Report: Valve Spent 2025 Ripping Apart Deadlock And Putting It Back...

Valve's futuristic MOBA has been figuring itself out on the fly, and I kind of prefer that to a carefully considered roadmap.

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.

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

Source: PC Gamer