Valve spent 2025 ripping apart Deadlock and putting it back together, and it delivered better live service than most live service games

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.