Last Friday, Valve formally announced Deadlock, its new multiplayer shooter that blends third-person action with a MOBA structure. Deadlock’s road to its official reveal has been highly unusual, with Valve pretending the game didn’t exist for several months, all while inviting thousands of people to play it.
Indeed, even now Valve has acknowledged the cat’s escape from the bag, the weirdness hasn’t stopped. Deadlock’s Steam page remains intensely cryptic, despite the Internet being flooded with videos of the game in action. Moreover, in a move normally reserved for a decade or two after a game launches, one of Valve’s developers has revealed a super early prototype of Deadlock in action.
The video of this prototype was noticed by online Valve bloodhound Gabe Follower, who posted the video on their Twitter account, stating “Valve dev ‘Yoshi’ shared early footage of gameplay prototype for Deadlock.” The video, which you can view below, shows the player walking through a blocky environment accompanied by a squad of antlions – the giant insects that hunt by smell from Half-Life 2. Moving forward, the player is accosted by an enemy group of antlions, and proceeds to shoot a few of them before his own insectoid pals catch up and take over combat duties.
Aside from its curiosity value, the video is a neat glimpse into the game development process. Despite clearly being at a very early stage, you can see the basic shape of what Deadlock is now, with players accompanied through the map by their own set of AI minions. It’s also interesting to see that the antlions are a different colour than they are in Half-Life 2 (grey versus yellow), and that there’s a bespoke particle effect for when they die. Deadlock was supposedly once set in the Half-Life universe under the codename Citadel. So it’s possible the antlions are more than mere placeholders, and we’re seeing a glimpse of what Deadlock might have looked like had Valve continued with the Half-Life theme.
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an earlier version of Deadlock. Several months back, footage leaked online of Deadlock in its previous incarnation as Neon Prime. In this iteration, Deadlock had a sci-fi setting rather than its current fantasy/supernatural theme, with players running around as robots as a cyberpunk city looms in the background.
Given how early in development Deadlock clearly still is, it’s wild to see how many iterations it’s already been through. It shows just how intensely Valve thinks about its games, and the dispassion with which it will alter or outright ditch an idea it thinks isn’t working.