks, making it easier to score kills if you don't have an intuitive sense of how much damage you're doing. While it's been quarantined in the game's casual modes for the last few months, patch notes from earlier this week stated the feature would be coming to normal draft and ranked play.

Players were mixed on the feature, with some welcoming anything that would make the game easier for newcomers and others more protective of its high skill floor. "Riot keeps dumbing down core mechanics and calling it accessibility," said Reddit user TsundereeTease. "[Last hitting] is literally the skill gap in lane, if you can't last hit you shouldn't be in ranked. What's next, auto aim for skillshots?"

On the same thread, user garethh was less skeptical. "Cutting back the barrier to entry without touching the play and counterplay of League doesn't seem like an inherently bad idea to me," they wrote. "If everyone knows if their auto will kill or not, what changes? Lazy players, sporadic players, and/or auto-filled players are empowered a bit. The entirety of the play and counterplay of laning still exists."

In response to the feedback, Riot announced in a post on X that it would pump the brakes on last hit assistance: "We want to get more data and feedback to decide if we should make them an option for ranked before making that call. So we’ll keep them enabled, but off by default, for swiftplay, co-op vs AI, and normal draft, to collect data and iterate." In other words, it may still come to ranked play, but it's no longer certain.

After a bunch of decidedly low-poly character models started leaking from League of Legends's public test servers, Riot decided to pull the ripcord: League of Legends Classic is real, though when exactly it will harken back to is yet to be seen.

The reveal came in the form of a cheeky skit called "200 Years of Experience" where League of Legends executive producer Paul "Pabro" Bellezza is trapped in a Pepe Silvia nightmare trying to conceptualize the ideal era for the mode. "Is it season one? Is it season four," he wonders. "Could it have been season two, when we started having jungle pathing? Could it be when we had Heart of Gold? It was a shell! Why was it named Heart of Gold?"

He doesn't clarify when the mode will be set, but the leaks suggest it could be a blend of things that changes over time—the video description states that a full reveal will come on July 11 during the MSI Finals. League of Legends has properly Ship of Theseus'd itself over the years, and a lot of questions come with an announcement like this.

Will the old set of currencies be used for unlocking characters? Will the now-defunct Twisted Treeline 3v3 map be returning? What about old rune pages and quintessences, buildcraft systems that have long been supplanted? We don't know just yet, but if there's the slightest chance I can play pre-rework Galio again, I for one am interested.

If you're curious as to why anyone would want to play a version of League with fewer playable characters and more dated visuals—aside from nostalgia—it comes down to the fact that League of Legends has changed a lot. It used to be a bit more similar to its big brother Dota, with lots of consequential mana costs and powerful point-and-click spells.

The modern game moves faster with highly mobile mages, skillshots out the wazoo, and a scaling movespeed buff in spawn to get you back to the fight ASAP. The old game is simpler and sillier: just compare post-rework Sion's guttural voice work to pre-rework Sion's two-bit Arnold Schwarzenegger impression crying out to hear "the lamentations of noobs."

Notably, this is not the first time a project like this has drawn eyes. A fanmade classic server for League, Chronoshift, was shut down after Riot got involved and assured the team behind it "the Chrono break [was] coming." While that back-and-forth is mostly remembered via memes, it seems like interest in an old-school version of the venerable MOBA has not died down since, putting it in a class with MMOs like World of Warcraft and RuneScape. It'll be interesting to see if this pans out the same way, or if MOBA nostalgia fades fast.

I have a very short history with MOBAs—apart from being dragged into one too many League of Legends games, I've tried to keep my exposure to a minimum. But that all changed when Valve semi-released Deadlock into alpha.

It's been almost two years since I started playing, and almost 100 hours later, and despite being one of my favourite games, I still haven't managed to figure out its MOBA intricacies—although I hear that's pretty normal for a MOBA. It's complex moving parts, at times suffocating team fights, and extensive list of items can be a lot to take in, especially for a new player who isn't familiar with MOBAs. But I'm here to tell you that it shouldn't scare you off, not when you can play Street Brawl.

I actually turned my nose up at this casual 4v4 mode at first, seeing it as a cop out or a lesser version of Deadlock's main mode, and I've had to live with that mistake ever since. Street Brawl is perfect for new players or those who are still trying to get their heads around Deadlock's features and mechanics. While it doesn't include everything that the main mode has, like farming, it's a great place to start.

First off it massively reduces the match length—instead of playing a 40-minute match where you're losing most of the time, Street Brawl games last for 15 minutes at most, even less if you're drastically out-matched. It also introduces you to items in drips. While community pre-builds are certainly a huge help in Deadlock, all the items can still be a lot to get your head around, especially when you don't have enough time in a match to read up on all of them.

However, in Street Brawl it's condensed down, as you pick three items out of nine before each round begins and cannot buy anymore while that round is ongoing. This gives you plenty of time to read up on the few items that are set before you and decide what works for you. It's a brilliant and easy way to try out new items and get to know old ones, and everything I've learnt in Street Brawl has massively helped me out in Deadlock's main mode as I've figured out which items work best for certain heroes and counters.

But the best part of Street Brawl is it's just a hell of a lot of fun. With none of the stresses and strains of multi-lane management or farming you can just get on with doing god's work: annihilating Lash players and throwing pillows full of bricks at people.

So if you've stayed away from Deadlock so far in fear of its MOBA qualities, I just want to let you know that you need not fear it, not when you can play the very fun mode for dummies like me.

Deadlock still technically isn't out yet—which means that Valve's gonna experiment. As was the case with last Friday's patch, that made a sweeping list of changes to the urn, one of the objectives on the game's map that helps encourage players to actually batch up for teamfights.

Previously, the urn spawned on one side of the map and had a drop-off point at the other—the carrier's movement was slowed considerably, and when they dropped it off, the opposing team could shoot the soul orbs that flooded out of it to recoup some of their losses.

Per that patch, though, a huge list of things changed—the new urn required players to melee it to pick it up. The new urn went into a depositing phase (shorter if you're behind, longer if you aren't) where the opposing team could melee it to change it to reward their team instead. And crucially, the new urn was always deposited at the midlane.

This had, uh, some consequences. I myself played a few games over the weekend just to see how it felt, and the interesting back-and-forth macro I was used to had clearly and plainly transformed into a "once every few minutes, everyone meets up in midlane and fights to the death".

Plainly put, the new urn was not only too important to ignore, it also overrode all other objectives and made certain heroes that are good at team-fights—Lash, Billy, Dynamo—or who excel at area denial—McGinnis and Graves—far more powerful than they otherwise would be.

It being on mid also meant that it was stacked on top of the midboss, meaning whoever won the urn fight would often be in a position to go and grab midboss too. Snowball central. It was a little obnoxious.

Here's a thread in the game's subreddit to back me up: "We were already in a very team-fighty meta where being in jungle was borderline worthless, and all they've done is exacerbated the issue and make late game carries more obsolete," writes one player."

"This is just everything that was already wrong with the urn turned up to 11, to the point where it just completely warps the game around itself," writes another, to which a third mid-hater replies: "It's so fast you HAVE to be there. It's very easy to get the urn to blue and cap it … so much macro depth and decision making feels like it's been tanked."

All this to say, this meant that the new urn's location lasted a weekend. As announced in a patch yesterday, while a lot of the changes are still being experimented with, the urn now spawns under the bridge in either one of the side-lanes. This should make it a little less All Mid, All the Time.

