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.

I don't think this is supposed to happen from r/DeadlockTheGame

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.

There's no greater pain in a MOBA than seeing your favorite hero swept into the swirling void of unplayability by a hero ban, but it’s a necessary evil, at least for buttoned-up ranked play. Bans make picking and counterpicking more interesting and keep imbalanced characters off the field while players wait for a balance patch—and to my delight, Deadlock has finally got them. Well, sort of.

What it's actually added is a “prefer to avoid” toggle you can assign to one hero from the game's roster when queuing for both standard play (which is always ranked) and Street Brawl, the new casual mode analogous to League of Legends's ARAM or Valorant's Spike Rush. You also can't avoid new heroes, which currently just applies to the six characters from Old Gods, New Blood.

The patch notes, which you can find on Deadlock’s feedback forum, call this a hero banning system, but there are a few reasons for both why this is different and why it might be necessary for a game in pre-alpha.

Most ranked modes in MOBAs have a draft phase—a pre-game lobby where both teams take turns selecting heroes for their team and banning them so that no one can play them in that match. In League of Legends, for instance, each player locks in a ban before anyone picks a hero (without seeing what the other team has banned) for a maximum of 10 unique bans.

Deadlock's hero banning is different because there's no chance to deliberate with your team beforehand; you pick the heroes you'd like to play, who you'd like to avoid, and you're dumped into a match with a bunch of strangers who did the same. While it bypasses the strategic, collaborative element a full draft introduces, it satisfies the same urge to avoid a particularly grating flavor-of-the-month build or practice a new hero without running into their hard counters.

It's probably too early for Deadlock to get an actual draft, anyway. There are only 34 playable heroes at the time I'm writing this and, assuming each player in a 6v6 game got a ban, a third of the roster would stand to be excluded every single match. Deadlock could implement a system where fewer bans are decided on by a team captain, as some MOBAs do, but if this toggle lets me play against Bebop less often, then I'm perfectly satisfied.

There are all sorts of other balance tweaks in the patch; you can read the rest of the patch notes here.

Deadlock's players already voted on which of the six new characters introduced in the Old Gods, New Blood update is their favourite—it's none other than the littlest guy around, Rem. But who would come in second place? Well, that spot has gone to a goth chick who carries around a dismembered hand.

Graves is the second of the new characters actually added to Deadlock, as she is available to play as right now. "The dead have been making a whole lot of demands lately, and only Graves has the courage to oblige," an official blog post says. "That severed lich hand she found in the cemetery has proven itself a valuable ally, allowing her to latch onto her enemies and steal their power for herself."

Wait, let me get this straight. So Graves' entire power centres around a random, severed hand she just picked up in a graveyard one day? Ok, well, that sounds like grave robbing, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years over here in the UK, but pop off I guess.

"Her curiosities about the passage of life are further put to use with Jar of Dead, collecting the remains of the fallen, shaking them up, and throwing them back at her enemies to grant those remorseful spirits a final shot at revenge," the post continues. "With Grasping Hands, she strikes a deep crack in the earth, allowing those down below to grab onto enemies' ankles and stop them from escaping her reach. And when all else fails, a Borrowed Decree will summon the dead to fight alongside her—Death is coming." Ominous.

The primary fire is just a green beam that locks onto enemies, like Moira or OG Sym from Overwatch. Her primary weapon, Jar of Dead, involves you just chucking a pot of deadheads at nearby enemies—the ghosts will then deal spirit damage to enemies who are caught up in the attack. If there's no one around, the ghostly heads will just follow you around until you aim for another player. Grasping Hands is also useful as a crowd control ability as it casts a line of hands to pop up from the ground (24m length), which will immobilise enemies and deal extra spirit damage. It'll be useful if you need to stop someone mid-escape.

Finally, Graves' ultimate, Borrowed Decree, is super helpful if you're taking on a base, as it summons a ton of ghouls that serve as extra bodies to deal damage. It lasts for 20 seconds, with a five-second time frame to summon. The ghouls can do 150 damage when they get close enough to someone for them to explode, which will also inflict -80% move speed for a 6.5m radius. It's a pretty strong ult.

Graves is most similar to Victor in that she deals a good amount of AoE damage and is great in a teamfight, so if you're looking for another character who's good at just going for objectives or sieging the enemy base, then look no further. She also has an auto-aim weapon, which is pretty forgiving, so if you're not massively comfortable with Deadlock's shooting aspects, she may also be a good pick for you.

Deadlock, the MOBA shooter that Valve would still like us to pretend hasn't launched even as it receives major additions whose patch notes span pages of tastefully produced graphical treatments, has been drawing attention with its Old Gods, New Blood update. As of last week, Deadlock's boasting an updated map, a new mode, all sorts of quality-of-life tinkering, and six characters gradually being doled out according to the whims of player base democracy.

The update's best new feature, however, isn't mentioned anywhere in all that lovely web design. To find it, you'll have to crawl through some vents.

Shortly after the Old Gods update launched, players discovered the Deadlock's updated map had peppered the streets of its necromantic New York with small vents, crawlspaces, and apertures that—while too narrow for most of the roster to traverse—clearly led somewhere.

Once Deadlock players selected Rem, a spritely little dream-imp, as their first choice for the update's new character rollout, those nooks and crannies suddenly became much more navigable. "An accidental stowaway from the world of dreams," is an adorable, nightcapped, candle-carrying crow-cat with a suite of sleep-related abilities, and—crucially—he's small enough that he can enter the map's newly-added network of narrow passageways.

While those vents allow all sorts of tactical opportunities in an actual match, they're also present in Deadlock's new hub hideout. One vent entrance is tucked next to the news desk; another is behind a breakable crate in the training gym. And if you follow either of those, you'll find yourself at the most delightful Old Gods addition: Rem's very own bedroom.

It's a charming little pocket of an environmental easter egg, where Rem has stashed a collection of snacks, books, and cushions. A trio of his helpers are hanging out there, too: one attentively reading a picture book while another naps. There's also, you know, a spectral hand cranking the phonograph, because Deadlock is spooky.

As an early fan of Deadlock's environmental design, I've been impressed by how much flavor and character Valve has been filling Deadlock's spaces with, even in their unfinished state. A hero's hidden bedroom doesn't affect the core gameplay, but it provides something just as critical: a strong sense of the world's atmosphere, and of the kinds of people—human or otherwise—that inhabit it. I'm not much of a MOBA guy at heart, but if the occult Big Apple keeps getting new details and diversions like Rem's hideaway, I'll keep coming back.

I like the horse in Highguard. The biggest thrills you can find in that game are on horseback—galloping across plains, jumping off slopes, and blasting foes off their own horses as you circle each other like sharks. That only happens incidentally, though.

At its heart, Highguard is a game about farming Vesper (money but blue) and loot in the open world, then overpowering the enemy team… for the first few minutes of a round, at least. Then it's about competing to grab and escort the Shieldbreaker, sort of like capture the flag. Once that's done, it's about sieging the enemy base; you plant bombs in their fortress, and they try to stop you by putting up reinforced walls, defusing the bombs, and holding out for long enough. By that point you're shuffled into a cramped base where the horse doesn't matter anymore, and you've kind of forgotten why you had one to begin with.

The sense I get is that Highguard wants to make a smoothie of the most dominant competitive games' best ingredients—the role-based teamplay and tide-turning ultimate ability spew of a MOBA, the frantic scavenging of a battle royale, the wall-breaching tactics of Rainbow Six, and so on. The end result feels a bit like a sport I’ve just invented where you hit a golf ball across a field, play a down’s worth of football wherever it lands, and then everybody starts curling.

Such wide-reaching fusion is a noble goal, and I don't dislike Highguard; cruising around its wide open maps looking for a fight is decent fun. But based on my knee-jerk impressions, the stew of styles on offer here has too many disparate flavors.

The time-to-kill feels too short for a strategic, MOBA-like exchange of abilities, but too long for dumping a magazine into someone to feel satisfying. Generous health regen and tough shields in the late-game make this problem worse, and since each character only has one non-ultimate ability, the result is fights that sometimes feel long for no reason.

Similarly, farming Vesper doesn't capture the fun of laning in a MOBA because the map is so free and open. Teams end up too far away to harass each other. It also doesn't capture the danger-filled fun of scrounging for loot in Fortnite because I know exactly how many enemies are around and have a decent idea of what equipment they could have, as well as what I'll find. I haven't noticed much room for cool surprises in the resource farming phase, so what is all the downtime for? Highguard replicates the rhythms of the games that inspired it, but not always the appeal.

