Deadlock's haunted painting is awake again, and ranked players should be nervous

Most studios announce patches with a roadmap. Valve hangs a painting in Deadlock's hub, waits for its eyes to start glowing, and lets the community do the rest.

The portrait - the guy with the red gloves - has lit up again. Last time that happened, Old Gods, New Blood landed shortly after with six new heroes, a new mode and a pile of other changes. This time we don't even have to read tea leaves: Valve developer Yoshi posted on Discord that the team is "planning on releasing the major content update early next week." That lines up with the late September window Valve gave after the patch slipped, a delay Yoshi put down to playtesting and iteration taking longer than expected. Honestly, that's the delay reason I want to hear. I'll take a few extra weeks of internal testing over a hero launch that breaks the item economy on day one.

What's actually in it? Valve hasn't said. Dataminers have turned up new models for the game's towers, which reads like a visual pass on the MOBA furniture that still looks out of place next to Deadlock's 1950s urban fantasy style. There's also talk of a PvE-focused mode, but that one sounds far enough out that I wouldn't plan an evening around it.

Here's my actual concern. Deadlock isn't the same game it was at the last big drop. Since then it's had a ranked overhaul and its first proper ranked season, with only minor balance patches in between. So the meta has had months to settle, and people have climbed on top of it. A major content update on a live ranked ladder isn't just new toys. If it's anywhere near the size of the last one, it's a reset of matchups, item builds and draft priorities while everyone's rank is still riding on the results.

That's fine - it's what a live competitive game is supposed to do. But go in with your eyes open, so to speak. The first week after a big patch is when your MMR is most exposed to stuff nobody has figured out yet: unknown heroes, untested builds, and teammates insta-locking whatever's shiny. My plan is simple. Play the new stuff in unranked, let the first wave of broken combos surface, wait for the inevitable hotfix, then queue ranked again.

And if Valve wants to keep communicating through a haunted oil painting, I'm not complaining. Its hit rate is better than most studio roadmaps I've read.

Image: Sergey Galyonkin from Raleigh, USA / CC BY-SA 2.0, source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Gabe_Newell_(12072446586).jpg