One interesting wrinkle is that the urn now spawns where it used to be dropped off for the "favoured" team (the team that's behind on souls)—in exchange for the bullet and spirit resist aura surrounding the favoured team as they deposit the urn being reduced from 50% to 35%.

The Fortnitification of videogames has seeped into just about every live-service excursion at this point. You can play as Nicki Minaj in Call of Duty. Final Fantasy 14 is getting an Evangelion raid series in its next expansion. Tekken 8 just announced a Baki character as its final Season 3 DLC fighter. Media can no longer exist on its own, it must merge and coalesce into an amorphous glob of characters and celebrities.

One notable exception has been Riot's games, particularly League of Legends and Valorant. While there are skins that certainly appear inspired by other famous media, it's never outright crossed over with other characters. And it'll be staying that way, according to League's lead designer August Browning.

During a stream on his Twitch channel (clipped and edited by HeWhoQuacksss), Browning responded to a question on how open Riot was to including third-party skins. "We've been pretty not open to that," he said. "The second you do third-party skins, the tone of your game completely changes."

He then goes ahead and talks about some of the games that have gone all in on collaborations. "Now that doesn't mean it's bad—it's really cool to play Overwatch and play all these anime characters and K-pop idols and things like that, right? It's cool to go into Fortnite, and have Goku and Jinx fighting Ariana Grande and Peter Griffin. But tonally speaking, it is also very different from the tone of all the characters in [League]."

Browning goes on to say that "historically, Riot has been pretty hesitant to do skins from other IPs," though highlights that the game does have a Louis Vuitton skin for Sena as well as a Swain skin that "looks very similar to certain chicken establishments." But overall? Browning calls straight-up crossing over other characters "a big step."

I mean, I get it. I don't need every videogame I ever play to put all my favourite characters from other stuff in it. I love Persona 5, but I don't need Joker making an appearance everywhere I go, you know? I have to agree with Browning's sentiment that all of these collaborations can drastically shift your game tonally, and I'd even go so far as to say it can really water down a game's identity.

Is putting Godzilla in Crocs and making him do K-Pop dances in Fortnite inherently funny? Obviously it is, but that ridiculousness loses its edge when everyone is doing it. Though I wouldn't consider myself the biggest enjoyer of Riot's library, I certainly appreciate its desire to stay in its own lane.

More than team fights, more than shrewd theorycrafting, and more than map awareness, MOBAs are ultimately games about scaling: get more money than the other guys, and once you've got a power spike to leverage, dunk on them as hard as you can.

That means the hardest part of these games is catching up. Each game has its own solutions to make playing from behind more bearable, and in a "small update" released yesterday, Deadlock's biggest comeback mechanic just got a hell of a lot more hectic.

If you're unfamiliar, the soul urn is a walking, talking bag of money (or souls, in Deadlockian parlance) that spawns every once in a while. A player on either team can take it, at which point their location becomes globally visible and, before the patch, they had to ferry it to the other side of the map a la capture the flag. The urn's turn-in location was based on your team's performance—if you were ahead, it was nearer to the enemy base, and if you were behind, it was nearer to your own base.

It's great fun, but because depositing the urn is instant, it can be easy to swoop down from a cheeky angle and avoid a fight or bully a losing team by claiming it aggressively while ahead. The new patch experiments with "an alternate set of urn mechanics" where the urn always has to be deposited right in the center of the map, at which point it will transition to a channeling phase.

The time it takes for the urn to complete channeling reduces the further behind your team is, but if the enemy team is nearby, they can punch the urn to add a second to the timer and switch its allegiance to their team. If the urn carrier holds onto it without turning it in for too long, they start taking huge chunks of damage until they deposit or drop it.

Suffice it to say, it should be much harder to avoid a fight while claiming the urn unless you're way behind and remarkably quick about it. But that's not the only new thing this patch lighting my brain on fire with possibilities—the midboss, a neutral mob which lets your team resurrect themselves on death a few times once defeated⁠—now spawns as soon as the game starts.

If you've played Dota 2, you'll know heroes like Ursa are notorious for their ability to kill Roshan (that game's midboss, essentially) all on their lonesome ludicrously early. It's cheeky, but it can be a huge advantage with some coordination. I'm curious to see if Deadlock will add a hero like Ursa to introduce a similar dynamic… or if such a hero is already in the game.

There's a shedload of other patch notes to sift through, including some absolutely delightful Doorman nerfs and a universal reduction to base HP. Updates like these are further evidence that the best way to deliver live service thrills is to let people muck around in a game where nothing feels set in stone.

I feel bad saying this because it sucks when a game fails, but frankly this may be the least surprising news of the day: Spellcasters Chronicles, the MOBA released by Quantic Dream just three months ago, has reached the end of the line. The studio said Spellcasters Chronicles "has not reached the audience needed to ensure its long-term sustainability," and thus development is halted—and it sounds very much like layoffs are happening as a result.

"With this project, our teams set out to explore new creative territories and create a bold, original multiplayer experience," Quantic Dream wrote on Steam. "Spellcasters Chronicles allowed us to experiment with new concepts and bring to life an ambitious game shaped by the talent, creativity, and dedication of everyone involved.

"However, in today’s particularly challenging market environment, the game has not reached the audience needed to ensure its long-term sustainability. We have therefore made the difficult decision to refocus our efforts on our other projects."

And then, the real bad news: "As part of this decision, the studio will undertake an internal reorganization. We are fully committed to handling this transition with fairness, care, and respect, and will prioritize internal reassignments wherever possible to support our other productions."

Spellcasters Chronicles has been kind of a baffling proposition right from the start. The obvious question is: why would Quantic Dream—the studio of narrative-heavy adventures like Fahrenheit, Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human—suddenly decide to make a MOBA? And why, having made that decision, would it resolve to release the game amidst the overwhelming noise of the Marathon server slam, the first Horizon Hunters Gathering playtest, and the Steam Next Fest, which puts thousands of interesting game demos on the table and gives everyone seven days to get through them all?

Despite some early promise, players just didn't show up for it: Spellcasters Chronicles launched with a peak concurrent player count of just 888 on Steam, a number that quickly tailed off to just a few dozen. For a free-to-play game that relies on in-game store purchases to pay the bills, that's not going to do it.

The reference to an "internal reorganization" is a little bit cryptic on the surface, but is ultimately just another corporately-sanitized way of saying "we're putting people out of work." The studio added, however, that the development of Star Wars Eclipse, which Quantic Dream has been working on since 2021, will not be impacted by the cuts.

Spellcasters Chronicles will remain playable until June 19, at which point the servers will be closed and that'll be that. Quantic Dream said that "all amounts" of money spent during the early access period will be eligible for a refund "upon request"—details on that will be shared via the Spellcasters Chronicles social media channels and Discord "in the coming days."

MOBAs are an unassailable genre at the best of times—they require not just a high level of mechanical skill, but they also have a massive knowledge floor, demanding you keep track of a dozen dozen variables or die in ways that ruin it for everybody. And Deadlock is no exception.

Actually, it might be even worse than the rule. Deadlock doesn't just demand you wrap your head around the interplay between heroes, items, map control, and so on. It also happens to be a third-person shooter, and one with just as much complex movement tech as any of Valve's finest.

Bumbling about with WASD won't get you where you need to go, no—if you want to really get good at Deadlock, you need to master sliding, dash-jumping, wall jumping, dash-jump-sliding, mantle sliding, zip-dashing, and don't get me started on air strafing, an old Source-engine trick that basically requires a crash course in imaginary physics just to begin practicing.