I found myself wishing that Highguard would have identified its own most fun bits rather than the fun bits of other games I can already play—riding around on the horse, fighting over the Shieldbreaker, and crashing through walls—and built its ruleset to make those things happen as often as possible (I reckon a dedicated CTF mode in Highguard would slap). The traditional MOBA is a great example of this; the fun part is getting gold for powerful items, destroying buildings and killing enemy players, and everything you do in a match of Deadlock or League of Legends funnels you organically toward those goals.

As if to deliver exactly what I'm talking about, Deadlock just patched in a new take on its formula, with an even more concentrated focus on the basic elements that make it enjoyable. Street Brawl melts Deadlock's relatively traditional MOBA ruleset down to a lean series of rapid-fire rounds. Everyone piles into one lane, the first team to take a tower wins the round, go back to base and buy some crazy items, rinse and repeat. It's like ARAM in League of Legends or Dota 2, but even better because I can drop pianos on people.

Street smarts

Street Brawl is a lot of fun because it takes the full-bodied growler of booze that is a normal length Deadlock match and swaps it for a potent shot with the same flavor. But zoom back out and the full game isn't some multi-phase genre mashup where the objective changes every few minutes. There are twists and details to unpack, but it's never distracted from the main event: farming, teamfights, and pushing.

There are other reasons Highguard isn't my new go-to competitive game. Deadlock has a more sublime vibe even in pre-alpha with unfinished art assets; "haunted New York featuring a bisexual half-snake girlfailure from New Jersey" has more draw for me than "indistinct fantasy world featuring quasi-realistic assault rifles." Deadlock's world is funny and evocative, so I want to spend time there. Highguard's world, like its ruleset, feels like an arranged marriage of elements removed from the context where they work.

I also appreciate that Deadlock's pre-alpha is devoid of monetization and player retention tactics entirely. I couldn't so much as buy a plush if I wanted to. Meanwhile, Highguard has already teed up its in-game shop, daily and weekly quests, three different currencies, a battle pass-esque system in War Chests, and a selection of cosmetic rewards split into purchasable "series" before ranked play has even been implemented. War Chests are mercifully not time-limited and this stuff is all sequestered into its own page on the main menu, but it’s another area where Highguard cribs the wrong stuff from its inspirations.

I get that live service games cost a pretty penny and Valve has plenty of pennies lying around. I also know that Valve gets early, enthusiastic buy-in from people because its past games have a lot of fans, and Deadlock has extra room to experiment and iterate because of those things. But Highguard’s elaborate rewards structure feels more carefully considered than its only mode, and I am dog-tired of seeing the cart come before the horse in games that I’m not even sure are worth the time of day yet.

The intensity of vitriol that's been directed at Highguard strikes me as disproportionate. The game isn't bad; it's fun enough. But I'm surrounded on all sides by games that feel like FOMO vampires trying to drain my every waking second; if I'm going to play one or even a few of them, I'm not going to settle for "fun enough." Highguard might appeal to me as a beer-and-pretzels FPS I can drop in and out of, but it's already got its time investment-hungry teeth bared and poised to strike—even if I were willing to get bit, I just don't have the time.

I don't usually get my hopes up when it comes to people online collectively making the right decision. I've been around long enough to know that it usually doesn't end well. But today, just this once, I've been pleasantly surprised.

Six new characters will be getting added to Deadlock as part of its massive Old Gods, New Blood update, but the order in which they're added has been left entirely to the community, and their first pick is exactly what I'd hoped for.

The community has cast aside the pretty unicorn lady or hot werewolf (at least for now) in favour of a particularly excellent little guy, Rem. "An accidental stowaway from the world of dreams, Rem has found himself stranded in the city that never sleeps," an official announcement post says.

Rem is a support character that has the ability to cast sleep and summon even more little guys to help fellow teammates. His primary ability is Pillow Toss, which is a projectile that does heavy knockback and landing hits reduces your ability cooldown. At its base strength, it inflicts 75 damage and -45% fading move speed.

Then, for healing, Rem has Tag Along, which allows him to jump next to an ally and take a quick nap beside them, which gives you and said ally a burst of heal based on how long you were by their side. If you're within a 23m range, you restore 15% of missing health in an instant, and you have a 40-second cooldown to restore 28 health per second while napping next to them.

Exploring the new Vents as REM! from r/DeadlockTheGame

Rem's final ability is his Lil Helpers, which allows him to summon an even smaller guy to help you or an ally do 'chores', whether that be collect boxes, do Sinner's Sacrifices, or just follow around allies and be helpful. If they do follow a teammate, that player gets 15% spirit resist and +3m move speed. While following a trooper gives it +35 damage/resist and 14 per second heal.

The biggest and baddest ability Rem has under his belt is his ultimate, though, Naptime. This is basically a huge AoE attack where Rem can cast sleepiness within a radius that slows players, reduces dash distance, and prevents them from using any movement abilities. It can even affect enemy players through walls. It also does 120 damage, and an extra 100 sleep damage within a 24m radius. I can foresee this ultimate being a real pain in the ass.

I'm very happy to see this little guy added to Deadlock so quickly, and by the sounds of things, so are most other players… most: "May god have mercy on us all."

I'm sure we have nothing to worry about, guys. It's not like Rem's kit will be able to scale way faster than everyone else thanks to his Lil Helpers farming, or that he'll probably be unkillable late game thanks to his speed, small stature, and healing abilities. Hang on, oh god.

I jest, while Rem certainly poses some obstacles players will now have to overcome, I'm really excited to see what the community does with this new character and what his builds will look like. Even if he is being called a Yuumi, I'm still not going to feel bad for having fun playing as him.

I don't have children, but if I did, I'd probably love them less than I love Deadlock, Valve's work-in-progress MOBA shooter. It might be unfinished, but its anarchic invite-only test has served up better live service than most live service games with its constant reinvention—a habit Deadlock's carried into 2026 with the massive update released Thursday. That update brought a new mode which is almost my favorite way to play the game now... if it weren't for one critical aspect.

A normal match of Deadlock is familiar MOBA fare and is therefore extremely stressful. Games usually last between 20 and 45 minutes, and there's very little downtime as teams vie for objectives and farm creeps. Furthermore, every match is ranked⁠—there's no casual queue. Even if you just want to try a new build and unwind, your lackadaisical performance might be mucking up a teammate's chance to get promoted. This environment is fundamentally hostile to the habitual chiller.

Most MOBAs have a chiller-friendly mode based on an old custom game tradition: All Random, All Mid. Everyone's hero choice is decided at random, and both teams barrel down a single lane to kill each other and start smashing towers as quickly as possible. It goes from a delicate, precise strategy game emphasizing rigid team roles to a facerolling bloodbath that prioritizes caveman instincts.

The new mode, Street Brawl, is Deadlock's answer to ARAM. It's a best-of-five 4v4 mode where players pick loadouts from a random grab-bag of items, funnel into a single lane, and have to destroy a single enemy building to win the round. Each round lasts a few minutes and it trades most of the game's strategic complexity for sheer fisticuffs.

In the half-dozen or so matches I've played, I quickly fell in love. The mode packs all sorts of hilarious new items you can't get in the buttoned-up normal mode, like a giant piano you can drop on enemy players and a shrink ray that lets you blast your teammates to microscopic size so enemy aim becomes a lost cause.

Its random item shops also helped me appreciate items I don't use so often in standard matches, like the Restorative Locket—its healing ability, which grows stronger as nearby enemies use abilities, shines in a mode where you're constantly in a close-up scrap. At its best, Street Brawl reminds me of Battlerite, a gone but not forgotten MOBA that I can't talk about too much or else I'll get choked up.

As someone who was starting to burn out on the ranked ladder grind, Street Brawl was the exact salve I needed to restore my excitement for Deadlock. The problem is, I'm already starting to see a pattern form: heroes with superlative pushing power and huge area-of-effect abilities like Bebop, McGinnis, and Seven really shine in the mode, even with random items. Because you can queue as any hero you like, you see these extra-powerful picks nearly every game. On the flipside, heroes like Drifter—who specializes in hunting down isolated enemies—are less enticing.

Players on Reddit have lamented the balance issues and called for a shift to randomized heroes as in this thread from user BlueDragonReal, and I'm inclined to agree. League of Legends encountered a similar issue when it introduced Brawl, a single-lane mode where ranged carries dominated. While ARAM has balance issues in any game that has it, it's impossible to guarantee a powerful team composition in that mode since hero choices are random.

I think borrowing that extra pinch of randomness from the age-old mode would go a long way in making Street Brawl the perfect casual spin on Deadlock. Even as it is, though, it's a great way to try a new hero or blow off steam in-between ranked matches.

It's all hands on deck for Spellcasters Chronicles' second closed beta test, which will be taking place next weekend, starting on Thursday, January 29. The devs have not only optimised performance, but have also added a ton of new content like a beta ranked system, new spells, creatures, and buildings.

