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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
I’m similar as far as FPS games go. Titanfall 2 is a masterpiece, and I enjoyed Overwatch with some friends until the long series of baffling decisions from Blizzard that began slowly killing the game.
I never could get into MOBAs though. I played a handful of LOL, HOTS, and Smite games and it just felt like I either spent 30 minutes losing a game or won for a reason no one could comprehend.
Deadlock has been crack since I got my invite. It scratches the shooter itch, and found a way to make the MOBA mechanics more accessible to me.
Video game generalist
From fighting games (Tekken) and fps (Apex, Titanfall 2).
Didn’t know this game was a moba before booting it up (I have never liked mobas)😅
So yeah, I was a bit skeptical in the beginning. However, given that Deadlock was a completely new IP, and it having a 3rd person movement shooter aspect to it. I decided to give it a go.
I’m glad I did, because Deadlock has become one of my favourite games this year.
The game wasn’t on my radar either. I only played it because some of my old PlanetSide 2 outfit mates were running a 6v6 training night and invited me to join. They assured me I’d be fine because of my ability as an FPS player but they completely underestimated how little I knew about MOBAs (I didn’t even know this game was a MOBA, I have basically never played the genre previously because I find it so uninteresting).
I got absolutely destroyed and thought about uninstalling but decided to give it another week of play by myself and put some time into learning the basics. I’m really glad I did, it has been unexpectedly enjoyable and something really different. I am a large scale shooter (PlanetSide, Battlefield, etc) player primarily and the state of that sub-genre is absolutely dire, so it has been so revitalising to actually find something fun which also feels like it has a future.
Oh hey it’s the friend I play “some” Apex with.
FPS for the most part, though I’ve played Dota. I find Deadlock much easier to approach as an FPS. Something about Dota just felt like I was playing with one hand tied behind my back. I could not, for the life of me, get proficient at jungling, but here it makes a lot more sense to me. Last hitting feels more intuitive to me. I think the spirit orb mechanic is fantastic as a skill game against your lane opponent.
The spirit orbs are sort of like an aim trainer mini-game. They get you to constantly practice short flicks throughout a match, it’s very satisfying.
💯 way more satisfying than cancel spam Dota last hitting.
I played Dota about a decade ago when I got a closed beta invitation but a few years later switched to just watching it. I have more fun watching Dota than playing it, but I do still like it. I also play a lot of shooters and action RPGs, plus a big grab bag of indie games.
I know in the popular conversation, everyone compares Deadlock to Smite or Paragon, but my view is that it’s a lot more like SMNC, which also leaned hard on third-person shooter combat like Deadlock while still having the prototypical MOBA setup. From this perspective, I find it kind of funny to hear people marvel that the TPS+MOBA gameplay concept is so fresh. I’m just thinking, “where were you a decade ago to play SMNC?” The biggest thing I miss about SMNC was the “sports on TV” theme. Super underrated aesthetic in gaming. I guess occult noir is, too.
It’s funny how Dota this game really is. Players come from outside Dota and go “whoa, this is so crazy,” but all the Dota players go “yeah, Dota has long had that.” In-game community build guides, the item design philosophy, the large amounts of disables. I was watching Dota streamers try the game for the first time and they get top souls despite still having to read tooltips.
I too have yet to adjust to the years we lost during the pandemic, but Dota closed beta started 14 years ago. A decade ago it had been released for a year following its much-memed three year beta. Time flies eh?
I’m exactly like you though, so I’m happy to find a kindred spirit. Played a shit ton of Dota 1, went onto playing Dota 2 starting from closed beta up to about 2017. I love the game, but I hated playing it - it mostly made me miserable. Very happy to have quit, but still watch TI every year, along with a couple other major tournaments perhaps. I think it’s great fun to watch.
I agree that MOBA macro and gamesense are very important, but they are also easier to pick up than movement and aim, so I find after the initial week or two of an adjustment period it’s mostly the FPS gods who dominate. I know I am primarily held back by my aim at the moment, for example.
The biggest thing I miss about SMNC was the “sports on TV” theme.
Have you played The Finals? That has a very similar theme. There was another FPS game in development called Combat Champions that also trying to do this but it was cancelled before ever making it to release.
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 tried dota 2 once and was immediately overwhelmed by the learn to play section and uninstalled it.
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.
Started with fps in 93, then mobas in 04, love them both, still suck at both
For me both, I first played a lot of League of Legends and later started playing Overwatch.
While playing the game I notice (or can guess) what background enemies have. Some people are really skilled at shooting but can easily be out rotated and tunnel vision on fighting. I won one game as Wraith while being 1/9, but I just focused on Objectiles while everyone else was just fighting. People with MOBA experience seem to be more aware about objectives and rotations.
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.
