Game Theory: Deadlock is one of those games where hell is other people

Every Friday, A.V. Club staffers kick off the weekend by taking a look at the world of gaming, diving into the ideas that underpin the hobby we love with a bit of Game Theory. We’ll sound off in the space above, and invite you to respond down in the comments, telling us what you’re playing this weekend, and what theories it’s got you kicking around.

The Great And Terrible Video Game Difficulty Discourse typically focuses on single-player games, i.e., those titles where players are left to suffer in solitary madness when a game operates firmly outside their comfort zone. (Did you hear they finally nerfed the final boss of Elden Ring: Shadow Of The Erdtree? A shame it already crushed our spirit before the digital gremlins could bring it down to our pathetic human level.) But what about when the problem doesn’t come directly from the game itself, but the human beings playing it alongside you? What do you do when gaming gets all Sartré, and hell really is other people?

These thoughts brought to you by several nights getting our teeth kicked in by the digital wolves running through the streets of Valve’s new game Deadlock, a spirited attempt to blend hero shooters like Overwatch with the absolutely numerical brutality of MOBA games like League Of Legends, or the company’s own DOTA 2. (If you’re curious what “MOBA” stands for, that’s good! Curiosity enlivens a growing mind.) Combining two genres that each have massive learning curves applied to them—character shooters require you to at least sort of know how your kit of abilities matches up with as many as two dozen others, while the lane-based MOBAs have elaborate meta-strategies constantly developing to tell you which choices will completely ruin you and everyone you know nine seconds into a game—it’s been a bit of a rough landing. This, despite the fact that everybody should sort of be on the same page, since the game has only been trickling out in its open beta form for the last few months—but it turns out that that’s more than enough time for the wolves to feast, and grow, and also to figure out how to completely fuck you up with a guy who can create a massive street-clearing lightning storm basically any time he wants. (We’re sure there are ways to shut this down; god knows it happens every time we try to do it.)

Where this puts Deadlock, then, is in a paradox that will be familiar to anyone who’s spent time even at the distant peripheries of the fighting game scene, where gatekeeping of a game, or genre, is coming not just from players and their various mores/tendencies toward toxicity, but from the skill floors of the games themselves. Multiplayer shooters need bodies to keep themselves going—R.I.P. Concord—but if your learning curve involves getting devoured by forest predators for multiple games’ worth of very hard lessons, it can be hard to keep morale from flagging deep within your own gnawed torso. It doesn’t help that one of the things Deadlock adopts from its MOBA ancestors is a soul-draining transparency for what might be thought of as “ruthless accountability,” which is our fancy way of saying that you and everybody else have constant access to a numerical measurement of how badly you’re fucking things up. (In this case, it’s your souls count, which measures both direct power and which upgrades you can buy; like in many games of this ilk, the early game in Deadlock is all about eking out an advantage over your rivals when it comes to this big, obvious number.) It’s not like online video games haven’t always had your score, or your kills/deaths ratio readily available. But there’s something about looking at the top of the screen and seeing exactly how much you’re ruining everything for everyone that’s especially dispiriting.

Valve, to its credit, has done its best to mitigate at least some of this. Deadlock has a decent enough tutorial—although we had to go to YouTube videos, inevitably narrated by the most irritatingly voiced content creators on the planet, to get important details for how its sprawling map actually works. (The game assumes you know what “jungling” is, for instance, even though that term would have meant something very different to our ancestors in the 19th or 20th centuries.) Deadlock also pushes you toward heroes with lower skill requirements in your early going, in hopes that you’ll learn through success instead of horrifying, soul crushing wolf attack. And the game’s extremely complicated character building system has some great tools attached that let you use guides developed by people who actually know what they’re doing in order to make sure you’re not completely fucking your team over with your very first purchase. Still, these are long games—we’ve had matches last up to an hour, which is utterly draining—and spending that whole time knowing you’re the thing holding your team back can be emotionally murderous in a way that can’t be good for keeping the player base engaged.

Luckily for Deadlock, it’s one of those games where losing is still kind of fun (at least, in small doses), with the game’s first-person take on the MOBA move from managing individual lanes in the early going to bigger free-for-alls as things escalate producing some thrilling moments. (Another thing it shares with more traditional MOBAs: When you pull off a hero moment that changes the tide of a battle, you really feel it.) Character abilities are varied, and there’s real pleasure in figuring out how they can be combo’d and deployed for maximum effect. The game’s vibe and characters are [note to self, come back to this when you can remember anything nice to say about its generally generic models and setting.] And as far as ways to get our spirits crushed, it’s a pretty fun one; it’s just, well, we’ve still got five or six Astro Bot levels—one of the most joyful games in recent memories—left to play, y’know? Only so many wolf attacks we can stomach when the alternative is that.