"I am very happy and excited to tell you that [on] January 29, we will release closed beta two of Spellcasters Chronicles," Gregorie Diaconu, game director, says in a dev update. "First of all, we wanted to thank all of you for joining our last closed beta in December. We were very happy and excited to see you all enjoy it, give us all your feedback, share your passion about what you loved about this concept, this game, this universe. And also give feedback about what you want in the game."

But the second closed beta won't just be more of the same. This time, players will be able to play in a new arena, the Nordic Shore, a location covered in the remnants of ancient battles and has a huge sea monster skeleton running across it. And to fill this new space, there'll be new toys to mess around with.

"As you know, the spellcasters can infuse the creatures, and for the first time, the frost infusion is coming into the game," Fabien Arnaudo, the senior game designer, explains. "And with the new resurrection and sacrifice spells, death of your creatures won't always be a bad thing."

Players will also now have access to defensive buildings like a Wall and Ballista, as well as a Harpy's Nest that can, well, summon harpies to attack enemies. There's also the Stone Behemoth creature, which can destroy buildings from a long distance, a Steam Tank that does immense single-hit damage, Faeries, which "brings invisibility", and a Lich: "I will let the player discover what the Lich does." Ok, not suspicious at all.

The second closed beta will also give players access to a new ranked mode, which is still in beta. There are eight ranks: Novice, Initiate, Adept, Mage, Archmage, Master, Grand Master, and Fate Weaver. It may not be good for my mental, but I will be checking this ranked mode out, because why not add higher stakes and stress to my matches?

But arguably the best change coming to the second closed beta is some much-needed optimisation. "The 3D engine team mostly worked on improving our specifications and improving performance between the closed beta one and the closed beta two," Marine Lopes, producer R&D, says. "With a lot of feedback during the closed beta one about performance and we wanted to improve that for the second experience.

"It was very important for us to provide a more fluent experience for players and to reach more players for closed beta two. We mostly worked on the CPU performance and RAM optimisation. And we're now happy to say that you'll be able to play Spellcasters Chronicles on 16GB RAM (down from 32GB). We want every player to be able to play our game, so we will keep improving even beyond the closed beta."

Deadlock fans are eating good right now, as Valve released a huge update for the MOBA named Old Gods, New Blood that's still technically in its secret closed beta. But they are not eating as well as the devs at Valve HQ, who may or may not have contributed to a serious Domino's pizza boom just before the update went live.

"Pizza places near Valve HQ in Seattle are experiencing higher than usual activity," Deadlock Intel posted a mere two and a half hours before the new Deadlock update went live. Was this actually a Pentagon pizza moment or just a strange coincidence? We don't know, but Michael Douse, Larian's publishing director, seems to think Valve isn't responsible for the boom: "Bro, they have unlimited boiled eggs on every floor. Nobody is going to Domino's over there." Ah yes, Valve's famous infinite horde of boiled eggs, I forgot about that.

Regardless of whether anyone saw this update coming, it's here now, and it's big. Valve has overhauled the patrons, bases, and troopers. On one side, we now have the Hidden King who "exists in the cracks of the city, waiting for his followers to usher him into the light." He comes with a bunch of candlewick troopers, much like the OGs.

On the other side is the Archmother, "Glass, steel, and stone… Order and power where once there was none… The Archmother has always guided the founders' hands, and now it is time for them to welcome her home." She comes with new blue crystal and glass troopers—very fancy.

Valve has also revamped the post-game pages, adding a new MVP feature and a Key Player for the losing team. Alongside new info screens for you to ignore if you performed badly, or screenshot to send to your friends as evidence you're too good to play with them. There's also some UI improvements, like reactive portraits, kill streaks, damage impact indicators, a mid-boss timer, and a better chat visual, among other new features.

Players who don't want to commit as much time to matches will also be happy to see the integration of a new, shorter mode. Street Brawl is a "quick 4v4 battle for the city over a best-of-five match. Each round takes a couple of minutes." It'll get rid of farming as players start every round with equal resources, and it's also streamlined the shopping system. Hell yeah, I can get on board with all of that.

But the biggest and best news from the Old Gods update is undoubtedly the six new heroes that are ready to be added to the game over the coming weeks. We've got:

• Silver: a "feral hot mess" who can transform into a werewolf.
• Rem: a little guy who can probably send other players to sleep.
• Graves: an edgy necromancer that can perform "area denial".
• Apollo: "a cut above" demon with high mobility.
• Celeste: a dazzling performer who is half unicorn, I think?
• Venator: not the Arc Raiders pistol, but an "arms expert" with a big gun.

All of these heroes are ready to go, but Valve would never be so kind as to release them all at once. Instead, two heroes will be released per week on Mondays and Thursdays starting on January 26. In what order? That is still to be decided, by you, actually.

Deadlock players will be able to vote on what order the heroes should be released in, with votes earned by playing the game. So the more you play, the better say you'll have. "Play a standard match or street brawl to earn votes," the update post says. "Your first win of the day gives you four additional votes. Cast your votes in the ballot box located in the Hideout."

After the first new hero is added, there'll also be priority tokens for players to boost the support of certain heroes. They will also be earned faster the more heroes are in the pool. And for those who are already planning to campaign for a certain hero, Valve suggests using in-game sprays to "demonstrate your support for your favourite upcoming hero."

I have already decided that I'll give my life for Rem, but honestly, any of these other heroes could come in a close second. Like the rest of the roster, all of them look fantastic and will undoubtedly have an excellent kit for players to work with.

You might remember Slork. He featured in a PC Gamer article with the headline "Slork," and the strapline, "Slork." Everyone had a good time slorkin' it back then, and the unfinished hero quickly turned heads with his ridiculous name and experimental, stealthy playstyle. That being said, I have bad news, #SlorkNation: Valve has melted Slork's wet, slippery body into Sunday dinner.

Let me back up. Slork was a hero concept first accessible via console commands in Deadlock's private test. He was later added to the hero labs, a feature where characters with placeholder art could be used to queue up for normal games during scheduled hours, assuming you had a certain number of games under your belt. At this point, Slork had been renamed to the decidedly less hilarious Fathom.

Deadlock has spent the last year shifting forms like the MOBA version of an Animorph, and the hero labs mode was removed as the game became increasingly polished and all play was subsumed into a single ranked queue. Four of the eight hero labs characters were added to Deadlock's core roster permanently. The others, including Fathom, were simply removed.

That brings us to now, a moment wherein the Deadlock community is in a stir over the next major update. Various leaks and rumors have surfaced all over social media about the next several heroes, but Slork fans have noticed Slork's absence from these rumors.

When asked about Slork's status on the Deadlock discord, developer Duncan "Hopoo" Drummond(yes, the same Hopoo of Risk of Rain fame, he works on Deadlock now) gave a grisly reply: "We made a delicious stock out of his bones and meats." The reply was shared in a Reddit thread from user ginger6616 titled, "They’re laughing… they murdered my boy and they’re laughing."

When Hopoo was informed he was being cruel, he doubled down: "7 hours," came the cooking instruction for Slork's now-extinct bones and meats. He quickly added that this was not a release window for the patch, just a cold acknowledgment that Slork was stewed for the better part of a day.

Suffice it to say, if you've been waiting to see Slork (or Fathom) make it into Deadlock proper, it's never been more over for you. He's gone; you have my condolences.

League of Legends looks unrecognizable in 2025 when compared to its cartoonier, humbler 2009 incarnation. And yet, while Summoner's Rift has been dotted with all sorts of new jungle monsters, balance tweaks, and visual overhauls, the actual map has changed only slightly.

Occasionally a different mode is introduced with a new map, but those rarely receive much support—League has been focused on refining a single map and mode of play for nearly two decades now. Dota gets a little sillier—okay, a lot sillier—and Heroes of the Storm prioritizes breadth over depth with all sorts of smaller maps, but the average MOBA feels familiar each time you return. Three lanes, kill creeps for gold, buy a consistent number of powerful items, try not to pass out from sheer anger when it all goes wrong.

Valve's Deadlock, on the other hand, has spent the last year rocking the boat frequently with no warning or restraint. Where other MOBAs are happy to get a new hero a few times a year with the very occasional dual release, Deadlock shows off six in one go and lets players tear each other apart over, er, voting for, which gets added first. The community went feral campaigning for their favorites. Just a few months earlier, a full rework of the shop added a shedload of new items and tweaked most of the existing ones.

All that pales in comparison to February's map rework, which changed the map from a four-lane layout to three. Not only did this mean solo laning—wherein one player had to go it alone in the early game, but received more income for their trouble—no longer existed, it meant ganking and rotating took a whole different form. Ultimately, the switch to three lanes felt much faster and centered more on big, climactic team fights; the fact that the same patch doubled the default sprint speed probably helped.

