Valve keeping up with the trend of "worst kept secrets". You need an invite to join the alpha but since everyone who owns it can refer their friends, it spread very quickly.
I've been playing it the past few days and it's honestly very fun. Still a bit rough around the edges (especially in terms of balance) since it's in early access, but it has serious potential to be dota 2 levels of popular.
For the unaware, Deadlock is a 3rd person shooter MOBA. It feels like a mix of Dota and Overwatch/Team Fortress. Nobody is allowed to share footage or screenshots, but obviously with so many playing there's a ton of leaks out there.
Runs perfectly fine on Linux though, with DX11 or Vulkan. On Windows, Vulkan has some performance issues that make it quite unenjoyable, but in Linux for me it plays a lot better with Vulkan than Windows DX11.
The quality of Proton is not the point, the point is that they're not dogfooding their own platform. They'll likely follow the same course as CS2: Lengthy prerelease test exclusively on Windows, then a few days before actual release someone will port the game to Linux/SteamOS and release day is the first day of the Linux port's alpha test.
How can anybody at Valve expect game publishers to take Steam Deck and SteamOS seriously if the developer of the actual platform is not dogfooding it with their own games?
It's almost as if they are a for-profit company that doesn't want to waste development time on an OS that have significantly fewer players to sell to and will choose to optimize for Linux as an afterthought.
I use Arch, btw and play only on Linux, so I'm not being biased, just speaking truths.
Yeah but Valve, who is making this game, made SteamOS and the Steam Deck in house. It's their own product. It would be a monumentally stupid move to release a first party game that doesn't run on their own first party hardware.
I wouldn't say that's the case because it's Valve, and they work on a very unique way. Besides, the work they did with Proton, SteamOS and Steam Deck shows that at no point they believe developing for Linux is waste of efforts or an afterthought. They go out of the usual way to make things better for Linux. I fully expect them to port Deadlock to Linux once it hits beta or release.
It’s almost as if they are a for-profit company that doesn’t want to waste development time on an OS that have significantly fewer players to sell to and will choose to optimize for Linux as an afterthought.
Yeah, why would Nintendo develop for Switch or Sony for PlayStation when it's clearly a waste of development time and and money and Windows is clearly the superior development target?
I’m not being biased, just speaking truths.
No, you speak nothing of truth regarding game development has a platform holder.
I'm with you in principle, but I think it's unlikely that Valve are building the game themselves, given that they haven't done much of that in ages.
It's reasonable to think their first priorities were finding a development studio [Edit: or even in-house developers] capable producing a good game, and helping them to do so. If the developers are most familiar with Windows tools and APIs, then the path to a successful game would be letting them use those, at least to begin with.
Let's just hope that they're being guided along to way toward design decisions that make a native port relatively easy if the game turns out to be good.
Edit:
The project is reportedly led by "IceFrog", which looked like a studio name when I first read it, but it's apparently a person. So maybe this is in-house development after all. Great! It would be nice to see Valve making significant games again.
Nevertheless, gathering a team with the talent and vision to make a good game is harder than finding people who can learn a certain API or platform, so if they have the former, it would make sense to let them target the platform they already know and get the game out the door. Doing it in-house just makes it even easier for Valve's linux folks to guide them in design choices that would simplify multiplatform support later. (Cross-platform development isn't all that hard if you plan for it from the start instead of painting yourself into a corner.) If the game is well received, it would then make sense to invest more time into training the devs on linux and doing a linux-native port.
Or to put it another way: Yes, Valve has an OS that keeps them independent from Windows, but that's just one tool in their kit. Proton is another tool. That gives Valve flexibility in how they bring a game to market, and how they prioritize/schedule various phases of the project. This still-unannounced game might be Windows-only for now, but I would not assume that will be forever.
If that studio’s developers are most familiar with Windows tools and APIs, then the path to a successful game would be letting them use those, at least to begin with.
So you're saying, if Sony or Nintendo made a new console and contracted an outside developer, that developer should develop for Windows instead of the new consoles because they are unfamiliar with the new tools and APIs? Why even develop using Source Engine (2)? Why not also give in to a total Unreal Engine monopoly because that's what every game developer knows? CS2 on Steam Deck is bad right now.
If you don't get the mail, this is probably due to playtest schedule, they may give you access when the playtest is open, after that you can always play vs bots
I'd love an invite! ~~https://steamcommunity.com/id/demonictaco~~. Thank you so much! Please let me know if link doesn't work. I'm at work so I can't go on steam haha. They have the website blocked.
Not really, SMITE is a moba that happens to be 3rd person, Deadlock actually plays like a 3rd person shooter that needs proper aiming and headshots and a much faster pace.
I see. This is probably a pretty niche reference nowadays, but is it more similar to Monday Night Combat? That was an actual shooter IIRC and had moba mechanics like lanes and creeps.
Good, cause I played the Smite 2 alpha and it was kinda garbage. I literally said out loud "this is like Dota for babies". It didn't even have good FPS mechanics to make up for no depth.
It's actually closer to Battleborn. Like the other commenter said, it's more of a third person shooter with MOBA elements. There's focus on movement (you can dash, double jump, crouch slide, some characters fly), headshots and distance change the damage and melee/parry are just a button, while every character has guns as their man attack means. For the moba elements, it changes a bit since there's 4 lanes and it's a 6x6.
Got one over on the reddit thread. Still waiting for it to come through because apparently there's a delay, but I'll invite some folks once it comes in.
Valve keeping up with the trend of "worst kept secrets"
Well it's very intentional I believe. You can invite an unlimited number of friends and there's no NDA or anything, they just casually ask you to not share details about the game since it's still a work in progress and in alpha, despite it looking like mostly finished to be fair. Characters are fully voiced and nothing really screams placeholder content, and most updates are regarding "balancing" and mechanic changes, just trying out what's best.
Yeah i feel like im late to the train of comments asking for a friend invite to the alpha, but if anyone wants to add me on steam and invite me that would be awesome.
I don't know if this information is already public but here are a couple of quick inferences I made by looking a the files. I'm not overly familiar with Valve's intellectual properties so I don't recognize any specific characters or franchises.
There's likely a hero named Yamato who has the abilities:
Shadow Form
Power Stance
Infinity Slash
Healing Slash
Flying Strike
There's a lot more hero information but that's the top one in the depots.
The game might be called "Citadel", or it may have just been called that internally at Valve.
The reason I suspect that is because of there appears to be a game folder called "citadel" which appears to be the main game folder.
The game was called citadel and was half life themed, they dropped that for neon prime and made it Sci fi, they then dropped that aesthetic changed the name to deadlock and went to a supernatural early to mid 1900s NYC noir aesthetic. A lot of the files still use the citadel name, but it's just leftover and means nothing anymore.
125hrs in the game over the last 6 weeks, it's great.
It literally has the second most concurrent players of any game on Steam at the moment and still has over half of the concurrent player numbers compared to its peak 8 years ago.