If Deadlock is real, the creative Valve we once knew is finally gone for good

I'm going to start with the bad - the reasons why Valve creating an online FPS game in the fashion of Overwatch 2 et al would feel like the end of an era, or some kind of new, subterranean level of creative bankruptcy in triple-A gaming. I go back to the opening section of Half-Life, those virtually inactive introductory minutes where you're purely looking, listening, and absorbing the atmosphere and tone. Particularly with regards to Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem, the prevailing sentiment of the era was that shooters ought to be fast, lean, and deliberately disengaged from any pretenses of story.

In retrospect, Valve's method may seem primitive and sledgehammer, this idea of essentially locking the player down and delivering 'narrative' to them by force. But that bluntness is characteristic of what was once the studio's determination to challenge and revolutionize - 'Inbound' is the spiritual antipode of Doom's 'E1M1,' a patent and concerted declaration that Valve, Half-Life, and perhaps mainstream shooters in general, from now on, are going to do things differently.

Across all of Valve's best games, you can find small and large examples not only of an ambition to subvert but also to make that ambition as visible and seditionist as possible. There are exceptions, and elements of the character that leave something to be desired, but in the main, triple-A gaming had no female protagonist like Alyx Vance before 2004 and Half-Life 2.

Again, there are exceptions, but when I think about 'humor in videogames' and what the umbrella concept of a 'funny videogame' represented, before 2007, it was nothing like Portal. I could get a kick out of Postal or Monkey Island or the more caustic moments of GTA, but it felt like to laugh at those games you already had to be into games, whereas Portal you could give to anyone, and they'd find it funny.

When 'emergent gameplay' and 'spontaneous narrative' were still academic and game criticism buzzwords, Left 4 Dead already had its groundbreaking Director. Even Counter-Strike, perhaps the most superficially formulaic of Valve's shooters, has become, paradoxically, over the years, more and more extraordinary compared to its genre contemporaries. Where almost every single online FPS since 2007 has followed in the pattern made by Call of Duty 4, with upgrades, perks, classes, levels, unlocks, and so on, Counter-Strike has steadfastly remained true to its original premise, and now, as a result, feels unlike anything else out there.

And so, if Deadlock really is the game that it currently seems to resemble - if it's that similar to the other hero shooters of the day - it feels like it would represent the end of a certain game-making ambition within Valve. I'm not a business brain. I'm not an industry analyst. But I'd imagine that Valve, the owner of Steam, can afford to take creative risks. I look at a lot of what came out in 2023 and what's coming out in 2024, and it feels like all the big gamer-makers are still trend-chasing and swimming in one another's wake. You'd think most of these studios can afford, in the literal sense, to be a little more dangerous and experimental. They don't and they won't, and it's a shame - but it's also just the way it is for now, I suppose.

But if Valve - Valve - the most risk-proof triple-A game maker in the world, which earned its wealth and a cult-like adoration from fans thanks to its risk-taking games, is doing a hero shooter as standard as Deadlock seems to be, then I don't know where authentic creativity and willingness to push boundaries, break ground, and challenge conventions could possibly continue to exist in big-budget gaming.

But here's another possibility, and some good-faith optimism on my part. Half-Life, at some point, might have seemed like just another FPS. Left 4 Dead, just another zombie game. Portal, another puzzler. From the outside, right now, when we really don't know anything, maybe Deadlock does look like just another hero shooter. But maybe it will continue another tradition in Valve's history of risk-taking games, where it abides by various genre standards, and is perfectly enjoyable as a conventional, basal online FPS, but subverts or forces the genre to evolve in smaller, more smuggle-through-custom ways.

You get the game into the hands of people who normally play this kind of thing, and then you give them more, you give them something different, you give them a better vision of what mainstream games of this particular type can be. Maybe that, when viewed differently, is how Valve has always operated, and maybe that's what will happen if what we've seen and heard so far is true to the nature of Deadlock.