Deadlock is a game that is currently still in closed beta, and somehow already has taken over 200 hours of my life.

It’s the most recent title by gaming-juggernaut-turned-digital-store-owner Valve, known for only publishing games that seriously redefine the gaming landscape (we don’t talk about Artifact) and having a work schedule best described as “we’ll work on it when we fucking feel like it.” The title is a new entry in the MOBA genre (Multiplayer Online Battle Arena), a genre characterized by human-controlled avatars duking it out in an online arena populated by various NPCs to slaughter and side objectives to complete in hour~long matches as each of two teams tries to destroy their enemy’s base.

As you can figure by that description, MOBAs are notoriously difficult. They are notoriously annoying to get into. If you know a MOBA, it’s probably League of Legends, and if you know League of Legends, you’ll know people hate League of Legends. Yet despite this, my friends sunk their teeths deeply into Deadlock, despite none of them being a particular fan of MOBAs. Why? And why did I sink so many hours?

I think it’s mostly chalked up to how this game invests heavily in supporting casual players, and doing away with the MOBA genre’s tendency to over-skill-ify its own systems.

I’ll go down a few examples of what I mean.

The POV

MOBAs’ camera perspective is, for the most part, a bird’s eye view. This is a standard carried over from the genre MOBAs were born from - the Real Time Strategy - and it’s a standard that’s all but unused outside of strategy games. The bird’s eye view tells a player that this is A Serious Game, To Be Played with Skill. That this game is a Strategy Game to Invest Time In.

It also tells people that this game is a bore for gamers that take themselves too seriously.

Deadlock, meanwhile, has a typical over-the-shoulder camera perspective found in most modern titles. This makes the game more familiar to players right out the get-go, and associates the game and its systems more with the Hero Shooter genre (Overwatch, TF2) which has been incredibly popular for the past decade.

Without changing any of the mechanics or fundmental systems, just changing the camera already makes this game much more approachable to the average gamer.

Signposting

Another issue with MOBAs is that there are a LOT of systems and sub-systems to be learnt, and players often drown in all of it. The game’s tutorial is… less than stellar, but it resolves this issue in a different way: voicelines. All of the characters have voice lines commenting on how the player should be playing the game to save them from imminent death.

The characters whose design is made to put turrets all over the map will comment “I need to put as many of these up as I can”. When you wander too deep into enemy lines without backup, your character will comment “I don’t like being exposed here” or “I should reconvene with my allies”. If you’re walking around with two thousand coins without having bought anything, your character will comment that “these won’t help me when I’m dead, I need to spend!”

This is without getting into how many of the upgrade paths for the various characters incentivize specific ways of play. Sure, this is true for any character in any game, but I can say that characters’ upgrades have been actively changed to be clearer about how they are intended to be used. If a great offensive capability is used defensively by new players, that capability was changed so that one of the upgrades is explicitly better offensively. Sure, good players were not making this mistake, but this change was made to help new players figure this out on their own.

The game teaches you during gameplay, rather than only during the tutorial, so you aren’t frontloaded with information. As you’re playing and processing the world around you, it nudges you in the right direction, so you feel like you have some control over things.

No Draft

This is something very specific to MOBAs and other “highly competitive” games. In ranked, competitive games where the choice of arena or character impacts things, there is typically a “draft phase” - a section of gameplay where both players select and deny eachother a choice of playable character and/or playable arena.

While this makes the game more balanced, it is also… really annoying. I can tell you personally, it’s really annoying if you just wanna play your favorite character in the game, and when you pick them you get some jackass hopping on the microphone going “YOU DUMB FUCK, THIS CHARACTER IS NOT META! report optimisticlucio for trolling. ggs. we lose.”

Merely by not having this minor feature, it’s already much easier to get into a game. I’ve already seen people whine about this feature being missing, but holy shit I could not be happier for this.

In general, this game shows how appealing less to an existing crowd of hardcore players and appealing more to the fringe, casual playerbase, can do wonders. This game is ranking in hundreds of thousands of players despite being in a closed beta you must get an invite to.

If you haven’t played this yet, I cannot recommend it enough.

…If you can get an invite.