Deadlock's City Never Sleeps update overhauls the map, adds six new heroes, and still won't let you in without an invite

Valve dropped the City Never Sleeps update for Deadlock this week — a massive overhaul that redesigns the entire map, introduces six new heroes, and stuffs the game with thousands of new voice lines. The invite-only MOBA is bigger and more polished than ever, but Valve has made clear a public release isn't coming anytime soon.

The map is now split into three distinct visual themes: a bright city center, a haunted university, and a shadowy stock exchange, with four districts layered in between — including a theater district run by steampunk automatons and a Chinatown bell tower where teams fight over a soul fountain for a currency edge. The six new heroes — Rat King, Nurse Harrow, Solomon the chess wizard, Baba the park bench witch, a skeleton with a rocket launcher, and a young artist with a paintbrush — are being released two per week via player vote, with the first dropping Friday. Rat King, who started as a fan concept and became a community meme, arrived with 1,534 voice lines total, 126 of them dedicated solely to his Rat Swarm ability — each one calling out individual rats by name, from "Get 'em Lou!" to "I brought Gumdrop's whole polycule!" Beyond the heroes, the update doubles voice lines for every existing character and pushes pre-match hero conversations from over 700 to 1,500, with over 10,000 non-ping voice lines added in total. The shop interface has been rebuilt with filters, health bars are bolder, the kill feed is cleaner, teammate indicators are visible on screen, and there are new accessibility options including custom UI colors and subtitles.

Deadlock is set in the Cursed Apple — a supernatural version of New York City — and the new heroes lean hard into that identity. Solomon is the old man playing chess in the park, Baba is a cheeky riff on Slavic folklore dressed as a pigeon-feeding grandma, and Rat King is, well, the rats. It's a design philosophy that sets Deadlock apart from most MOBAs, which have historically recycled archetypes rooted in Warcraft-era fantasy. Valve is building something with genuine original lore and a blank canvas to tell it on, and the community's enthusiasm — fan art, voice line deep-dives, speculation threads — reflects that. The City Never Sleeps update is the second major overhaul after Old Gods, New Blood earlier this year.

In a rare development blog, Valve confirmed the update is not a signal of imminent public launch. The studio says it shifted to working on many systems in parallel this year, and several features are still in progress — including hero cosmetics, a Wardrobe system for hideout customization, large item redesigns, and alternative game modes (one potentially PvE, built by former Risk of Rain developers). Visual refreshes for older heroes are also being moved up the schedule. Valve was direct: "there was still a good amount of work we wanted to do on the core game itself" before entering a polish phase. For now, if you want to see the spooky new map yourself, you'll need to find someone willing to hand over an invite.