This means that, unlike your standard MOBA, you can pretty much juke your way out of any situation.

Getting ganked in a game like Dota 2 is a frustrating experience, a stun or two triggering an unskippable cutscene where you slowly try and click your way to safety and, most likely, die. Getting ganked in Deadlock has me playing Baby Driver tunes in my head, because there are just so many avenues for escape.

I have, more than once, gotten out of certain-death scenarios by just having a good understanding of the basics and a solid sense of direction. Scrambling up the side of buildings, ducking into hidden tunnels or walkways, wall-jumping as soon as I'm around a corner to quite literally bounce over my pursuer's head as I loop 'em like the Road Runner. It's a downright thrill.

And that's to say nothing of when it's actually time to buckle up and fight.

The intentionally vertical nature of Deadlock's maps mean you can do a lot more than just hiding in designated under brushes. Point to a spot on the Cursed Apple, and I'll give you three to four engagement routes that all have their advantages and disadvantages.

The "midboss" arena really hammers this home. You can drop in from the box room at the ceiling (my personal means of ingress when I'm trying to steal the rejuvenator), or rappel down a rope to access not one, but two different elevations protected by veils.

You can slide down the long staircases, accessible from the nearby lanes or, if you're a character who can access them, dip in through the tunnel network like the filthy little sewer rat you know you are.

Every spot in Valve's masterwork is like this—and it lets you feel oh-so-clever. The more you learn about how the map and its mechanics work, the more you feel like an utter genius when you pull off some sneaky nonsense. And while I've fallen out of love with other MOBAs, Deadlock's got its hooks in me and keeps pulling me back in for more.

OpenAI is now one of the world's most talked-about companies, and the ongoing legal spat between co-founders Elon Musk and Sam Altman has resulted in some truly juicy revelations around exactly what was going on in the firm's earliest years. One example: it turns out Gabe Newell gave the company over $20 million, and was the sole member of its "informal advisory board" in 2018.

One of the first times OpenAI attracted wider attention was when one of its bots defeated pro Dota 2 player Danil "Dendi" Ishutin in a 1v1 match at the 2017 The International (TI) tournament. This "much simpler" variant was then built out into an AI called the OpenAI Five, a bot that taught itself Valve's MOBA through the simple technique of playing 180 years' worth of games against itself every single day. The goal was to beat a human team in a 5v5 matchup, and it did.

The OpenAI Five bot played three exhibition matches against a team of human players in 2018, and the results were pretty conclusive. The AI romped home against the professionals, though it did lose the third game after Twitch chat lumbered it with a terrible team composition. One of the players involved, MoonMeander, described a last-minute save made by the AI in the second match: "There was one time when I was about to fissure kill a Lion and the courier came at the frame-perfect moment, delivered a salve, and it instantly used it. No way a human could have done that. No way."

OpenAI said at the time that the OpenAI Five's training process required 256 GPUs and 128,000 CPU cores—that's a lot of compute, to use the parlance. And thanks to the ongoing Musk v. Altman trial, which has seen the release of a slew of internal emails and documentation, we now know precisely where it was all coming from.

One document, which is the "proposed findings of fact" from Musk's lawyers, outlines the buddy-buddy arrangement with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, which happened well before the company went all-in on its OpenAI investment (much to Musk's chagrin, since he'd "lost faith" in the non-profit's mission by that point).

"In 2017, OpenAI needed even more compute to power its 'Dota' project, in which OpenAI’s AI bot would attempt to defeat a human Dota champion," says the document. "Musk personally called Nadella to request additional discounted compute. Nadella agreed."

The Microsoft CEO also clearly kept close tabs on the Dota 2 project.

"The day OpenAI won the Dota challenge on August 11, 2017 [sic], Nadella congratulated Musk, Altman, Brockman, and Sutskever by email. Musk replied: 'Indeed, much appreciated. Will make sure people know about Microsoft’s help.'"

Another email from earlier in the year gave Musk a progress report, with some eyebrow-raising claims that were not borne out (as of yet). It's from Shivon Zilis to Musk: Zilis is a tech venture capitalist who was on OpenAI's board until 2023, and is also the mother of four of Musk's children. At this time Zilis was both working for OpenAI and providing Musk with the inside track on what was happening.

In the email to Musk, sent on April 23 2018, she lists some facts under various headings. Under "Tech" she discusses how OpenAI's attempts to have its AI beat a five-player team in Dota 2 is progressing, and what she's been told by Sam Altman:

• Says Dota 5v5 looking better than anticipated.
• The sharp rise in Dota bot performance is apparently causing people internally to worry that the timeline to AGI is sooner than they'd thought before.
• Thinks they are on track to beat Montezuma's Revenge shortly.

Well it's 2026 and we still don't have AGI, so that correlation to Dota skills didn't pan out. The more amusing element here however is the reference to Montezuma's Revenge, a 1981 Atari 2600 game that is weirdly resistant to typical AI game-playing strategies. In a seminal 2015 paper titled "self-taught AI agent masters Atari arcade games" Montezuma's Revenge was the big outlier, being the only game where the AI bot got 0% of the average human score.

This clearly made Montezuma's Revenge something of a white whale for OpenAI, which made a huge effort to produce an AI bot that could master the game and achieve a high score. This OpenAI blogpost from 2018 goes into considerable detail on why the game's structure baffles certain AI techniques, and explains how the company built a model with elements of "curiosity" in order to better play the game:

"For an agent to achieve a desired goal it must first explore what is possible in its environment and what constitutes progress towards the goal… simple exploration strategies are highly unlikely to gather any rewards, or see more than a few of the 24 rooms in the level. Since then advances in Montezuma’s Revenge have been seen by many as synonymous with advances in exploration."

OpenAI did eventually achieve a breakthrough with Montezuma's Revenge, though it was 2021 before a different team of researchers claimed to have cracked it with their own AI model based on multiple algorithms, collectively called Go-Explore. I guess us children of the '80s were just built different.

There are times where, during our daily discussions of whether something meets the bar to be considered news on the good site PC Gamer, where I am filled with a deep sense of foreboding dread.

This morning was one of those times, where one of my colleagues informed me that Joe Rogan—American podcaster and historic advocate for current US President Donald Trump—had entertained a guest who tried to explain Deadlock. I then had the following thoughts in sequence:

• Wait, I play Deadlock.
• I have 285 hours in it.
• I am going to have to watch someone explain Deadlock to Joe Rogan for six minutes.
• I am then going to have to write about it.
• Oh no.

Because, for good or for ill, someone pitching Valve's still-in-testing MOBA to one of the biggest podcasters on the planet is very much news. So allow me to stow my opinions on someone who helped elect the guy who (among several other deeply concerning things), has made it really bloody hard to buy RAM.

Instead, I will focus on the important things. Like whether Joe Rogan understands lanes.

Stand-up comedian (and apparent Deadlock player) Brian Simpson spends about six minutes in the following clip trying to explain a deeply complicated genre to Rogan. Most surprising to me is that Rogan, by the end, has an accurate assessment of MOBA players.

I mean, Simpson opens with a crystal-clear encapsulation of the MOBA experience: "This sh*t cooler than a motherf*cker, but it will also make you mad as sh*t." Yeah, that about sums it up.

He then proceeds to open up with the most important part of any MOBA—economy. Deadlock might be a shooter, sure, but it is first and foremost a game about efficiency, and it is exactly how I've started explaining it to the friends I've roped into playing it. Mind, I might explain this with the phrase 'economy is king'.

