Deadlocking

The last few weeks I have been trying and failing to "get back into" Deadlock. Valve's "Not a moba" moba. What happens when a game developer with unlimited resources actually releases a game? You get - Deadlock.

I played early Deadlock that required an email invite and signing a virtual NDA (which was a text box that said "don't talk about the game idiot") and I still did. Thru the terrifying complexity I was able to nearly take a whole team using Ivy, and posted footage of it to a telegram channel where someone else was like "please don't share this, I sit a few feet away from the guy banning people" 

Me and my friends would team up for various struggles. Playing Deadlock then was an exhilarating struggle of trying to figure out what the fuck is happening at any given moment. There are a thousand moving pieces each moving at a thousand miles an hour, you don't have time to read and strategize, plans fall apart in an instant. It was fun and then Valve lifted the fake NDA and suddenly there were more people, but more importantly there was a "right" way to play the game and metas emerged. 

A year later I am trying to get back into the game, and the loss of muscle memory and changes to gameplay make me feel like I'm drowning. I can't keep up on the soul count progression like my teammates do, and I'm doing the same actions as them, so a big part of the game is just trying to gain some kind of proficiency. Mercifully, there are bot matches now so the guilt of bringing a whole team down over not performing are gone.

Over a decade ago I played Leauge of Legends and quit because the complexity felt obnoxious. I was attempting to use Teemo as my first hero and looked up builds online, but when I tried to implement those builds in a match I couldn't get enough currency to buy the items at set times, so I had to learn an entire gameplay skillset to progress fast enough through a match to get the items to create the build. 

Deadlock feels the same way, yeah you can move through the map and play objectives and level up and buy items in a build, but that won't get you to win. Instead it takes many many hours of building up a knowledge of the map and knowledge of what to do in hundreds of micro specific situations and matchups to gain an edge over opponants and use that to ride an unimpeachable snowball effect against the other team. 

What is depressing about deadlock is that it has great characters and settings and "lore". It's a world I want to explore more, but Valve is never going to make any more single player games - it doesn't have to. No game studio other than Valve is making a game like this with this kind of production values because most would consider it too niche and hardcore. Every studio that managed to somehow still have VC funding is making a fortnite-like because that's the only game VC investors can remember.

So I am left with trying to play a game I don't actually like, hoping that at some point I like it enough to understand it and be good at it.