Fast and loose

These changes each felt like novel one-offs, but taken as a pattern, big swings defined Deadlock's 2025. The game became faster, more intense, and twitchier. As recently as November, lane creeps began dropping their income on the ground to be secured manually rather than passing it to nearby heroes automatically on death—a sizable change that encouraged more close-up scraps in lane.

I don't think Deadlock is capable of this rapid reinvention because it has something figured out that the other MOBAs haven't. Dota and League do a lot to stay fresh, and if Dota decided to fundamentally change how gold is collected or if League added a fourth lane after all these years, that could very well be a disaster. Deadlock can handle this sort of radical reinvention because it isn't done.

It's pretty obvious if you play it for very long. Different areas of the map meet vastly different standards for art quality, and certain heroes look more like prototypes than the real thing (the magician Sinclair is still just a flat, undetailed mannequin, and heroes like Bebop seem very much like holdovers from when the game was a sci-fi shooter called Neon Prime).

But even as someone who likes to wait until early access is over to try the latest survival games, Deadlock's crude, unfinished form has endeared me to it more than I think a carefully constructed roadmap would in a more stable game.

It's the same reason I think the majority of competitive games are at their most fun right when they release; nothing feels set in stone, and with such constant overhauls of the core experience, Deadlock feels new over and over again. In Dota, learning a new hero takes understanding its ideal income priority position, optimal lane, best matchups, and meta item builds. These interactions have fermented since the days of Warcraft 3, and are the reason you can play Dota for 2,000 hours and still suck at it.

In Deadlock there's not so much as a draft phase. A given hero's best build seems to change with the wind; even how many item slots a hero has access to at a given time has changed from patch to patch. The game achieves a live service-esque freshness with each new patch because the already immature metagame is warped beyond recognition.

The dramatic updates keep the community in a perpetual stir. Right now, rumors swirl as to the release date of not one hero, but another six. Modders tinker with the game as eagerly as the developers, with entire fanmade maps and custom hero redesigns making the rounds on social media. And before the game has even had a chance to establish its own lore outside of in-game dialog, people have gleaned an astonishing amount about the Cursed Apple from the test build—perhaps because the associated lore is unignorably hilarious in some spots.

Rolling forward

Deadlock isn't yet ready to settle into a normal update cadence, even considering how much the art and balance have improved in the last year. It's hard to say how far off from "release" we are, at which point I expect the game will probably feel more like Dota: Big swings, yes, but delivered more infrequently and precisely.

As excited as I am to see the finished Deadlock, I think I'll always have some affection for this primordial period where so much feels like it is in flux. The same way Dota players trade stories of abandoned hero ideas like the Gambler, I think Deadlock players will trade stories of the four-lane map and release Drifter, assuming the game stays aloft for as long as Dota has.

I don't recommend it just yet if you want a stable, consistent game to find your footing in. But the MOBA space has been dominated by two unfathomably huge games for as long as I have played the genre, and that Deadlock can stroll in and toy with the formula with such an anarchic spirit is more than a bit of fun: it's proof that my favorite style of competitive game still has the ability to surprise me all these years later.

I don't know what Deadlock will look like when it finally hits 1.0, and that's exactly why it's been so thrilling; not knowing where we're going makes the road getting there all the more tantalizing.

The changing of the year can be a time of renewal and reinvigoration, but that renewal isn't always frictionless. The new year might mean wrestling with over-ambitious resolutions, the frustration of writing the previous year whenever you're dating a document, or—in the case of Riot Games—forgetting to renew the encryption certificate for your software and leaving your game unplayable for millions of players worldwide. We've all been there.

Late on Sunday, reports started emerging on Reddit and elsewhere that players were unable to login to League of Legends, with their attempts stalling out indefinitely at the game's initial loading screen. While Riot shortly said it was "looking into the issue," players quickly narrowed in on the root of the problem after checking the client's error logs: Windows was rejecting its connection attempts because of an expired SSL certificate.

SSL—short for "Secure Sockets Layer"—is a security protocol for establishing encrypted connections between a server and client. To form an SSL connection, the client and server verify each other's SSL certificates, which are issued by trusted third-party certificate authorities and must be regularly renewed. If you're reading this article, you're using SSL right now (or technically the more recent TSL, but we're working in broad strokes): Your web browser and our website have formed a secure HTTPS connection after checking each other's credentials, verifying that the data is going to the right place and helping to avoid domain spoofing and other hazards.

The League client is essentially both a web browser and web server: It uses your PC to host web elements that it then requests for display in the client. But bafflingly, as players have deduced, it attempts to form a secure HTTPS connection for that traffic even though it's all happening on one machine. While it's an odd choice, it functioned without issue thanks to the application's hard-coded SSL certificate—until yesterday.

While traditionally issued SSL certificates are often renewed automatically by the issuing authority, the League client's hard-coded certificate meant someone at Riot would've needed to remember it required updating before its expiration date. While Riot hasn't confirmed that the neglected certificate renewal was the culprit, the signs seem pretty clear—particularly because players could solve their login issues if they set their system clock back to before the certificate's expiration.

What's delightful about this whole mishap is that Riot had the same problem 10 years ago: When players started receiving SSL certificate expiration popups on New Year's Day in 2016, Riot confirmed on Reddit that its "cert expired for the new year when it should have auto-renewed." If anyone set a reminder to stay on top of the cert renewal the next time around, those proverbial post-it notes were probably lost in the shuffle during a client update later that year.

Riot has since issued a client update to address the login difficulties, which evidently entailed setting the SSL certificate's expiration date to 2125. If we run into the same problem then, I'll do my best to report back.

A new Bloomberg report says Riot Games is currently working on an update to League of Legends, known internally as League Next, that will be the biggest in the game's history. The overhaul of League's "visual aesthetic," as Bloomberg put it, will impact characters, battle arenas, and the interface, and is aimed at making the game more welcoming for new players.

League of Legends has a reputation for being rough on newcomers, which is probably inevitable for a game that's been around for 16 years. To put that in perspective, you could've started playing before the Covid-19 pandemic hit and still be 10 years behind the real veterans.

That's a big hump to overcome, but Riot needs to surmount it: LoL is still one of the biggest and most successful videogames on the planet (the 2025 Worlds had a base prize pool of $5 million) but the existing player base is getting older and there aren't a lot of newbies jumping in.

The continued success of League is vital to Riot, because it's struggled on other fronts: In early 2024 it laid off 530 employees and closed Riot Forge, the initiative it launched in 2019 to make singleplayer League of Legends games in partnership with external studios. The games that emerged from that program, including Ruined King, Mageseeker, Bandle Tale, Song of Nunu, and Convergence, were generally well received but failed to attract significant audiences.

Another round of layoffs at Riot followed in October, as Riot co-founder Marc Merrill indicated that the studio was looking back to its foundational MOBA for future success. "This isn't about reducing headcount to save money," Merrill said at the time. "It's about making sure we have the right expertise so that League continues to be great for another 15 years and beyond. While team effectiveness is more important than team size, the League team will eventually be even larger than it is today as we develop the next phase of League."

After the Bloomberg report went out, Riot posted a video that didn't exactly deny what was in it. Pointedly entitled "A look at some of our plans for League after 2026," the video has executive producer Paul "Pabro" Bellezza and head of studio Andrei "Meddler" van Roon acknowledging that the studio has "been working on some bigger updates to League."

"For starters, we're making a brand-new around-game client that's fully integrated with the in-game experience, rather than being a separate application like today," van Roon says. Bellezza then jumps in to say, "We're also revamping Summoner's Rift with entirely new visuals, and a bit of new gameplay," and then adds, pointedly, that Riot is "overhauling the new player experience, so that once we're done, it should be the best time ever to get your friends into League."

It definitely isn't a comprehensive look at what's coming in some post-2026 timeframe, but it does sound very much like it will be very big indeed. Whether it succeeds in attracting new players to League, or merely annoys the existing old-timers, is an entirely separate question, and the irony is that Riot's co-domination of the MOBA space, alongside Valve's Dota 2, has made life extremely difficult for newcomers. Supervive, developed by a team of Riot veterans and released just five months ago, announced earlier this week that it will close down in February; Seekers of Skyveil had an even shorter lifespan, Gigantic: Rampage Edition has literally zero players on Steam, and Amazon recently opted to sell March of Giants to Ubisoft rather than release it. League of Legends may be aging out, but whether there's an appetite for some kind of 'League 2.0' remains to be seen.

We really thought Supervive might have the juice when it was unveiled in 2024. The name wasn't great, sure, but it was "a surprisingly deep MOBA-style battle royale that could be your next game for life" developed by a team made up of numerous Riot veterans, including former League of Legends executive vice president Joe Tung. Sadly, it was not to be, and just five months after its 1.0 release, developer Theorycraft Games is pulling the plug.