Simpson says: "Since this b*tch got the most money, she's bought the most stuff, which makes her stronger." Maybe not the language I'd use but, hey, he's right.

At the end of the clip, Rogan makes two observations and I have to admit that he has basically understood it. His first is that "this seems super complicated." Yep. His second is that "this is the kind of thing that people without kids say", in regards to Simpson's assertion it takes about 200 hours to vaguely understand what's happening. Poor taste in presidential candidates, but when he's right, he's right.

Deadlock is an exercise in how high you can get your blood pressure, just like any other MOBA, but as someone who has put close to 300 hours into it? Yeah, I also kinda get what's going on. Add another 1,000 and I might even be halfway decent, and then maybe Joe Rogan will have me on his podcast to tell him how air strafing works.

If given the opportunity, I'll always choose to play as a little guy in a videogame. So for Deadlock my character of choice is obviously Rem, the littlest guy around. He's adorable, surprisingly strong, and very mobile, meaning I can cause chaos, swipe a kill, steal some sinner's sacrifices and then scamper away through the tunnels back to safety. It's certainly a frustrating style to play against, but lucky me, Deadlock just made it even easier to pull off.

The latest patch notes introduced a couple of great movement buffs: you can now jump mid-slide and a dash jump now grants a brief period of increased air control (30% for 0.25 seconds to be exact).

I welcome any kind of movement buff in Deadlock. A lesson I learned very early on was just how useful it is to master the art of running away in this game. Something as small as sequencing movements makes a huge difference as it lets you traverse the map at a rapid pace.

Dash slides, dash jumps, slide hopping can all help you escape an aggressive enemy or chase after a low-health target. There's so many buildings, rooms, and tunnels around Deadlock's map that you can shake an enemy off your tail pretty easily. This is something Rem is very good at.

Now with the added benefit of a jump-slide you'll be able to get around the map even faster as you gain momentum if you time your jump just right. Sliding also gives you infinite ammo, so it's certainly the best way to make your way around the map if you can help it.

But as usual, this patch is much more than just some updates to movement, and Rem hasn't come out of it completely unscathed. His Lil Helpers' healing frequency has been reduced although its spirit scaling has been increased, and his Naptime ability movement speed, duration, and radius have also been decreased. Meaning he's not quite as strong as he once was. It's still not enough to convince me I shouldn't be maining this little guy in every game I play.

There's a lot going on in the world of videogames right now. The Marathon server slam is the big attention-getter of the moment, but Sony also got the first playtest for Horizon Hunters Gathering going on this weekend for some reason, and of course the Steam Next Fest is wrapping up over the next few days, and there's a lot of very cool stuff coming out of that.

On top of all that, Spellcasters Chronicles is now in early access on Steam, a much lower-key affair but still interesting because it's being developed by Quantic Dream, and is absolutely nothing like anything Quantic Dream has ever done before. The studio's previous games, like Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls, and Detroit: Become Human, are all adventure (or action-adventures, if you want to get fiddly about it), but for Spellcasters Chronicles the studio decided to give 'er hell with a MOBA.

Our initial impressions were positive: PC Gamer's Elie Gould spent some time with a Spellcasters Chronicles beta last year and declared it "exciting enough that I want to put extra time and energy into figuring out its details." The reception of the early access release has been somewhat cooler, however: Significant performance and stability issues seem to be the most common problem, but there are also complaints about a perceived lack of development progress from the beta builds to the early access release.

Well, that's early access for you: It's called "early" because you're getting hands on it before it's finished. (We used to call that a beta test, but now the beta test is early access and the alpha test is the beta test, I'm really not sure how the hierarchy works further down the line but you get the idea.) Performance, stability, and gameplay issues can all be tuned as development continues—as long as development actually continues. This could be a bigger problem for Spellcasters Chronicles: Its peak concurrent player count at this point is 888, and at this moment it's sitting well below that.

This isn't a catastrophic situation. This is a very crowded weekend, and on top of that the release of Spellcasters Chronicles was not widely publicized: Quantic Dream announced the date via its X account, but on the Steam store page, for instance, the updates go directly from the start of the second closed beta to the early access release. It's a bit muddled, then, but I'm inclined to think that this is one instance where it doesn't really matter because there are so many other things going on anyway.

And there is enthusiasm for it in other quarters: Posts in the Spellcasters Chronicles subreddit also call out performance problems but are notably more upbeat about its potential if and when those technical shortcomings are addressed.

Sadly, I can't offer any personal comments on Spellcasters Chronicles because my aging CPU is not supported, but that's probably okay too because the only thing I know about MOBAs is that Elie seems to like them. Now that Spellcasters Chronicles' early access is live, I'll see if I can talk them into jumping back in and giving us a more detailed look at what it's all about—in the meantime, it's free to play so you can try it for yourself on Steam or the Epic Games Store.

MOBAs are interesting videogames—imagine, if you will, a slot machine. Then imagine that slot machine takes forty minutes to do one pull of the arm, and also it's yelling colourful and exciting swearwords at you in a language you don't understand the entire time. That's sort of what playing a MOBA with public voice chat is like.

League of Legends might be joining those hallowed halls of flaming, as suggested by files found on the public build environment (PBE) by SkinSpotlights on X. The files in question include reports for "VOICE COMMS ABUSE", as well as entries for a comms panel that include voice options for party or team.

While League of Legends has let you communicate over voice with folks you're partied up with for a while, being able to yell at strangers is an entirely new ballgame for the MOBA and… oh god, let me tell you, you aren't missing out on much. I'm not even sure why Riot's adding this function, bar capitalising on the Discord fiasco.

Here are my credentials: I have over 2,400 hours on Dota 2, and approaching 200 hours in Deadlock. I wouldn't consider myself "good" at MOBAs (because no one truly is), however, I am very experienced in the absolute torture chamber that is having your voice chat turned on while someone chews you out for feeding in your lane, only for you to be forced into the social equivalent of a small, confined space with them for a 30-minute match.

I don't want to be a cynic. I don't think people are inherently bad. But MOBAs are a special kind of pressure cooker that makes people act out and reach for their favourite book of slurs the moment something goes slightly wrong.

In several of my recent Deadlock games, I've had to gently encourage my teammates not to tilt themselves because the early game goes even slightly not their way. People get mad, explosively and often, and as one player in the game's subreddit observes, "How fitting for League that the first hint at voice chat we get is the report function."

The upshot of this is that, generally speaking, voice chat does promote a lot of cooperation when the vibes are good. And believe it or not, that can absolutely happen. At the very least PCG contributor Izabela Tomakic seems to think so. But also: Prepare for naughty words and implications about your mother/father/dog from some very furious people. Or just turn voice chat off, as is your right.

I've reached out to Riot to see if this is a fully-fledged feature or just something preliminary dug up in the game files, and I'll update this article if I receive a response.

Apollo, the latest hero to come to the Cursed Apple of Deadlock—and the final in the sextuplet of the Old Gods, New Blood update—has been hit with a barrage of nerfs, per the game's official changelog forums.

For context, Apollo was a duelist character whose mobility and relative tankiness was a terror in most games—a major culprit was Flawless Advance, his third ability. This thing sees Apollo kip into the air, levitate for a moment, and then strike forward with his blade. When upgraded, it'd also heal you on connecting with a hero.

