How much dev time did Deadlock take away from CS2?

While it is a separate project handled by a separate team, Valve’s rumored-slash-leaked hero shooter shares one of the most precious resources available with CS2: the handful of developers who are already familiar enough with the intricacies of the Source 2 engine.

What is Deadlock (and what might Valve be cooking?)

The gaming web is wet and has its panties twisted in a knot on account of a gusher of leaks related to Deadlock, Valve’s rumored new project is said to be a 6v6 hero shooter with tower defense mechanisms sprinkled into the action. Previously, it was known as Neon Prime in the insider community (or Half-Life: Citadel in even earlier iterations), and its trademark was registered back in late October 2022.

We’ve seen over 90 separate videos leaked over the past few days, and SteamDB listings and insiders galore all seem to point towards this being a real thing – not that Valve themselves would be willing to confirm or deny it at this point.

So, there might be a new Valve game on the horizon! And yet, here I am, thinking about an old one.

Whisper it, but the Bellevue behemoth’s recent releases have not exactly set the world alight, except when fancy new technology was concerned in the case of Half-Life: Alyx. While I will die on the hill that Artifact had an excellent foundation, it ended up as the biggest meme of all time, and Dota Underlords completely failed to capitalize on the autobattler craze after the folks at Drodo rejected Valve’s original offer. And now they are late-joining the party for another genre that has sort of fizzled out, with a project that partially cannibalizes their existing multiplayer FPS property?

I’m as big of a Valve fanboy as the next guy – and I think I was one of the few people who were bullish even on CS2’s initial rollout – but this seems like such an odd project to me.

And here’s something odd, looking into the figurehead of the leak community:

So, who knows when this project might see the light of day. All we know is that it exists and has been in the works for a while. This means it has most definitely taken up that most finite of resources available right now in game development: experts competent in the ins and outs of the Source 2 engine. For any Valve project right now, this is the bottleneck – the money and the quality are obviously guaranteed.

So how this all might have played out in Seattle?

Seriously, though, how did this impact Counter-Strike 2’s development?

To recap, the mad lads had another Source 2-based shooter in the works all along as CS2 was also in the pipeline – at a time when people capable of doing a good job with the powerful engine were few and far between. Clearly, this aspect of the development process will continue to ease up as time goes by, but I can’t imagine what the availability must have been like back in 2022 for these two projects.

To be fair, the many criticisms about CS2’s current state almost never involve the engine or the technical foundations. It’s more the barebones content, the MR12 economy, the netcode, and the cheating situation that draws the ire of the community. And sure, three out of the four are exactly the sort of issues that you have a better chance of figuring out after a soft launch with tons of data becoming available to you.

But surely CS2 could have launched with more than just Dust2 and a handful of maps alongside a half-baked competitive mode if development resources were allocated differently? Perhaps that boisterous Summer 2023 date could have actually been met, and wouldn’t have looked so stupid, had Deadlock been on more of a backburner?

Valve’s notorious for giving its employees freedom and agency in the project selection department, but it breaks my heart to think that an unfinished hero shooter that is still so very far away was taking away precious dev time from the premiere competitive FPS of our time, just when it was about to make a grand technological leap and could have launched in a state where it lapped the competition.

Imagine having more game modes, exciting new maps, and the many small quality-of-life changes that are still only slowly trickling in, all back in 1.0. Reading about Deadlock makes me think that it could have been done!

But hey, at least something is cooking, and unlike all those false starts in the 2010s, this might actually see the light of day. That’s also something to celebrate, I suppose.

It seems like we spent the past decade waiting for that one big lynchpin that would see Valve return to big-time game development. Be it the software in the form of Source 2 or some of the hardware projects like the Steam Deck, it always felt right around the corner, the moment when they would start churning out top-tier projects.

But hey, at least Microsoft won’t be buying them anytime soon. Right?