"While the game has been out to the public for a little over a year, many of you have been playing with us for longer during our open prototyping phase," the studio explained in an FAQ. "We're proud of the game that we built together, but ultimately we've been unable to capture the attention and excitement of enough players to sustain further development."

In a video accompanying the closure announcement, Supervive executive producer Jenn Nam said "a huge number" of players had tried Supervive, but most of them stopped playing after a short time with it. That's left just a handful of die-hards still playing—currently a little over 200, according to SteamDB—which isn't enough to justify the expense of keeping Supervive running.

That reaction will also have an impact on how Theorycraft approaches its next game, which "is going to look pretty different from Supervive," Nam said.

"Our goal is to forge a new direction for Theorycraft, one aimed at delivering high quality, sharply focused games that live more squarely in the space between indie and triple-A. This isn't a call to follow us on that journey. In fact, we're likely to go dark for some time as we spin up something new. But with any luck, when you see us again we'll look quite different."

At the moment, Theorycraft has not announced any layoffs as a result of Supervive ending. I've reached out to the studio for more information and will update if I receive a reply.

Supervive will continue to operate until February 25, 2026, after which servers will be taken offline and the game will become inoperable. In-game purchases have been disabled, and refunds will be offered for any purchases made since September 16. No further content updates are planned, but Theorycraft did release one last patch today that includes a new game mode, various fixes and changes, and a final cosmetic bundle, which will be free for all players.

Amazon's slow, shambolic withdrawal from mainstream videogame development continued apace with today's announcement that it has offloaded the free-to-play MOBA March of Giants, which is still in development, onto Ubisoft. The deal will also see Amazon Games Montreal, headed up by former Rainbow Six Siege creative director Xavier Marquis and Ubisoft Toronto managing director Alexandre Parizeau, join Ubisoft as part of its Montreal studio.

"Returning to Ubisoft brings things full circle," said Marquis, the creative director on March of Giants. "We built some of our most meaningful work here, and we're excited to continue developing March of Giants from within Ubisoft. This game has enormous potential, and I know Ubisoft can help us take it to the next level."

Ubisoft CEO Yves Guillemot shared similar sentiments, saying that March of Giants "has a real opportunity to bring something fresh and dynamic to players, and to help Ubisoft compete in one of gaming's biggest arenas."

"We're looking forward to welcoming back Alexandre, Xavier, and many of the seasoned March of Giants team who have previously worked at Ubisoft, and the entire team's ambition, creativity and talent align perfectly with our desire to build bold new experiences for players," Guillemot said. "We look forward to supporting them as they shape the future of this promising new IP."

The MOBA genre can indeed be lucrative, if you happen to be the company that made League of Legends or Dota 2. For everyone else, it's more of a fistfight over the crumbs. Gigantic: Rampage Edition and Seekers of Skyveil both crashed out quickly after launch, and while Smite 2 continues to trundle along, Hi-Rez Studios has struggled badly with layoffs and game shutdowns over the past couple years. The only game with the potential to shake things up in the genre is Deadlock, almost entirely due to the fact it's being developed by Valve.

The response to the March of Giants closed alpha in September might suggest that it's in for a similarly rough ride. Not that the reaction is overly negative, there just doesn't seem to be much of it at all: The "closed alpha recap" post, the most recent update, has drawn a total of six comments, and the game's Steam forum in general is largely devoid of activity; the March of Giants Discord seems similarly moribund.

How likely it is that Ubisoft will be able to turn that around is anyone's guess, although the odds don't strike me as particularly great. But assuming it follows the LoL/Dota 2 pricing scheme, March of Giants does seem like it could be a good fit for Ubisoft's focus on live service games in the future.

Amazon, meanwhile, hasn't completely stepped back from the videogame business. It remains committed to publishing the two new Tomb Raider games announced at The Game Awards 2025, and it also seemingly sees big things in AI-fuelled garbage like Courtroom Chaos Featuring Snoop Dog.

This may not be a great time for Ubisoft to try busting into the MOBA biz, but at least it's better than that.

The League of Legends community is in an uproar following a recent patch that added alternative keyboard controls to the popular MOBA. Developer Riot Games released an update on December 3 that brought WASD support to certain game modes, echoing Path of Exile 2's embrace of more actiony controls in what has traditionally been a mouse-driven style of game.

While that change proved to be a great success in Path of Exile's sequel, it hasn't gone quite so smoothly for Riot, with initial fears that it would unbalance the game now mostly giving way to the opposite problem: players complaining that the controls suck to use.

When Riot announced the change in a blog post in August, it framed it as a way to make the game more approachable. “We’ve seen that for new players, WASD is the most familiar control scheme for PC games today, and let’s be real, a lot of us instinctively put our fingers there when coming back to League after playing something else,” the developer said. “By offering WASD as an alternate control scheme, we believe League will feel more intuitive to some players who come from other games.”

Soon after the announcement, players were already spiraling into doomsday scenarios decrying the decision from Riot, and the early feedback was concerning. Marc "Caedrel" Lamont, a streamer and assistant coach of the professional team Los Ratones, tried the WASD controls during a closed testing period and compared them to playing the game with “aim assist" in a stream.

“If you play on WASD, you already have Master to Grand Master level spacing,” Caedrel said. “All you have to do is hold the directional keys you want to run in … and you hold your mouse right-click on top of the enemy champion. That’s it. Then your character will automatically run away and hit on every single attack speed that it has.”

Caedrel suggested that WASD would make precise spacing and landing attacks far easier than with mouse-click movement, meaning certain roles like attack damage carries would stand to strongly benefit. In reality, early impressions claim the implementation of WASD is quite the opposite—the keyboard movement comes at a major cost for the minn-maxxing types. WASD players can't use animation cancelling to their full advantage for extra auto attacks, making the classic setup is better for the more competitive.

After that initial round of testing, it seems Riot imposed a slight attack speed nerf on the WASD setup. That's a big deal for the whole roster, but it's an extra nasty penalty for speedy champions like Jinx or Twitch (the rat, not the streaming platform). On the League subreddit, poster J0rdian shared their admittedly imperfect science for comparing the two control schemes and claimed "WASD has substantial DPS loss, especially at higher attack speeds."

The recently updated PBE (public beta) release had most folks reporting the same conclusion, leading to Reddit threads questioning "Is everyone complaining about WASD for nothing?" And, well, it sort of sounds that way.

Others like WanderingRin got a little deeper with their explanation:"They stopped it from auto canceling and they implemented an artificial attack speed nerf. Now you have to hit 0 movement inputs while the attack is playing out and only input one when it's cancelable. On top of that it's still nerfed at higher attack speeds."

On X, Riot senior tech game producer Darcy Ludington highlighted a video that seems to address the potential for WASD play to compete with classic controls while also explaining why it feels slower.

"You can avoid the delay between autos by releasing WASD keys before the attack fires and alternating movement ->attack->movement," wrote HydroZenith in a quote response. "You can get into a good rhythm to succeed, props to this player for figuring it out so quickly!"

Perhaps the early feedback really sunk in and Riot did some major surgery, but regardless it's not the WASD doomsday scenario some imagined. Did the developer overcompensate? Maybe—there are, of course, some players now complaining that WASD isn't good enough, but it's clearly going to take an adjustment period for both players and Riot's balance team to assess the impact. The control scheme isn't even available yet in Ranked play where it's sure to come under the most scrutiny.

"It'll be more than a month before we communicate out the outcomes, mainly as WASD is one piece of the pie for new players," Ludington wrote on X. "We have tested it already though with new players and did see it was one of the major barriers to trying LoL out."

Spellcasters Chronicles is Quantic Dream's upcoming action MOBA that sees teams of three pitted against one another alongside hordes of grunts and mythical creatures as they fight for dominion of the map. It's pretty cool, I had a great time with it in the preview, and now you can too, soon.

Quantic Dream is opening Spellcasters Chronicles up to the public in a couple of weeks, on December 4 at 3 pm UTC until December 8 at 9 am UTC. Over these few days, players across Europe and North America will be able to jump into games and check this new game out for themselves.

There are six spellcasters for you to try out: Two Duelists ( the Swamp Witch and the Astral Monk), two Conquerers (the Iron Sorcerer and Fire Elementalist), and two Enchanters (the Mystic Scribe and Stone Shaman). Each one will have a variety of decks, expendable summons, and abilities. Everyone also has an ultimate that builds up throughout the match and access to summoning a titan, a huge beast the size of a skyscraper that can destroy almost anything in its path.