Not only did this make him hard to escape, it also made him hard as hell to hit, too. Especially since his other ability, Disengaging Sigil, wasn't being properly countered by Slowing Hex. You know, the one item you're meant to be able to build against hyper-mobile heroes.

I, myself, experienced quite a few matches where I was playing either a support or a ranged, squishy character (Valve really likes to give me Mina games, recently). A teamfight would happen, I'd try to pop off some shots from the safety of the backline, only to hear Apollo coming around the corner with his DBZ zips, utterly powerless to do anything as he ran me down.

Anyway, that's all been fixed, now, with Apollo getting nerfed firmly into the ground. His Flawless Advance's hit radius has been shrunk, its damage has been reduced, its spirit scaling has been slashed, and it heals you slightly less when it does connect. Disengaging Sigil now gets snubbed properly by Slowing Hex, making it an easy counter buy.

His ultimate, Itani Lo sahn, is now also slightly weaker. If you can interrupt it, it goes on cooldown, it shouldn't hit targets that are behind him anymore, its base damage is slightly low, and its spirit scaling has also been nudged down slightly.

Reactions on the game's subreddit have been appropriately jubilant: "Damn they beat his ass," writes one player. "Yoshi took him out back," adds another. You can read the specifics on how thoroughly Apollo's ass has been beat down below:

• Apollo: Fixed Slowing Hex not preventing Disengaging Sigil
• Apollo: Riposte On Pummel Hit changed from -15% Bullet Resist to -22% Melee Resist (affects T2 as well)
• Apollo: Flawless Advance hit radius reduced by ~10%
• Apollo: Flawless Advance Base Hold Damage reduced from 30 to 25
• Apollo: Flawless Advance Base Hold Damage spirit scaling reduced from 0.7 to 0.55
• Apollo: Flawless Advance Max Hold Damage reduced from 45 to 40
• Apollo: Flawless Advance Max Hold Damage spirit scaling reduced from 1.1 to 0.9
• Apollo: Flawless Advance Perfect Damage reduced from 75 to 65
• Apollo: Flawless Advance Perfect Damage spirit scaling reduced from 1.65 to 1.55
• Apollo: Flawless Advance T3 reduced from +75 Perfect Damage to +65
• Apollo: Flawless Advance T3 spirit scaling indirectly reduced (it is +15% Spirit Scaling)
• Apollo: Flawless Advance T1 heal on hit reduced from 35 to 30
• Apollo: Itani Lo Sahn now goes on cooldown when interrupted
• Apollo: Fixed Itani Lo Sahn hitting targets behind him
• Apollo: Itani Lo Sahn base damage reduced from 250 to 225
• Apollo: Itani Lo Sahn spirit scaling reduced from 1.75 to 1.6

I have a love-hate relationship with MOBAs, but Deadlock—after its new Old Gods, New Blood update—has dragged me back to the genre kicking and screaming. I've got over 2,400 hours in Dota 2 from my misspent uni years, and I'm currently sitting on 183 hours with Valve's latest and counting.

I'm having a good time, and by "good time", I mean I am magnetically attracted to this dopamine machine and cannot pull away, even while I learn about all the fun new slurs I can be called by strangers online. But that comes with the territory. I'm deep in the paint enough that I've been viciously consuming voicelines, lore, and worldbuilding when I'm not playing.

And yet, I can't shake off this sense of malaise—a feeling of "what if", and I think it's that worldbuilding to blame. Not because it's bad, but because it's very, very good.

Deadlock might be one of my favourite videogame settings in a while. It's placed within a fantastical 1950s America where magic is not only real, but it's become a heck of a lot more real within the past few decades.

An event, called the Maelstrom, opened a bunch of Astral Gates across the world—including one right above New York, dubbed the Cursed Apple. The reason it's a MOBA is because there are two patrons trying to manifest fully in this magic-flooded planet, and you've gotta stop them.

Valve's character artists and writers have taken this concept and run with it. In no particular order, here are some of my favourite facts about this setting:

• There's a governmental agency that invades people's dreams called the Sandmen.
• The Vatican has supersoldier exterminators.
• 'Hell', actually another realm called Ixia, has been permanently connected to the Earth, and also South Ixia is a member of the United States.
• Ixians have been a part of human society for so long that the game's newest character has a conversation about identity and diaspora with the New York-born Ixian Infernus.
• There's an entire Vampire: The Masquerade-style society of vampires with their own baronies.
• There's a thieves guild of time-jumpers called Paradox whose literal goal is to just put priceless items on display at pop-up museums.
• The souls of the dead power machines of war.
• New York has a Municipal Coven of witches.
• There's a Lovecraftian entity who got so bored he decided to join the service industry.
• The Djinn want part of Wyoming. This is an actual plot point.
• Jacob Lash is an asshole.

This is a game, need I remind you, which has an incomplete roster—some of whose models are also deeply unfinished (my poor Vyper), but when Valve's polish does apply, it's been cooking up some of its best designs ever, and the map is getting downright pretty, too. I whisper a quiet "hell yeah" to myself whenever I romp through The Hidden King's subwoofer-drowned base.

Which is why I'm a little sad, because, well—it's a MOBA. As we all know, introducing your friend to a MOBA (and worse, getting them into one) is a sin that will mean your soul will never see the light of heaven. But it's also, by its very nature, a pretty constraining setting.

It's three lanes and a single map—we might get a little more from Valve in the form of animated shorts and comics a la TF2 (indeed, there's already a visual novel in the works) but that's it. Deadlock's setting is worthy of its own singleplayer game—be that an RPG or a first-person shooter.

Heck, there's enough juice here where I'd subscribe to a Deadlock MMO, or merrily run my own Deadlock TTRPG campaign (maybe I still could, with Blades in the Dark's new sci-fi supplement? Oh man, don't give me ideas).

I wanna meet other agents of the OSIC. I wanna run errands for the Municipal Coven. I wanna see what Ixia and the rest of the Baroness look like. I want to chase a time thief through a Paradox exhibit. I wanna get caught in a turf war between the vampire baronies. I want a terrifying boss fight with a Venator that has express permission from the Pope to stake me.

… Ah, crap. This is what League of Legends players feel like waiting on that Riot MMO, huh.

These are, to be clear, pie-in-the-sky dreams: But they're the kind of games I think about through the tiny windows of the game that Deadlock actually is—Deadlock has an ocean-deep skill ceiling and incredible complexity, true. But it's also an infinitesimal slice of a much more interesting world I wish we could see more of.

Which, hey—it's a good problem for Valve to have, right? I salute you, artists and writers under Gabe Newell's employ: You have cooked hard enough to leave me hungry for more.

Deadlock's Old Gods, New Blood update has released its final hero, the duelist Apollo, and he's really goddamn fun—before I get into the nitty gritty of the Ixian cast, however, Valve has some fun stats from the voting process to share.

In case you're unfamiliar, Deadlock's latest update has introduced six new heroes—however, they've not all been released at once. Instead, players have been able to vote on the order in which each character arrives at the Cursed Apple, with two added to the game every week.

Players accumulate votes by playing games—with your first win of the day giving you four whole votes to spend. Valve states in the Steam update that "60,776,963 total votes were cast across the event."

According to Valve, there are "exactly 600" soothsayers among the playerbase, too, who voted exclusively for the eventual winner in each round. The person with the most votes, though? An as-yet-unnamed unicorn lover who gathered 813 votes for Celeste.

