Gaming's worst-kept secret Deadlock received a humongous update earlier this week, one that redecorated its entire town and added six new classes for players to sink their teeth into. On the subject of teeth, one of these classes is a tank called Rat King, a giant humanoid rodent who started out as a fan concept before becoming part of Deadlock's official roster.
Rat King loves two things in life: rats, and throwing rats at his enemies. In fact, he enjoys rat tossing so much that he has more than 100 voice lines dedicated to his calling.
According to Deadlock voice line viewer (yes, that is a site that exists) Rat King entered the fray with a grand total of 1534 individual utterances, a similar number to most other Deadlock heroes. Of those lines, 126 of them are dedicated to his power "Rat Swarm", whereby Rat King unleashes a swarm of rodents from beneath his resplendent cape—which leap onto enemies and deal spirit damage over time.
Why so many voice lines for a single power? Well, I suppose the short answer is "because Valve can". But the longer answer is that, although some of the lines are generic power callouts (such as "I got a whole lotta rats, baby!") many of them refer to individual rats by name.
Rat King clearly likes to express support for his subjects, so will yell phrases like "Get 'em Lou!" or "My boy Widget is gonna chew you up!" or "Rabies Ronnie has a gift for ya. Surprise, it's rabies!" Sometimes Rat King will refer to named groups of rats, implying there are whole factions residing beneath his cloak. Rat King's group-based callouts include "The Pantegana boys say hello!" and "Say hello to the McMullen gang!" and my personal favourite—"I brought Gumdrop's whole polycule!"
It's a great example of the huge injection of personality Deadlock received from the City Never Sleeps update (which is not to say the game was short of it before). It's worth noting that Rat King is not the only character to become much more talkative. Alongside the newly introduced heroes, Valve has doubled the number of voice lines for all existing characters in the game.
It's this kind of colour and attention to detail that has made Deadlock so popular despite players having to be invited to the game in order to experience it. How much longer Valve will keep Deadlock (theoretically) under wraps is uncertain, but let's face it, there isn't exactly a pressing financial need for Valve to push the game out of the door.