"We built Spellcasters Chronicles as a game that thrives on adaptation, creativity, and team

synergy, and that only truly comes to life once players get their hands on it," says Gregorie

Diaconu, game director of Spellcasters Chronicles. "Opening the servers for the first time is such an exciting moment for the team. It’s the beginning of a dialogue we’ve been eager to start; we want to listen, to iterate quickly, and to shape the experience together with our players."

You can sign up for the closed beta through the Spellcasters Chronicles Steam page or via the official website. Not everyone who applies to be a part of this closed beta weekend will get in, but that won't disqualify you from further tests. "If they do not receive access for this first session, they will remain eligible for the upcoming beta."

"This closed beta will help the studio refine the game through player feedback," a press release says. "A second closed beta, featuring expanded content, new Spellcasters, arenas, incantations, and summons, will take place early next year as Spellcasters Chronicles continues its journey toward early access. Each new phase will introduce additional gameplay features and unveil more about the world and the community-driven narrative of Spellcasters Chronicles."

I'm not new to the landscape of MOBAs: I've been dragged through the mud of League of Legends for longer than I'd care to admit, and I've recently found solace in Valve's kinda released (but not really) game, Deadlock. But I'm always willing to try out anything new that crosses my path, but whether it sticks is another matter.

Quantic Dream's new MOBA Spellcasters Chronicles did have the leg up in that I had to play it to write this. I've been excited to dive in since my first small glimpse of the action, and all it took was a game-and-a-half to fully implant itself into my brain.

Instead of going for a top-down approach, Spellcasters Chronicles opts for third-person. Taking control of a spellcaster, I started with a limited number of summonable grunts and abilities, both things I'd build into as time went on and I levelled up during the match. Every character can also sprint along the ground or fly in the sky for an unlimited amount of time, making it easy to get a good grasp of the battlefield.

Matches are 3v3, but each player has the option to summon an increasing number of grunts depending on what perks you pick every time you level up. Games also go on for around 30 minutes, but having played a few matches at this point, it always feels like time passes much faster.

Getting in on the ground floor of a MOBA always feels great. The game is still simple enough that it's incredibly intuitive, meaning I didn't have to exhaust all my brain cells in figuring out what's going on. It's one of those where I reckon I won't get dumpstered by people who've already figured it out months, dare I say years, ahead of me. With only six heroes so far and a handful of different deck abilities, I could figure out what's good and bad pretty quickly. Big, angry red titan that's walking towards me; bad. Friendly blue lizard with a bow and arrow; good.

But what's better than actually knowing what's going on? Knowing what's going on and enjoying it. Getting to be in the heart of the battle and not just a top-down observer is by far my favourite part of Spellcasters Chronicles. Not only does it always make the mundane acts of healing grunts or finding treasure more engaging, but it also provides some truly spectacular moments.

The first time I summoned a titan in Spellcasters Chronicles was slightly accidental. You see, aside from all your attacks, abilities, and ultimate, there is a titan gauge on the side of your screen that slowly fills up throughout the match depending on how well you're doing. It activates at different times depending on the player, but you'll usually only be able to summon one per game.

I brought mine onto the battlefield when I was knee-deep in managing a failing side of grunts. Getting overwhelmed by two enemy spellcasters and all their summons, I began to panic, and with that came button mashing. A tactic I wouldn't normally suggest, but it did mean I accidentally hit the titan button just at the right time, bringing a huge skyscraper-size titan into my defending spawn right on the heads of my enemies. Moments like this can be truly chaotic, but cutting through the mess and still managing to come out on top is what makes Spellcasters Chronicles great.

Sure, defending my team's spawn in the last minutes of a game could be incredibly stressful, as everyone in the game has the max number of grunts and has unlocked and buffed all their abilities by this point. So I was just left trying to decipher good vs bad grunts between a shower of comets, multiple titans, and some bog witch hunting me down.

But this shortcoming is far from debilitating and only really present in the final moments of a game, which is pretty common in MOBAs as one team's power finally snowballs to eclipse the others, securing them the win.

The ability to fly into the sky for unlimited periods of time massively helped with finding my bearings and getting a good read on what's going on in the battlefield. The chaos of the final battle will likely be something that I just need to get used to.

Practice makes perfect, and while Spellcasters Chronicles is a very intuitive game for anyone with a shred of experience in MOBAs, there's still plenty to learn. Whether that be which abilities you should build into, what deck you need to choose, or even which spellcaster works best for you. But Spellcasters Chronicles is exciting enough that I want to put extra time and energy into figuring out its details, if only so I can experience what it's like to drop a titan on someone's head again.

Deadlock's not-so-secret invite-only beta has been a blast if you don't mind your favorite MOBA getting fundamentally altered every few months. The game has switched up how many lanes it has, dropped half a dozen new heroes in one go, and now, majorly overhauled lane creep mechanics in what Valve calls a "small update."

Troopers, Deadlock's version of the lane creep you'd find in any given MOBA, grant souls on death which players exchange for items. In the past, you immediately got half the souls (split with nearby allies) when a trooper died and had to shoot the other half out of the air as it floated from the corpse. Now, the first half of the income also has to be manually secured—it will fall to the ground, and you'll have to walk within a short radius of the souls to claim them.

Unlike the souls which have to be shot, these can't be denied by the enemy team and will appear translucent to them. Still, it will certainly lead to more fights breaking out in the laning phase; heroes that prefer to stay back and farm from afar will have to get closer to the action so they can snag those precious souls.

Another significant trooper change is that the healing trooper will no longer, well, heal. Instead, it will drop a medic pack when killed by the enemy team, which will restore 10% of nearby players' missing health. Both of these changes remind me of Blizzard's MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, where minions drop EXP as small orbs on the ground and every wave drops a "healing globe," though in Heroes they are claimable by either team. If you're going to take, may as well take from the best.

The biggest takeaways as I see them are twofold: players will have to be more aggressive in lane to secure all their income and keep their health topped off, and it will be easier to keep a steady income in the late game, since you can arrive to a lane after all the troopers have died and still get their souls. But knowing Valve's definition of a "small update," that's not all.

Nearly every hero has also seen a balance pass. Most of these are minor number tweaks, but other heroes have gotten substantial changes; Mirage's ultimate can now take him to friendly objectives, for example. You can find the full list of patch notes here.

The progenitor MOBAs—RTS mods like Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients—had something sensational on their hands, but it took awhile for the whole thing to catch on. In 2010, before League of Legends and Dota 2 had become the esports institutions they are now, there was Heroes of Newerth. Before it shut down in 2022, it was a relic of a time when MOBAs hadn't really proved their staying power yet; and now, somehow, it's back.

First announced nine months ago, Heroes of Newerth: Reborn is a relaunch-slash-remaster of the defunct MOBA. A trailer dropped Wednesday announcing a free open beta starting on Nov. 11, and it certainly looks like HoN. While League of Legends was a fully original game with its own heroes and items, HoN was much closer to DotA (albeit with a trashier sense of humor). In May 2010, Dota was still just an old Warcraft 3 mod, so HoN had its niche among players who didn't like League's snappier, skill shot-oriented action.

All this makes the re-release sort of a headscratcher for any outside of Newerth's niche fanbase. If you long to play Dota, it's one of the biggest games on Steam—a platform Reborn is completely forgoing in favor of Juvio. If you're wondering what Juvio is, you're not alone.

I searched Google for Juvio, and the first result was Heroes of Newerth: Reborn, which isn't a great sign. But after scrolling a little further, I discovered it's a nascent storefront that promises "tools to discover, competition and trade." There's also an explainer graphic at the bottom of the page labeled "make money," which compelled me to take a closer look.

As explained on Juvio's create page, custom mapmakers are invited to use HoN: Reborn's engine to publish games on the platform and sell it (or content within the game) in exchange for a digital fixed-value currency called Jade. The Juvio website states Jade can be exchanged for "real currencies." As I understand it, it's essentially a custom games browser as a monetized marketplace a la Roblox.

And if that weren't enough, Heroes of Newerth fans don't seem thrilled with the revival. It's in closed testing right now, and recent Reddit threads are full of feedback ranging from the lukewarm to the inconsolable. Many commenters compared it negatively to Project Kongor, a fan-run version of classic Newerth.

"It's not better mechanically, it's negligibly better visually, and looks like a HoN version of LoL," commented Reddit user JadedProduct9068. "So, why invest the time into it? Because we have no choice come release time." Fellow commenter TeflonJon_ concurred: "I just wish they didn’t slow it down to feel like LoL or DOTA—the old move speed, turn speed, attack animations, etc., were all crisper and quicker and it felt far more intense."

Commenter Kaspar70 didn't mince words: "It's complete garbage compared to Project Kongor. I understand it's still in beta but the regression from PK is insane."