The reason I feel terrible for this poor schmuck, as the headline suggests, is because Celeste was released second-to-last. Let's just do the maths real quick on how many games they dedicated to the nigh bottom of the barrel:

The update was released on January 22, and Celeste arrived on February 9. Let's assume this Celeste lover won at least one game every single day, including on the days that the update was announced and before Celeste's release. That's 19 games that produced 76 votes. This leaves 737 votes leftover.

This person played, at minimum, 756 games of Deadlock over the course of 19 days—if we assume each match lasted a half-hour (they can range from 20 minutes to hour-long slogs), that's 378 hours of Deadlock. Or, pleasingly, around 19 hours a day for 19 days. You might notice this leaves roughly five hours for sleep.

Chances are, this player in question instead played a lot of Street Brawl, the update's newer game mode with a shorter runtime—but even at around 20 minutes per match, that's still 252 hours of Deadlock, or 13 hours of gaming a day.

All to pour their votes into someone who, I must reiterate, came in second to last. Anyway. Apollo.

Anyway, Apollo

Apollo is a duelist type that'll likely be built with a bent towards Spirit items, given most of his abilities deal Spirit damage in some way. His weapon, "Pride of Ixia", has a relatively short range but fast travel time, meaning he'll need to get in close to secure last-hits and denies in lane.

His first ability, Disengaging Sigil, creates an Ixian rune that explodes on the ground and sends him flying backwards—it also causes a movement slow. At its highest level, it also refreshes your air dash/jump limit when you strike an enemy with it, making it—ironically enough—very good for continuing to engage with people.

His second, Riposte, is a parry that deflects any attack (basically, a left-click) and sends him flying towards any schmuck who triggers it. Apollo gets invulnerability frames while he dashes, and stuns them when he lands. This also reduces their bullet resist, making it a nice softening-up ability for your more gun-focused allies.

Flawless Advance is the result of some madman at Valve going, "Okay, Deadlock's already really complicated, so what if we added a QTE to it?" Apollo lunges forward up to three times, and if you release the active key at the perfect moment, indicated by an Osu-style ring around your crosshair, you gain maximum damage.

What's neat about this is that it can be used while airborne, making it good for movement. Apollo will also kip in the direction you input before activating the ability, allowing you to juke left, right, or backwards between strikes.

Lastly, his ultimate, Itani Lo Sahn, sees Apollo farming aura for a few seconds (otherwise known as 'charging up') before dashing forward. This Curses enemies for a brief window and also forces them to move in slow motion so Apollo can look cooler. Then, they explode for an enormous amount of damage—one that increases against half-health enemies, making it a soft execution.

All in all, Apollo seems designed to win 1v1s and capitalise at the end of teamfights with his ultimate, mopping up enemies and chasing down low-health adversaries. He also seems designed to be rad as all get-out, and I can't wait to play him and inevitably whiff every single one of my skillshots.

To spare myself the psychic turmoil, I decided to accept years ago that Half-Life 3 will never happen. Best case scenario, I get to be delighted by being proven wrong. Worst case, I'm sparing myself from the cyclical mass psychosis of reading an imminent Half-Life 3 announcement in whatever tea leaves we've convinced ourselves exist.

But if the studio doesn't seem interested in bringing Gordon Freeman out of retirement in the foreseeable future, modders are more than happy to give Gordon some screentime in Valve's games whether the company wants to or not. There might not be a new Half-Life on the horizon, but thanks to modder Grelgn, Deadlock can now star the last free man.

Available on Gamebanana, Grelgn's Gordon Freeman mod is a skin swap for Venator using a Freeman model originally built by artists Komegatze, TGH, and Bruss for Source 2 Filmmaker use in Half-Life: Alyx. As a demo video shows, Venator's firearms-and-crossbow kit feels right at home with Freeman, even if the bespectacled scientist feels a little out of place against the backdrop of Deadlock's Cursed Apple.

It will mean your game will feature one less ruggedly handsome muscle-priest, which I imagine is a net negative experience for a sizable swath of Deadlock players. Mod according to your priorities, I suppose.

That said, after all the interdimensional travel and time shenanigans Gordon's been subjected to, I can't imagine he'd be particularly unsettled by necromancy or lycanthropy or, uh, whatever Seven's deal is. Or at least, I can't imagine he would show it. Guy's pretty unflappable.

I choose to believe he'd get along excellently with Rem, however.

Unsurprisingly, the Freeman mod is just one of many skin swaps available for anyone wanting to turn Deadlock into a MOBA-style Smash Bros. I'm particularly fond of the one replacing Mo & Krill with Donkey Kong and Diddy, but I can't confirm whether it's compatible with the latest update. Don't worry, though: It seems like Hatsune Miku works fine.

Deadlock has me in an iron grip at the moment, and I owe part of that to my prior experience with Dota 2—see, back when I was a lot less happy (these things might be correlated), I sunk about 2,500 hours into that MOBA hell dimension. I regret just about every single one, but they did stick with me.

As such, I've been mightily enjoying Deadlock, because while my aim is bad and I don't have a lick of schmovement, I do have the paranoid "check the map every 10 seconds" instinct boiled into my bone marrow. Which is why its newest hero, Celeste, is giving me conniptions.

Celeste is the fifth hero released as part of the Old Gods, New Blood update. Over the course of the past month and change, players have been able to vote on the release order of five new heroes: First it was Rem, then Graves, then Silver, then Venator—leaving Celeste and Apollo to fight over second-to-last place.

The Coney Island carnie has won out, and she is giving me flashbacks because her ultimate's basically just the ultimate of Lich from Dota 2, and it is equally as terrifying in the low-level brackets I languish in, because clicking on heads is hard.

Let's get into her kit—Celeste is an agile spirit nuker with abilities geared around blowing up your opponents in style. She starts with a whopping four stamina pips to juke with, and she also floats a little bit, allowing skilled players to air strafe and zip around the map like they're playing Titanfall.

Her first ability, Light Eater, hits in a cone and provides two benefits: A bit of spirit lifesteal, and extra spirit damage on Celeste's weapon attacks for a few seconds after hitting afflicted enemies with it. I've seen most people pick this up early, given it allows her to score some meaty trades in the early minutes of the game.

It's the same with Dazzling Trick, which works a little like Paige's shield except Celeste can only apply it to herself. It gives the unicorn some extra movement speed and creates a silencing explosion when it's destroyed, which makes her surprisingly tanky during laning.

The spirit damage from both of these synergises nicely with Radiant Daggers, an AoE that triggers after a few seconds and deals spirit damage to enemies caught in it. The main benefit of this is that it gives Celeste a stacking spirit damage buff if you catch enemy heroes inside, up to a maximum of six stacks. These drop after a bit (unlike Bebop's bombs or Mina's Love Bites), but Celeste is still scary when she's ramped up.

And lastly, the thing that's giving me flashbacks: Shining Wonder, an orb that bounces between enemy heroes, dealing even more spirit damage, applying a slow, and reducing their dash distance. This thing hurts if you're poorly positioned, given it can get up to a whopping 18 bounces at its max rank.

I have already been sent hurtling back in time to my Dota 2 days where Lich, whose ult pretty much does the exact same thing, would send his fun bouncing ball of doom to rip through my badly-organised teammates. I thought such horrors were behind me. Alas.

Last to arrive at the Cursed Apple is Apollo—who you can amusingly still vote for—that seems ready to finish off the sextuplet as a melee duelist type.

