Now that Valve is acknowledging that okay, yes, Deadlock exists, we’re free to discuss its excellent vibes. A major piece of the hero shooter MOBA’s aesthetic is of course the heroes themselves: a colorful cast of occultists, interplanar anomalies, and—according to its unfinalized character backgrounds—at least one asshole.
As you’ll read in the message that pops up when you launch Deadlock’s closed playtest, Valve considers the project to be in early development: All of the art, abilities, UI text, and just about everything else currently in-game could change before its unspecified release date.
Still, while each hero may well be unrecognizable by the time Deadlock reaches its final form, the early versions of each character’s background informs us that one of Valve’s writers thinks Lash is a real piece of shit.
Most of the current character bios give a brief summary of the tragedies and travails that produced Deadlock’s cast of paranormal misfits. Abrams, the half-devil detective, is embroiled in a conspiracy surrounding a mysterious tome that appeared on his office desk. Dynamo, a tenured Columbia professor, fell into a spacetime hole and is now a tiny star living in a robot body. Ivy is a living gargoyle-turned-vigilante who was adopted by a family from Spanish Harlem.
The backgrounds are in varying degrees of completion. Some have interesting quirks—Yamato, a sword-wielding yokai who’s due for an upcoming redesign, has a bio that’s written entirely in untranslated Japanese. Others have some probably-unintentional punctuation goofs. And then there’s the single-sentence biography for Lash, which reads:
“Jacob Lash is an asshole.”
That’s it. That’s all we get. No backstory, no tragic past. Just a note to say this guy sucks.
It’s clearly very placeholder—although I’d love to see Valve be ballsy and leave it as is, no notes—but it’s also a fun window into the ever-changing nature of game development, where juggled production priorities might mean that a character’s background remains a single-line dev dunk for an indefinite amount of time.
I will say, looking at Lash’s abilities, I can understand how someone might end up in a place where they need to mark, however briefly, that he’s a trash man. Lash’s kit includes a whip that lets him grapple and pull himself towards targets, and his ultimate lets him tangle up the enemy team in a big ball. He’s a big guy with a big moustache who can launch himself through the air and toss you and your friends into the worst possible places with his horrible whips.
Here’s an example:
funniest thing that happened to me in deadlock, lash throwing my entire team into the enemy’s fountain pic.twitter.com/EbeSB0lXdwAugust 24, 2024
I get it, is what I’m saying. Whoever was responsible for that placeholder text: I see you, and I understand. Lash: Be better.
