Deadlock City Never Sleeps Update Adds Six New Heroes and Map Overhaul

Deadlock’s City Never Sleeps update went live on 30 September, rebuilding the Cursed Apple as a haunted New York and lining up six new heroes, including community favourite Rat King. The heroes arrive two a week from 2 October in an order players vote on, and a limited-time merchant called the Broker is trading in corrupted items until the first of them lands.

Valve’s MOBA shooter is still in early development on PC through Steam, with no release date and access limited to invites from existing playtesters. Launch-day traffic still pushed Deadlock to a new all-time peak of 228,086 concurrent players, past its previous record of 171,000, and into Steam’s top ten most-played games.

Six New Heroes, Voting Rules, and NZ Release Times

The six newcomers are Baba, Deadman Danny, Nurse Harrow, Rat King, Solomon, and Violet.

Valve has shared little about them beyond three descriptive tags each.

As with the Old Gods, New Blood update, players decide the release order by voting. Voting now happens in a new pre-game lobby, where the winning team’s votes count double, and your first win of the day still doubles your votes as well. Once the first hero is out, playing also earns Hero Priority Tokens, and Campaign Posters let you show support for the hero you want next.

Heroes release on Tuesdays and Fridays at 2pm PT, starting Friday 2 October. In New Zealand that works out to 10am NZDT the following day, so the first hero arrives on Saturday 3 October. Valve has only dated that first release, but if the Tuesday and Friday pattern runs without a break, the six slots fall like this:

The Broker and Corrupted Items

The Broker is only in town until the first new hero arrives, which puts his exit at 2pm PT on 2 October, or 10am NZDT on Saturday 3 October. Until then, the mysterious merchant will swap your high-tier items for Corrupted versions. His arrival time varies, but his first shipment is stocked around 30 minutes into a match, with more Corrupted Items available on average every 15 minutes after that.

Every Corrupted Item comes with a downside. Each match, all corrupted items are assigned random negative attributes from a predefined set, and while the strength of the positive and negative effects varies slightly, it is identical for every player in that game. That means nobody in a lobby gets a kinder roll on the same item than their opponent does. Separately, the Street Brawl mode now grants a corrupted item after the item draft in Round 5.

Broadway, Greenwich, and York: The New Lanes and Haunts

Each of the Cursed Apple’s three lanes now has a New York name, three distinct zones, and new Haunts, Deadlock’s neutral creatures, with behaviours that replace the old neutrals.

The Four Districts

The back alleys and side streets between the lanes are now split into four districts, each with its own Haunts.

The Sunken Plaza sits beneath the Plaza District’s main square and trades safety for reward: the deeper you go, the more your stamina drains. The Bell Tower in Chinatown is a concentrated soul hotspot, but collecting from it rings the bell loudly across the whole map, so farming it tells every enemy where you are.

New Pickups and Breakables

• Tough Crates: need a Heavy Melee to break open and drop extra souls.
• Buff Containers: the revamped golden statues now also grant Spirit Resist, Bullet Resist, Ability Range, and Move Speed as permanent bonuses.
• Healing Snacks: hidden around the map for quick heals.
• Steam Vents: grant invisibility and a small amount of regen while you stand on them.

HUD, Shop, Ping, and Voice Line Changes

The full list on Valve’s City Never Sleeps page runs long, but the biggest readability change is the new health bar. Enemy bars now show player names, the current health value in real time, stamina, critical health status, and icons for an available Rejuvenator use or a ready ultimate. Haunts show their soul value and relative difficulty, and objectives get the same treatment.

HUD and Event Feed

• Ally indicators that stay visible at any distance.
• Improved stats showing your investments, buffs, and debuffs during a match, plus live stat changes while shopping.
• A cleaned-up targeting mode with less UI in the way.
• A new Event Feed showing which item or ability landed each killing blow, full bounties with your personal share, and Soul Bags to secure.

Shop and Pings

• The shop now shows the kill feed and incoming chat, and you can push to view the scoreboard without leaving it.
• Popular Items uses live player data to show what is most often bought on your hero and at which phase of the game.
• Stat filters, improved search, and the 1 to 6 keys navigating shop tabs by default.
• An updated Build Browser with build copy and paste.
• A reworked ping system with over 15,000 new and updated pings, a minimap wheel, a typing indicator, item pings, and callouts for how many enemies sit in a minimap cluster.

Voice Lines

Pre-match conversations between heroes have grown from just over 700 to 1,500, and Valve has added more than 10,000 non-ping voice lines. A new dialogue player lets you browse and listen to every voice line in the game.

Accessibility, Reporting, and Technical Changes

A dedicated accessibility menu now covers visuals, audio, and controls:

• Custom enemy UI colours and reticle fill and border colours.
• Subtitles for in-game dialogue, with adjustable size, colours, and font.
• Auto Move (double-tap Move Forward), Auto Mantle onto ledges, and Auto Fire.
• Reduced camera shake from impacts and explosions.

Reporting has teeth now too. A player reported mid-match and found to be abusing comms is muted for the rest of that match and given a 30-day comms ban, and you get a notification when action is taken on someone you reported.

The Sandbox gains bot recording and looping, a combat log, a speed graph, and a DPS meter. Settings can be shared as codes, more of them are cloud-saved across machines, and Japanese, Chinese, and Korean players get IME input support. Custom lobbies now support eight spectators.

Under the hood, Deadlock moves to the latest version of Source 2, with improved anti-cheat, network prediction, and rendering and audio performance. Abilities and items now fire the instant you press the button rather than waiting for the next input window. Among the gameplay tweaks, Graves can now destroy Venator’s traps with her gun, and successfully parrying objectives no longer resets your Parry cooldown.

What Valve Says Comes Next for Deadlock

Alongside the update, Valve published development notes explaining how it has spent the year since Old Gods, New Blood. The team wanted more work on the core game before moving to polish phases such as updating older hero artwork, and ran several workstreams in parallel rather than focusing on one update. Some of that work is not in City Never Sleeps yet, including progression and hero and Hideout customisation, which Valve wants to adjust based on player feedback before full release.

Other projects are less certain. Valve described large item redesigns and additions, plus alternate game modes that expand the game’s scope, as speculative: they may not ship depending on playtesting, though Valve called the results so far promising.

Hero remodels sit further down the list, because Valve considers them “more of a known quantity”. That is a sensible order: a new model for an existing hero changes how a match looks, while Midboss, Guardians, and Walkers are objectives that still shape how matches are played. Valve says those three, including Midboss’s model and to a degree its layout, will be the focus of upcoming updates, with hero remodels likely worked on gradually alongside them.