Deadlock's newest support character, a sleepy owl-goblin creature called Rem, is just the littlest guy. He barely comes up to waist height when standing next to the towering tank Abrams, and if he crouches, he's about the size of one of the breakable gold jars that decorate the map. He's adorable! He's also sneaky and slippery in ways that are completely novel for the genre, and despite his short stature, stands tall as the game’s most fascinating hero (the guy who can make portals has been demoted to a close second for me).

Sliding around on his pillow at full speed, he's a bastard to hit. Rem's head is pretty big, so most of his model is a crit spot, but he has plenty of movement tools to work with. Beyond the universal suite of slides, jumps, and air dashes, he can use his Tag Along ability to jump to an ally and stick to them. He can recast this while it's active, letting him bounce from ally to ally like a pinball. Combine that with his throwable pillow, which displaces enemies when it hits them, and getting a bead on this guy becomes a one-of-a-kind pain.

This dynamic, where a hero's height meaningfully impacts their power, barely exists in other MOBAs. Deadlock foregoes the RTS-inspired controls and camera angle that characterize the genre in favor of third-person shooting—in other words, it's one of the only games in the genre where you can't take your autoattack for granted. And while games like League of Legends are full of manually aimed skillshots and 3D MOBA Smite requires attacks to be aimed in the general direction of your foe, neither require nearly the same precision as Deadlock.

Part of that is just the fact that it's a shooter where every single character is ranged and only one character's gun truly locks on to foes, but the new patch leverages its camera angle and controls in completely unique ways.

There are tunnels all over the map now, and Rem is the only character small enough to access them without using an ability or Street Brawl-exclusive item. The only other character who can easily use them is Calico, but she has to limit herself to a cat form where she can't dash, slide, attack, or use abilities. A few others like Drifter and Paradox can squeeze in through some unique interactions… but they need a tiny hero to lead the way, and they're trapped once they get in.

These tunnels are a great way for Rem to get around the map more quickly than other heroes, and they let him slip away from fights even more than his core kit allows. This synergizes with his Lil Helpers, which he can use to buff lane creeps and steal souls from the enemy side of the map. He slinks behind enemy lines, secures a subtle advantage for his team, and retreats where almost no one can follow. There's even one tunnel that provides a direct slide to the midboss, a crucial objective that can be stolen at the last second from any team trying to claim it, which lets him squeeze in for a steal more subtly than other heroes might.

There are other, more incidental advantages afforded by his height. If you take cover behind a suitably high wall (or far enough from the edge of a rooftop, if viewed from below), your health bar is concealed, making you effectively invisible to other players. After some testing in the "Explore NYC" mode, I was able to find lots of little edge cases where Rem is automatically concealed in spaces where other heroes would have to crouch, as well as at least one small arch Rem could squeeze under without sliding.

Crouching slows you down and getting enough speed for a good slide can require a stamina-draining dash, so this meaningfully expands his juking potential. And since Rem's ultimate lets him momentarily CC an entire enemy team with a sleep-inducing gaze that pierces walls, being hidden at the right time can make all the difference.

This all complements my very favorite aspect of Deadlock: the way its camera angle matters in a way that you can't find even in the other big MOBAs. Where Smite's third-person perspective is largely a novelty, Deadlock's changes everything.

Camera obscura

This is a game where you don't gank by casting your ult from a bush that makes you invisible, or using Blink Dagger from the fog of war, but by literally descending from the rooftops or rising out of a nearby tunnel. Frantic chases lead you down stairwells into a maze of tight corridors and dead-ends that fake you out with ghostly silhouettes. You can often evade what would be certain death in any other MOBA by taking advantage of the map's verticality.

And if you have a keen eye, the increasingly labyrinthine map allows for absurd new levels of skill expression. Grey Talon, whose ultimate lets him manually fly an explosive owl around the map, can squeeze that projectile through the smallest of tunnels.

These sorts of dynamics are more common in pure shooters. In Overwatch, for instance, the nimble hit-and-run assassin Tracer is smaller and harder to hit than a beefy tank like Reinhardt. On top of being good, communicative visual design, this serves a gameplay function; a stray shotgun blast is simply more likely to be soaked up by a big character, whose higher health pool is balanced out by how easy it is to hit them.

You usually only get a ghost of this in a game like League of Legends or Dota. Certain characters are larger than others, but it only has a marginal impact. Cho'gath and Zac can grow over the size of a match to ridiculous sizes, and each bit of growth increases their attack range and hit box size a bit. Dota's Undying grows to huge sizes as he steals enemy strength, making him easier to click, but his hitbox doesn't change. In most other cases in Dota and in other MOBAs, size indicates roughly how big a hero's hitbox is, but all this is still less impactful than in a typical shooter—or in Deadlock, since the overhead camera shows the action in wide shot with perfect clarity.

Anyone can still become invisible in League by standing in tall grass, and while a fully stacked Cho'gath can shield his puny allies from certain skill shots with his giant face, a long-range attack damage carry player can simply right-click whoever he's protecting. There's nothing on the level of a secret tunnel system only yordles can access, the challenge of carefully threading a skill shot through said tunnels, or the fundamental need to aim every shot.

It's all part of why Deadlock, though it is more MOBA than hero shooter, transforms the genre with the aspects of the shooter that it does embrace. To me, Rem indicates that Valve is looking to push the envelope in this regard even further, and I'm eager to see what the best players are capable of given time.

I consider myself to have a pretty high bar for tolerating the unnerving and weird. But watching a long-armed Linguini slap players around in Deadlock triggers a fight or flight response in me that my ancestors probably felt when they saw a prehistoric cave bear for the first time.

The Linguini and Remy over Mo and Krill mod does exactly what it says on the tin; it transforms Mo into Linguini and Krill, the creature riding on Mo's back, into Remy. The only problem is that Mo has slightly different proportions from Linguini. This means Linguini's arms are uncannily long, and he runs around the map on all fours: nightmare fuel.

You can watch Linguini slap Vyper around in FairyColonThree's video: "Vyper was trying to go to heaven, I guess LMAO." Everyone else in the comments seems equal parts amazed and terrified. "What in the Slenderman?" one player asks, while another simply states: Skin walker Linguini cannot be unseen, I am changed forever." Me too, Ringus123, me too.

But if you look closer at the video, you can see Linguini and Remy aren't the only modded characters playing. Hatsune Miku is modded over Bebop, meaning her ult is quite literally a Miku Miku beam, and Pikachu is modded over Seven.

There are more character mods out there than just that. The LeBron James mod for Abrams has been around for quite some time, and players have been making the most of it for months now: "It's so perfect." Alongside LeBron, there's also a Spider-Man Lash mod, which actually looks weirdly accurate.

This isn't to say the original characters in Deadlock aren't absolutely fantastic. Valve has some of the best character design I've seen in a multiplayer shooter in decades. But come on, who doesn't want to be able to fly around the map as Spider-Man or kill people as the one and only Hatsune Miku? Although I stand by the fact that the Linguini and Remy mod looks like my sleep paralysis demon.

Deadlock's most recent update, "Old Gods, New Blood", has added six new heroes to the game. Well, kinda—it's allowed players to vote on the release order of six new heroes, which have been coming to the cursed apple piecemeal. So far we've had sleepy little guy Rem, an actual highschooler (who you bet is somehow listening to My Chemical Romance in the 1950s) Graves, and drunk werewolf Silver, who I am normal about.

The most recent addition to the cast is Venator, leaving the fencer Apollo and carnie Celeste in the lurch, and to be fair it's not hard to see why—this man has aura, and I'm not just talking about the shining power of the Holy Spirit.

