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.

Valve's latest third-person MOBA-like hero shooter, Deadlock, has had a pretty serious cheater problem, despite still being an invite-only public test. While the game has thus far operated on a player reporting system to identify and punish cheaters, a recent game patch has introduced a rather comical—and seemingly effective—anti-cheat system that can either ban cheating players or turn them into frogs until the end of the match.

Valve says that the new anti-cheat system is set up to be fairly conservative at the moment to avoid any false positives. Aside from the new anti-cheat, Deadlock's September 26 update introduced a new hero, Mirage, whose design and gameplay seem rooted in the jinn from Arabic myths (aka djinn or genie) and added a pretty vast collection of gameplay updates, balances, and quality-of-life improvements throughout the game.

Valve's latest arena shooter Deadlock has been generating hype for a long time, with recent concurrent player counts exceeding 170,000 at one point, according to SteamDB. More recently, however, reports indicate that cheaters are already invading Deadlock, despite the fact that the game is still in invite-only public alpha testing.

As shown in a recent Reddit post containing a kill-cam video from Deadlock, a supposed cheater very brazenly appears to use a wall hack to track an enemy through a wall and pre-emptively dodge an attack. In the clip, the gamer who spotted the alleged infraction, this isn't even the first time they have encountered the same cheater in-game, and there are countless reports on both Reddit and the Deadlock forum reporting similar experiences.

The Risk of Rain series has been successful over the years. The first game in the sequel was developed by university students Paul Morse and Duncan Drummond, becoming an indie smash hit. The second game, Risk of Rain 2, was released in 2019 and also sold pretty well, gaining 500,000 players just in early access.

Later, in 2022, Gearbox gained ownership of the Risk of Rain IP, from Morse and Drummond's development studio, Hopoo games, and simply put, the reception to its latest expansion has not been going great since then.