Former Valorant and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive professional player Michael 'Shroud' Grzesiek thinks Valve's newest game is already one of the greats, even if it isn't officially out yet.
Valve tried to keep its hybrid third-person shooter-MOBA Deadlock a secret for months, but even then, the game attracted thousands of players into its limited playable test runs. Though now that it's been available ("limited to friend invite via our playtesters") for a while, it's not generating buckets of hype like it used to.
Still, Shroud reckons everyone ignoring the still-in-development game will have their heads turned come release. "I feel like a lot of people care so much about player count and all that bulls**t that people might not play Deadlock when it comes out because of the development branch," he recently said on stream. "But the game will be so good that it doesn't matter. Eventually, they'll cave and play. Probably. Hopefully. I don't know."
As for the current state of Deadlock, Shroud called it "the same s**t as before - still one of the best games ever made, just a matter of time." Though he hoped it wouldn't take Valve developers "three more years" to reach 1.0. Elsewhere, Shroud theorized that an early 2026 release date would be ideal because of, err, the GTA 6-shaped elephant in the room, which he describes as a "problem".
Valve has been pretty consistently adding on to and improving Deadlock, so there's no reason to think the team would slow down now anyway. It's currently in the process of introducing six new characters, one of which borrows a page from a Valve classic and lets you zip across the map using portals, of all things.
For now, here are the new games of 2025 and beyond.