If you're keen to give Heroes of Newerth: Reborn a try, you can sign up for the closed test on its website until open beta starts Nov 11.

If I had to bet money on what Quantic Dream's next game would be, it's fair to say that I'd be out of pocket, especially after the announcement that Spellcasters Chronicles will be an action MOBA full of titans, Swamp Witches, and little guys.

"Quantic Dream has been innovating in games since 1997, starting with The Nomad Soul—for those who can remember it—it was one of the first, maybe the first, open world, free city," associate game director Greg Diaconu says during a first look presentation.

"Then for Heavy Rain, we developed a genre that we called interactive drama that put emotion and narration at the centre of the experience. And we have been doing interactive dramas of that kind for the last few projects. But we also want to keep on innovating, creating things that challenge us."

Spellcasters Chronicles is a competitive PvP MOBA with teams of three players taking on the role of a powerful mage. Matches will take place in an arena full of hidden treasures, summoning areas, and then the centre of the fight, each team's life stone.

These are positions on either side of the map, with several summoning towers placed between them. Players must capture these towers to summon more creatures and buildings closer to the enemy's base so they can destroy their life stone and win the game.

But you don't have to go about this on your own. Alongside your two teammates, you can summon little critters, buildings, and even giant titans to help you get the job done. "The Titans are like your ultimate creatures that take some time to actually be able to summon, and they're extremely strong," producer Laura Courouble says. Seeing the Titans for the first time is quite the experience, as you can glide along beside them and watch as they wreak mayhem on everything in their path.

"One key element is that it's third person," Diaconu says. "Rather than going with a top-down view, or more traditional views for this type of game, we wanted to put you in the heart of the battlefield. And what's great about flying is that it gives you, as a player, a great view of what's happening on the battlefield. Give you a strategic view."

"The other element that we really pushed for is the deck-building aspect. So rather than going with a typical hero-based only game. We also wanted players to be creative and to see how they could create the perfect synergy between some spells and some of their spellcasters."

At the start of every match, you can fill four slots with spells which can deal damage or support your armies, summonable grunts, or buildings that you can construct during games. "It's really up to you, or you want to really forge your style and forge your gameplay," Diaconu says. "At launch, we are going to have about 60 creatures, spells, and buildings, with more coming, which will add more possibilities for players."

The grunts you summon will attack whatever is in front of them, be it enemy summoning tower, giant titans, or other little grunts. "You can have up to 600 creatures on the battlefield summoned by the players," Diaconu explains. Matches only last around 25 minutes, so you need to make your summons count in the time you have.

Aside from pitching titans against one another, there's also a story that'll unravel as players experience Spellcasters Chronicles. The devs didn't go into much detail, saying that it's a conversation for another time, but we have got a couple of hints as to how the narrative will progress, and it's rather surprising.

"Some exceptional spellcasters will have the ability to alter fate, to create miracles, to change the future of the world, and to decide what path they want to put the world on, which future they want to favour," Diaconu says. This is to say that apparently, the top rung of players will have some control over major narrative decisions.

Needless to say, it all seems like a bit of a leap, but one I'm excited to watch play out. "I know Quantic Dream is very well known for our PvP multiplayer games," Courouble jokes. "When we think of Quantic Dream, a very specific image of what one of our games looks like comes up—this is a huge swing away from that."

But Spellcasters Chronicles didn't just come out of nowhere—it's been in the works over at Quantic Dream for seven years now. "It's a very small project, and a very atypical story," Diaconu says. "It started as a prototype. After we finished Detroit: Become Human, we had some downtime," and this is what the devs "wanted to focus on."

"I'm as surprised as you are to be able to show it to you honestly, but I'm super excited."

I've never played an invite-only beta test with such a fully-formed ranking system as Deadlock's, but I guess when everyone gets unlimited plus-ones, the audience is big enough to warrant it. Besides, the game's beta status didn't stop me lamenting my place in Arcanist IV—below average, assuming ranks fall into normal distribution—but a patch dropped yesterday that majorly shook up everyone's ranked placements, leaving me three full leagues ahead of where I was and terrified for my next solo queue.

To my surprise, though, the update wasn't to the matchmaker, but to the ranked badge system. As developer Yoshi put it on the Deadlock Discord: "Previously, badges were tied to fixed skill ranges on the backend, rather than percentiles. As new players joined and as the distribution shifted over time, it caused badges to clump up in negative ways. You can head over to your profile now to see your rebalanced badge."

Players did exactly that, of course, and the Deadlock subreddit is ablaze with players who had similar leaps to my own. Reddit user YunusES said, "Bro I got sent to fucking Phantom 4 from Emissary 4, I'm scared to even search for a game." Sharing a similar anxiety, user Papalmpy said, "I was Archon 1 and got shot up to Ascendant 1. Why does it feel like I'm about to get my ass destroyed?"

As plenty of people on social media are pointing out in response, though, the badge changes shouldn't signal a matchmaking change. Whatever your new rank is, it's just a different—ideally more accurate—digestion of the same match history data that determines your MMR. As Redditor axepeartree put it: "If you were miserable before, you'll still be miserable now."

Given that, when parsing match data from before this patch, Deadlock stat analysis website Statlocker showed a disproportionately huge number of players stuck in the very lowest rank, it seems like this update was a long time coming. Whether you went from Initiate to Eternus or Initiate 1 to Initiate 2, your bragging rights should be doled out more accurately now—ideal, given that Deadlock doesn't have an unranked queue.

The finals of The International 2025, the annual Dota 2 world championship tournament, are now underway, and to get things started on the right foot Valve boss Gabe Newell shared a special message with fans: After all these years he still loves the game, even though a lot of you are pretty mean to him online.

"14 years ago, we held the first The International in the German city of Cologne," Newell said (via JakeSucky), presumably from the comfort of one of his yachts. "The first International truly amazed me. It was amazing to see the players’ skill and the passion of the community. Before the first International, I really liked the game, but after TI I fell in love with it. I love not only the game, but also the community."

Heartwarming, isn't it? And, it seems, also true: Newell said in 2011, after the first International, that he'd put about 800 hours of playtime into Dota 2, and that "it's probably the game we've made that we're most obsessed with playing."

"Every day after we're done working on the game, everyone goes home and plays it till two or three in the morning," Newell said, way back then. "So yeah, I love playing the game."

But it's not just the game he loves, Newell continued in his new video message: It's the community of players who bring it to life.

"Sure, people talk shit at me in chat, and about once a week people say, 'Hey, noob, uninstall the game and ********,' but that's really about their enthusiasm for the game, and the energy that they bring. And that's why, after all these years, I still play Dota every day."

Okay, well, that's maybe a little less inspirational, but full points for telling it like it is: That's the real Dota experience, alright. Of course, there are good odds here that Newell isn't being entirely serious about the whole thing: He's known for having deadpan fun with this sort of thing, maybe most famously with the Potato Phone episode of 2022. Compared to that, this is positively restrained, but still pretty great.

The finals of The International 2025 kicked off today at the Barclays Arena in Hamburg, Germany, and will run until September 14, with a $2.6 million prize pool up for grabs. You can follow along with the action at dota2.com.

Deadlock's "Six New Heroes" update has added, you guessed it, six new heroes. You gotta respect the economy of language there. Two of which, the Drifter and Victor, are causing a bit of a scene.

See, both the Drifter and Victor are what you might, in the MOBA lingua arcana, call "pub stompers"—if you play around their abilities, you'll mostly be fine. If you don't, they'll snowball into an incredible problem.

When it comes to the Drifter, this issue's a little more apparent. Bloodscent gives you a literal blood trail and heartbeat sound effect while you're near isolated enemies and, more importantly, a permanent stacking weapon damage buff whenever you kill (or assist in a kill) an enemy hero.

In other words, if you've got terrible map sense and are blindly farming the jungle while the Drifter's about, he's going to get a bazillion Bloodscent stacks and run you over.

Victor's a little more complicated. His Aura of Suffering builds up damage to enemies and himself, his Jumpstart trades HP for regeneration and movement speed, and his Pain Battery lashes out whenever he takes damage.

With the right item build, these abilities can make him an absolute menace—but the real kicker is his ultimate Shocking Reanimation, which, similar to the Wraith King in DOTA 2, gives him an extra life. Meaning, if your team spends a ton of abilities and resources killing him, that's a perfect opportunity for the enemy to swoop in and murder you all while your pants are down. Which happens in my elo bracket a lot.

In fact, in low-skill games, both of these heroes become huge problems. Players will feed Drifter like it's their job, or dive deep on Victor while his ultimate's up and then get steamrolled, over and over, flooding them with souls until they can hold down W and win. That's being concurred in some feedback threads, such as this one on the DeadlockTheGame subreddit:

"Viktor and Drifter are fun, but not super fun to play against," writes one player. "Drifter feels too strong," adds another, "Reminds me of the time when Bloodseeker from DOTA 2 got damage for free just cause one guy was low hp on the other side of the map." Shudder. Yeah, that's exactly the feeling.

