For the last few months, Valve has been releasing updates for Deadlock every two weeks. It's an impressive schedule that saw the game improve significantly over a short time with more detailed map finishes, new ways to traverse the buildings, and regular fine-tuning of hero abilities. That's not a sustainable pace in the long-term, though, and Valve knows it.
"As we start 2025, we are going to be adjusting our update schedule to help improve our development process," one Valve dev who goes by Yoshi says in the game's official Discord. "While it was very helpful for us in the beginning, we've found that our fixed two-week cycle has made it more difficult for us to iterate on certain types of changes internally, as well as sometimes not giving enough time for the changes themselves to settle externally before the next update came around.
"Going forward, major patches will no longer be on a fixed schedule," Yoshi adds. "These patches will be larger than before, albeit a little bit more spaced out, and hotfixes will continue to be released as needed. We look forward to fleshing out the game in the new year."
Deadlock often saw heroes buffed and nerfed in record time. This has its benefits, as it meant that no one hero stayed too overpowered for very long, but it was also quite a lot for players to keep up with. I stopped playing Deadlock for a few weeks, and on my return, I found that the hero I'd played for the better part of a month—learning strats, builds, and matchups—had been nerfed into the floor.
Although it seems counterintuitive, longer wait times for updates will mean that the changes made to Deadlock stick around for longer, giving the devs more time to polish them. Most players also seem to understand this, and support the developers and their decision to slow their roll.
"Seeing how early the game is, I think this is a great change. Less pressure, more time for them to make the changes they want to make," one player says. "Also means a less sporadic meta, which might be nice. Though the chaos of the first few months has been fun, all my friends who did play are gone because of it."
Deadlock is still only in its infancy, so it makes sense that updates have been so frequent and frenetic until now. Despite being in beta, I've had a ton of fun with Deadlock so far, and I'm really excited about what big changes the developers will bring to the table next.
