You might remember Slork. He featured in a PC Gamer article with the headline "Slork," and the strapline, "Slork." Everyone had a good time slorkin' it back then, and the unfinished hero quickly turned heads with his ridiculous name and experimental, stealthy playstyle. That being said, I have bad news, #SlorkNation: Valve has melted Slork's wet, slippery body into Sunday dinner.

Let me back up. Slork was a hero concept first accessible via console commands in Deadlock's private test. He was later added to the hero labs, a feature where characters with placeholder art could be used to queue up for normal games during scheduled hours, assuming you had a certain number of games under your belt. At this point, Slork had been renamed to the decidedly less hilarious Fathom.

Deadlock has spent the last year shifting forms like the MOBA version of an Animorph, and the hero labs mode was removed as the game became increasingly polished and all play was subsumed into a single ranked queue. Four of the eight hero labs characters were added to Deadlock's core roster permanently. The others, including Fathom, were simply removed.

That brings us to now, a moment wherein the Deadlock community is in a stir over the next major update. Various leaks and rumors have surfaced all over social media about the next several heroes, but Slork fans have noticed Slork's absence from these rumors.

When asked about Slork's status on the Deadlock discord, developer Duncan "Hopoo" Drummond(yes, the same Hopoo of Risk of Rain fame, he works on Deadlock now) gave a grisly reply: "We made a delicious stock out of his bones and meats." The reply was shared in a Reddit thread from user ginger6616 titled, "They’re laughing… they murdered my boy and they’re laughing."

When Hopoo was informed he was being cruel, he doubled down: "7 hours," came the cooking instruction for Slork's now-extinct bones and meats. He quickly added that this was not a release window for the patch, just a cold acknowledgment that Slork was stewed for the better part of a day.

Suffice it to say, if you've been waiting to see Slork (or Fathom) make it into Deadlock proper, it's never been more over for you. He's gone; you have my condolences.

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.

Deadlock's not-so-secret invite-only beta has been a blast if you don't mind your favorite MOBA getting fundamentally altered every few months. The game has switched up how many lanes it has, dropped half a dozen new heroes in one go, and now, majorly overhauled lane creep mechanics in what Valve calls a "small update."

Troopers, Deadlock's version of the lane creep you'd find in any given MOBA, grant souls on death which players exchange for items. In the past, you immediately got half the souls (split with nearby allies) when a trooper died and had to shoot the other half out of the air as it floated from the corpse. Now, the first half of the income also has to be manually secured—it will fall to the ground, and you'll have to walk within a short radius of the souls to claim them.

Unlike the souls which have to be shot, these can't be denied by the enemy team and will appear translucent to them. Still, it will certainly lead to more fights breaking out in the laning phase; heroes that prefer to stay back and farm from afar will have to get closer to the action so they can snag those precious souls.

Another significant trooper change is that the healing trooper will no longer, well, heal. Instead, it will drop a medic pack when killed by the enemy team, which will restore 10% of nearby players' missing health. Both of these changes remind me of Blizzard's MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, where minions drop EXP as small orbs on the ground and every wave drops a "healing globe," though in Heroes they are claimable by either team. If you're going to take, may as well take from the best.

The biggest takeaways as I see them are twofold: players will have to be more aggressive in lane to secure all their income and keep their health topped off, and it will be easier to keep a steady income in the late game, since you can arrive to a lane after all the troopers have died and still get their souls. But knowing Valve's definition of a "small update," that's not all.

Nearly every hero has also seen a balance pass. Most of these are minor number tweaks, but other heroes have gotten substantial changes; Mirage's ultimate can now take him to friendly objectives, for example. You can find the full list of patch notes here.