I've noticed this myself because, well—I've got decent MOBA knowledge, with such secret insights as 'you gotta look at your minimap occasionally' and 'you should go push waves sometimes' and 'muting voice chat is good for your mental health'—but I'm willing to admit I'm garbo at shooters. I couldn't hit the broadside of a barn if I were inside one with a flamethrower.

I've watched, multiple times, helpless to stop them, as my teammates spend everything to kill Victor once, then die. Or walk into the enemy jungle while Drifter's missing, and die. And when they're both on the same team? It's a double-dose of pub stomping misery. Then I try to make a play, miss half my shots, and weep with the understanding that I'm part of the problem. I'm working on it, I promise.

While it is undeniably a skill issue, it's not like Valve hasn't been taking the nerf stick to the both of 'em—so I can assume they're causing problems in high elos, too. Multiple nerfs have targeted both heroes since their release. For instance, Victor's ultimate now only brings him back to 60% health until he puts points in it—and the Drifter has earned himself 12 separate nerf bullet-points. And hey, I mean, it's a playtest. We're playtesting, and I'd rather these heroes be too strong for a while, but interesting, than weak and wimpy upon release.

I had a grand old time with Valve's MOBA, Deadlock, when I first took it for a spin back in August of last year. And then, because I am a person with a job, social obligations, bills, and—most importantly, two MMOs I'm currently playing—I dropped off.

Well, given the six new heroes that dropped into the game, I thought 'hey, might as well see what's different'. The answer is a lot. A lot's different, and it's well worth picking up Deadlock if you're any kind of curious, because these last few months of updates have changed the game in some big ways.

First, the map rework update, which dropped back in February. This one's by far the most revolutionary, not just shifting the map itself around, but also changing up a few of the core rules to up the game's tempo.

The biggest change is that troops—the little candle-head guys in your lane—no longer need to be "last hit" to gain souls. They still drop soul orbs, which you can either confirm or deny. Otherwise, you'll gain farm just by being in the lane.

This change bumps up the tempo of the early game considerably, and makes the late game less of a hassle—with the added benefit of lowering the skill ceiling slightly for new players. If your enemy knows what they're doing, they can still snatch your souls out from under you, but making the game a smidge more approachable is a welcome change.

This also means that during laning, you have more time to take nips at your enemy, reducing the mental load of balancing last-hits with damage and instead making it all about denying them, pushing the wave, and other things that're ultimately far more engaging.

And when you're pushing late-game waves, not having to worry about dropping farm because you weren't last-hitting is a blessing. There are also three lanes, now, instead of four, bringing heroes closer together, which means more action, more often.

Then there was the shop update in May, making buying items way easier, adding a ton of new items, rebalancing old ones, better artwork, and a 'quick buy' option, which lets you put items on a list to auto-buy the next time you nip by a shop. It also added a new base design and tinkered with the map some more.

Lastly, the Six New Heroes patch, which has slowly been drip-feeding players six new heroes (it's a pretty self-explanatory name) over the course of a couple of weeks. While all of these guys are great—the portal-spawning Doorman especially—the update is misleading, because it also included a visual overhaul to the map (it's darker, now) and swapped out the main menu for a hideout.

This place is great; instead of having to load up a different zone to futz about with your abilities, you can select a hero to run around with and are provided training dummies to see how your buttons work alongside a cute little soul orb aim-trainer. You're also given adorably decorated vignettes to access various, previously menu-driven functions: A reading nook for tutorials, a movie room for watching matches, and a little shop to… well, buy items for testing.

In summary, if you're anything like me, and you let Deadlock start collecting dust in your Steam library after a few dozen hours, I'd highly recommend coming back; it's all very different.

Valve has spent this past year tinkering with its map to encourage constant teamfighting, risky dives into your enemy's concrete jungle to nick their farm, and tons of nooks and crannies in its map—which has both vertical rooftops to skulk over and tunnels to slink through—all the more interesting to romp around in. I look forward to losing more of my ever-vanishing free time.

It's easy to forget that Deadlock is still in its infancy—maybe because Valve spent several months denying its existence before unleashing it in an invite-only form last August. But the developer is still toiling away at creating the MOBA alongside the community, and this week has seen a pretty major update: an overhaul to the dashboard and character select screen, and six new heroes being drip fed over the next two weeks. Oh, and the community gets to decide who comes when.

The first one has already been decided by Valve, with vampire Mina releasing alongside the August 18 update. She's described as "a glass cannon that delivers quick bursts of Spirit damage at range with her passive, Love Bites." And in classic vampire fashion, she can transform into a bat and scurry off when things start looking a little dicey. Her ultimate Nox Nostra "unleashes a massive swarm of bats that hunt down and silence nearby enemies." Pretty neat.

The other five include demonic goat Billy, bookworm Paige, the aptly-named The Doorman, Victor "the monster who can't be stopped," and a slightly unsettling red-eyed lad called Drifter. Valve's dropped art for each one, and I'm personally a pretty big fan of Mina and Paige here, especially the latter. Apparently she can bring books to life, and I'm interested to see how that plays out in-game.

unleashing it in an invite-only form last August. But the developer is still toiling away at creating the MOBA alongside the community, and this week has seen a pretty major update: an overhaul to the dashboard and character select screen, and six new heroes being drip fed over the next two weeks. Oh, and the community gets to decide who comes when.

The first one has already been decided by Valve, with vampire Mina releasing alongside the August 18 update. She's described as "a glass cannon that delivers quick bursts of Spirit damage at range with her passive, Love Bites." And in classic vampire fashion, she can transform into a bat and scurry off when things start looking a little dicey. Her ultimate Nox Nostra "unleashes a massive swarm of bats that hunt down and silence nearby enemies." Pretty neat.

The other five include demonic goat Billy, bookworm Paige, the aptly-named The Doorman, Victor "the monster who can't be stopped," and a slightly unsettling red-eyed lad called Drifter. Valve's dropped art for each one, and I'm personally a pretty big fan of Mina and Paige here, especially the latter. Apparently she can bring books to life, and I'm interested to see how that plays out in-game.

Valve hasn't dropped all six at once, though. Instead, it's trying something different. A new hero will drop on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday both this week and next. The order isn't set in stone either, with Valve asking players to vote after each completed game for who they want to be unlocked next.

I kinda like that—both the drip-feeding and letting the community pick who they want to see first. Especially with Valve promising balance adjustments for each hero a few days after each one's release, this feels like the best way to go about it without potentially disrupting the balance with a huge batch straight off the bat.

It's not the only big change coming. The old dashboard UI has been swapped out for the Hideout—a cosy lobby space with a training area and all of the old menu options spread out into different nooks and crannies. It seems like Valve wants people to be able to customise the space eventually, too, something which I am very much down for.

The last big update is the character select screen, which is sporting something a little more fighting game-esque now. There've also been some visual updates to existing heroes, with Valve saying the work is ongoing and players "can expect more updated heroes in the future."

Mondays—who needs 'em. I'm not having a particularly great one, myself. But I'm enjoying it far more now, as I've just found out that a bunch of Riot's big bosses had to get up on stage at a leadership meeting and figure out what "gooning" meant.

That's per gameplay director on LoL spinoff Teamfight Tactics, Steven Mortimer, who—in a recent livestream (spotted by our friends at GamesRadar+) said: "I shouldn't tell you this, but I'm going to tell you this and if Riot gets mad at me for it, that's fine."

"At the leadership thing I was at, I am not kidding, at one point on stage, they were talking about how they didn't know what the word 'goon' meant, and then they started explaining what gooning meant. That was a real thing that happened."

In an industry ruled by the iron fist of growth, filled with live-service after live-service, there's a small, tiny, chaotic part of my ruined heart that's very pleased. We have all collectively managed to be so comprehensively unhinged online that we have forced Riot to acknowledge a synonym for masturbation in an honest-to-goon leadership meeting.

It's not like Riot's the only one getting grilled, mind. Marvel Rivals had to bat off the gooner accusations recently. And it's no real secret that games have yawed hard back into sex appeal—which I've got no real issue with, as long as it's equal-opportunity.

Besides, Riot's gone on the record to say that it sells "skins to make things like Arcane", so if the, uh, self-indulgence helps fund some of the best animation we've seen in recent years, I'm all for it. I can hardly turn my nose up and claim moral superiority when these companies are simply meeting demand with supply.

"The context was fine, and it was funny, and whatever," says Mortimer. "But out-of-context, it was hilarious." I'll say.