Just curious what the demographic here is like. The game seems to be appealing, at least for now, to both crowds. I am an FPS player whereas my friend is a ex-MOBA player and we usually struggle to find games we can enjoy equally. So far we are playing Deadlock a lot together though, and I am more hooked than I expected to be when I first realised this was primarily a MOBA.
If you started playing this game for a different reason feel free to share as well.
If I had to pick, I’d say FPS. I tend to not like point and click gameplay, so the only MOBA I ever enjoyed before deadlock was Paragon. I’ve always understood the basics of MOBAs but LoL and Dota were just never for me.
But I’m also not huge into FPS games. There has to be some form of ridiculousness to a shooter for me to like it.
Deadlock brings some of that. I think the newness is leaving match making for people who would be in what ever tier I exist in a weird place of either being rolled or rolling most of the time. But that will get better.
I think the newness is leaving match making for people who would be in what ever tier I exist in a weird place of either being rolled or rolling most of the time.
This is a super common complaint from what I’ve seen, so I suspect maybe matchmaking just isn’t very optimised right now. I’ve found that most of my matches are actually very close but there is wild imbalance between players in a match. Like you’ll have one team with 3 people who go 2/12 or something and then another guy on the same team going 24/2 with a couple of other teammates somewhere in the middle.
I think another common problem for some people is that they consistently lose their lanes either because they don’t understand the soul mechanics or they lack FPS mechanical skill and struggle with positioning and aim in an early 1v1. And because they’re new, they don’t understand the mid-game mechanics enough to realise that there are ways to catch up after a bad laning phase by playing smarter and more defensive. Instead they keep trying to push aggressively or join team fights and endlessly feed as the power gap grows larger and larger. If you are that far behind and repeatedly dying then it can feel like a game is less even than it actually is.
It may not be the matchmaking, but the pool. Since the game is still in invite only mode, I believe, the limited pool means they could be doing the best the can with what they have.
The invite only thing doesn’t really mean anything in practice, though. I think it was more hype generation from Valve than anything else and if you check the Steam discussion page for the game it’s just filled with endless threads of people giving away invites. Currently Deadlock has a 96,000 24 hour peak on Steam, putting it in the top 15 games being played on the platform and its all time peak is 171,000 from a month ago. There are definitely enough people in the pool for balancing to be possible.
FPS, I tried dota 2 once and was immediately overwhelmed by the learn to play section and uninstalled it.
Been playing fps and rts all my life but about 2 years ago some friends convinced me to play League.
I see Deadlock as a fun shooter with League like mechanics.
Just like league my team has terrible mental and ints to fall behind on CS and all caps type or scream into their mic.
Just like CoD the other team is a 6 stack of Joewo moment kings and my team is eating glue while saying the most wild shit.
Deadlock is 10/10
I have a pretty extensive Dota background behind me, but I quit years ago because I noticed I wasn’t really having a good return in terms of fun/hour. This is really the first MOBA I’ve played since then - though I’ve kept watching Dota esports.
I played FPS multiplayer years ago (Unreal Tournament '99, TF2 and Planetside 2 primarily) but I have definitely not kept it up, sticking mostly to single player and story heavy games as I’ve gotten older. This is the first competitive game I’ve played in years, so between skill atrophy and getting older, twitch aim is definitely my number one weakness in Deadlock. I hope I’ll be able to either get better at it or at least perform well enough to be good enough to feel like I can have fun playing it, as the movement and mechanics of the game are addicting as hell.
FPS. I actually haven’t liked a single MOBA before I tried Deadlock, I’ve always thought they were too punishing and needed tons of knowledge while combat was weirdly slow paced until the late game. Deadlock fixes these problems for me just by being always fun to play, and you can kind of get away with just following a popular build and shooting enemies without really understanding what you’re doing.
Well it is still a very new game so I think the fact that there are so many noobs and non-MOBA players is helping with that. But yeah, there are a lot of quality of life improvements and enjoyable mechanics front loaded into the experience so it doesn’t have that usual MOBA barrier of boring/wildly inefficient gameplay for beginners. You don’t need to have a lot of learning or in-game experience to have fun and feel like you know what is happening in a match.
The community build system was present in Dota 2, as well, but it’s been massively improved here.
And if you want to get into it, the fact that build creators can leave notes on each category, annotate each individual item, even, means there’s a way to start learning just by mousing over things and reading.
Grew up with FPS games, but also have a few hundred hours on Dota 2. So far I find the movement much more intuitive than Dota ever was, and the community is far more good natured at this point as well. Loving it so far.
Video game generalist
Both, actually.
I played Dota 2 a bunch back in the day, and struggled with FPS games. Eventually I got enough of Dota and moved onto other games, eventually finding my FPS home first with Tribes Ascend, then later with Titanfall 2. Tribes was when aiming and moving truly clicked for me and I started seeing results in terms of my skill improving.
From there, I found and adored Battleborn, somewhat enjoyed Overwatch, played a good bit of Apex with one friend…
Battleborn shutting down was horrible, but Deadlock has now realized the kind of game that is truly and completely “for me”. It implements a collection of mechanics that is just pure crack imo. The movement system especially is 😘👌 for my titanfall playing ass.