Valve rolled out a massive update for its lane-based multiplayer hero shooter Deadlock on Tuesday and in doing so helped boost the still-kind-of-unannounced game to its biggest concurrent audience to date. Deadlock‘s new City Never Sleeps update introduces a new map, six new characters, and a bunch of new creeps — aka Neutrals and now officially known as Haunts.
Shortly after Deadlock‘s new update went live, player counts surged past 228,000 concurrents, an all-time high for the game, according to SteamDB.
Valve provides an update on Deadlock’s progress
Alongside the City Never Sleeps update, Valve also issued an update on the game’s overall development, which appears to be nowhere near completion. After January’s Old Gods New Blood update for Deadlock, Valve said, “we felt that there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself before we moved onto more polish phases of the game development (like updating older hero artwork).”
The Deadlock team says it’s been working on a number of features in parallel, some of which are included in City Never Sleeps.
“Some others are things we’ve been working on in the last few months alongside this update,” the team said. “This even includes things like progression and hero/hideout customizations, as we feel those are features we want to be able to adjust and significantly change based on feedback before the game is fully released. There are also other things we’ve been working on recently that are more speculative (as in we aren’t 100% sure if they will be released or not based on how playtesting goes, though results so far have been promising) like large item redesigns/additions and alternate game modes that expand the scope of the game.”
Ultimately, the team sounds like it’s happy with Deadlock‘s progression over the past few years and amid ample feedback from players.
What’s in Deadlock’s City Never Sleeps update
A lot. Too much to list here, but the highlights are the New York City map, which captures the early to mid-20th century vibe of the City That Never Sleeps, albeit highly stylized and spooky.
Deadlock‘s New York introduces Haunts, the neutrals that players know have been replaced by inventive new creatures. These include:
- Specimen – a disembodied hand in a jar
- Past Dues – library-inspired spectral creatures
- Gutter Ghouls – cyclopian walking trash bags
- Barrel Mimics – barrels (and exploding barrels?) with limbs and tire irons
- Stage Hands – marionettes controlled by ghostly hands
- Crabbage Pots – one of New York’s famous cryptids, seemingly inspired by Little Shop of Horrors
- Festival Spirit – souls that inhabit Chinese lanterns
- Shrooms – chill fungi wizards
- Underhands – gargoyles who might just be pickpockets
Valve is also introducing six new heroes, many of which have New York vibes: Nurse Harrow, Rat King, Solomon, Deadman Danny, Baba, and Violet. While Rat King (complete with a pizza rat supplicant) and Solomon (a competitive chess player) may be the immediate standouts, there’s also a little old lady who hangs out with pigeons named Baba. Finally, babushka granny representation in a hero shooter. Players can vote in-game on which of the six new Deadlock heroes rolls out first.
More details on the City Never Sleeps update are available at the official Deadlock website.