Valve's next-gen hero shooter, Deadlock, has been making waves lately, with a recent update addressing cheating in a rather comical way. Now, it looks like the developers are putting in more work to both expand the game's hero roster and bring it up to feature-parity with other modern MMOs and PvP shooters. According to the changelog for the October 24 Deadlock update, Valve has added six new heroes to the game alongside some much-needed bug fixes, visual tweaks, and new social features.

The biggest news is obviously the new heroes, which, despite being added to the game, aren't quite ready for prime time just yet. As such, Valve has created a new experimental mode called Hero Labs, where players will be able to test new, potentially incomplete, heroes and provide feedback to the developers. The preliminary names for the six new heroes are Holliday, Calico, Wrecker, Fathom, Viper, and Magician, and Valve developer, Yoshi, is clear that these new heroes are still works-in-progress, with Magician in particular lacking his own ultimate ability. New heroes aren't the only changes coming to Deadlock, though, and Valve's update notes include a new character shader and better sky and environment illumination, a commend feature to show appreciation to other players, and a slew of balance changes to just about every character in the game.The Hero Lab feature is an interesting, low-consequences way for Deadlock's development team to get a feel for how characters interact and quickly make changes to characters and their abilities without affecting the main game. The developer says that Hero Lab play will be restricted to certain hours in order to speed up queue times and get as much feedback as possible from players playing simultaneously. Heroes will also apparently frequently disappear from Hero Lab for a while and return some time later with reworked abilities and new stats. The new experimental queue will also be restricted to Deadlock players with at least 50 Deadlock matches under their belts.

The rest of the exceedingly long update changelog can be found here, although most of the other changes are either small bug fixes, like warning the player if the game is not in focus when they're about to respawn and adding or fixing UI elements that weren't there or weren't displaying properly. Many of Deadlock's heroes have also received stat and ability boosts and nerfs in an ongoing effort to balance the game. You can check out Deadlock on Steam while it's still in testing, but you'll need an invitation code from a friend who already has access before you will be able to join in on the fun or give feedback on the game.