Venator, also known as Father Quinn Rourke, is a member of the Venators, "a Vatican-sanctioned order whose members are deployed to regions with a high concentration of supernatural predators.

"Few in number, their modus operandi is to observe, identify, and exterminate. They are methodical, they are precise, and once they identify a threat to the flock they are relentless. But even amongst those who are called The Sword Of St. Benedict, one stands apart from the others. A man whose hardened heart has allowed him to pay terrible prices in the name of the greater good... and he has once again been dispatched to New York."

So yeah, he's cool as… well, not hell. Cool as heaven? Sure.

Venator is a gun character, and that's not just because he's literally wielding so many armaments that he needs to light melee by headbutting people. Almost all of his abilities scale with weapon damage, so you'll be building for just that on this character.

First up we've got Consecrating Grenade, which deals weapon damage (told you) and sets enemies on fire. It's a projectile that bounces once before exploding, leading to a potential for trickshots—though it'll also detonate on contact with an enemy. Like a lot of Venator's abilities, it also deals "pure" damage, which ignores all resistances, and reduces enemy healing, making him a good pick against self-healing heroes like Victor.

Gutshot is a shotgun blast that deals (you guessed it) weapon damage, while also pushing enemies back. If you bonk someone into a wall with this, you also apply a stun—at max level, stunning someone like this also makes your next heavy melee attack "blessed", dealing pure damage and executing low-health enemies. And since melee damage scales with weapon damage in this game, that's gonna hurt.

Hex-Lined Snap Trap (killer band name, by the way) is his most finickity ability. You slide a trap across the floor that arms after a delay, and if an enemy walks into it, they take spirit damage, are immobilized, and become revealed—letting you see them through walls for a bit afterwards.

These suckers stay on the floor for about 30 seconds, so they can sometimes catch people unawares, and at their max level Venator deals 20% damage to any poor sod whose gormless legs are stuck in them. It's a little tricky, but if you aim it right, you can combo your Gutshot into one of these.

His ultimate, Ira Domini (literally 'the wrath of the lord') gets his stake-firing crossbow involved. He can shoot three stakes while this is active, each dealing a boatload of weapon damage—with the last one being blessed. At max level, however, all of his Ira Domini bolts are blessed, so you'll likely be maxing this ultimate fairly early on.

As for how to build him? Weapon damage, mostly. Taking a look at the build browser (where I can find such early-day delights as "GUN CATHOLIC DADDY BUILD" and "TOP 1 PRIEST NA"), that means items like Fleetfoot, Titanic Magazine, and Bullet Lifesteal—eventually leading into Glass Cannon, Lucky Shot, and Vampiric Burst.

Now only Apollo and Celeste remain before all of the new updates' heroes are released, and honestly, I'm pretty excited—all of these new heroes have been really interesting from a design perspective, even if I hate Graves' little zombies and stupid immobilising wall that I keep walking into (my fault) so much. It's enough to make me want to not join the black parade at all, but I shall confess such sins to Father Quinn and hope for absolution.

One of the 'fun' things about Deadlock being in 'closed beta'—that is, not officially released, but relatively accessible with an invite from a pal—is the fact that Valve is under no compulsion or desire to keep the meta stable for any serious length of time. As is the case with Silver.

Silver's the newest hero in the roster, and one I have a vested interest in playing because I think she's cool as heck, so I've been doing just that. I've been having trouble playing her because of the way the game's picking system works, forcing you to select a random pool of heroes to go into matchmaking with—everyone else wants to play her too.

I did, however, get a good round of games in on her last night, here are the things I learned:

• Her gun is very bad, except for when you're using her Slam Fire ability.
• Her ult is very good, and has a very short cooldown.
• As soon as you get her ult in the early game, you can start going ham on people.

So imagine my surprise when I woke up this morning to discover that Silver's gun had been buffed, her ult's cooldown had been increased, and its early-game performance had been tweaked so you can go less ham on people. Can't have anything in this accursed city, I swear.

That's per the Deadlock forums, in which a thread tallies up these rapid-fire balance patches. To get into specifics, here are the major changes for Silver herself:

Her gun (which I am just learning now is called Hair of the Dog. Very good, Valve) now has a higher base fire rate and a slightly bigger magazine, and she also has better base regen. This should make her better in lane, given her gun's poor base stats were, pun intended, pretty dogwater.

Slam Fire's had a bit of a nerf to it—15% of the tier 2 upgrade has been sheared off and given to its tier 1 upgrade, its cooldown is slightly longer, and the tier 3 buff is weaker. Boot Kick and Entangling Bolas tier 3's upgrades are just plain stronger. While the Slam Fire nerf's a little harsh, given developer Yoshi reckons the base weapon's fire rate buff leads to a "11% DPS increase", it's not as bad as it seems.

As for her ultimate? It's mostly been nerfed. The biggest heartache is the health bonus you get for transforming into a werewolf—slapped down from a meaty 350 HP to a measly 100 HP. Its cooldown being increased from 22 seconds to 35 seconds is nasty, too—making it harder for Silver to apply pressure in the midgame by just running at everybody, wolfing out, and tearing them to shreds.

Essentially, the scales in her kit have been tipped: Her base form is overall stronger, her wolf form is overall weaker. Which means I've gotta go learn to play her again. Current pubstompers Graves and Bebop also had some adjustments, too. Though knowing the pace at which these buffs and nerfs come, we may well see more tinkering in the near-future.

The third hero of the new batch coming to Deadlock is none other than Silver, the bounty-hunting werewolf, as she won the latest round of voting. I would just like to thank everyone who voted, and, of course, myself for not only using all my votes on Silver but also for canvassing in every game I played.

"Silver makes her living tracking down lowlifes, but today New York's misanthrope lycanthrope plans on summoning a god," an official blog post says. "Fortunately, her career as a bounty hunter has prepared her well for all that the ritual requires."

The most interesting part of Silver's kit is that she has two, one for her human form and one for her werewolf form. While in human form, she uses a rifle to damage enemies from afar, with abilities like Slam Fire, which instantly reloads your gun and buffs your fire rate 300% and deals bonus weapon damage for three shots. Then there's Boot Kick, a dash into a melee attack, and Entangling Bola, which deals spirit damage and applies -20% movement speed for 1.5 seconds on hit targets.

The aim of the game with Silver is to just keep hitting targets. Because after seven direct hits, your lycanthrope curse meter fills up, turning Silver into a werewolf for a short period of time. Before the timer runs out, she has access to three new abilities, which are as follows:

• Go For The Throat: a melee attack that also inflicts 40% lifesteal.
• Mauling Leap: a melee attack that deals weapon and spirit damage.
• Tail Whack: A crowd control attack that knocks enemies back and inflicts disarm on hit enemies for 2.5 seconds.

This transformation acts as Silver's ultimate. Instead of having a hugely devastating attack that you can only use a few times during a match, Silver can transform into a werewolf for multiple short periods of time with a cooldown of only 22 seconds. She's pretty brawly and will undoubtedly be a pain in the ass to fight against—I'm looking forward to it.

Although, Silver's character isn't entirely finished yet. She uses Seven's movement animations while in human form and Drifter's while in werewolf form. But that just gives us something extra to look forward to when Valve randomly updates her animations in the future.

Silver now joins Rem and Graves as part of Deadlock's ever-growing roster. The only three left to be voted in now are Apollo, Celeste, and Venator—my money's on Celeste for taking the next win.