7. deadlock
i played about 300 hours of deadlock before i determined it wasn't particularly for me.
i'm not good at shooters. well, i'm probably better at shooters than like, the "average gamer," but deadlock being valve's new underground pc-only invite-only-or-something moba/shooter hybrid thing naturally draws in a crowd of real-deal gamers, so even though i can play well in a low mmr match in one of the normie games, even the baby lobbies of deadlock tend to rinse me. i understand the game's macro mechanics, and when i get into a good groove i'm able to monitor situations and be where i need to be, but i struggle with skirmishes at every stage of the game so i never really get my footing.
but i really love the game! the movement is rich, each character has a multitude of viable upgrade paths, and knowledge and skill seem to be rewarded in equal measure, provided you can reach the required baseline in both. every facet of the game reveals mechanical fathoms when inspected and the skill ceiling feels astronomical. that's to say nothing of the aesthetics. the characters are incredibly designed, voiced, and realized nearly entirely across the board, and while the writing does tend to make me roll my eyes (erik wolpaw, you are sorely missed), the way it's employed constantly in reaction to what the player does creates a bond with your character. and they're characters who are easy to bond with.
i've determined that a way to create a strong personality for a character in a competitive game is to write someone it would be fun to roleplay as. this, if i were to imagine myself as an aspiring indie dev with an interest in competitive gaming, would be the biggest lesson deadlock taught me as an aspiring indie dev with an interest in competitive gaming. mina calls to me. she's rich and pretty and vapid, a commonality among my mains in past competitive games. there's also the doorman, an sort of demon-thing with powers stronger than just about everyone else in the game, currently nerfing himself to pose as a hotel attendant just for the thrill of walking amongst humans, and mcginnis, a bag-focused girlboss who uses her genius intellect to sell her soul making weapons for the game's "lockheed martin-but-even-worse" evil organization. the game's real accomplishment is the quiet synchronicity between the personalities of its characters and their role within the game.
i constantly see lash players roleplaying in the game's all-chat as their character. he's annoying, flamboyant, and arrogant, befitting the character's flashy aerial maneuvers, and his tendency to speak in the third-person creates something easy and immediate for lash players to emulate when "getting into character." ivy's nicey-nice personality subtly engenders a compassion in players which makes it a rush to use her ult to extract a teammate from a dangerous situation. viscous is a funny goo man, and he makes me laugh, and when a viscous on my team does his funny goo things, that makes me laugh, too.
okay. my beef with deadlock:
well, for starters, i'm not good at it, because i'm not good at shooters. i try to explain to my friends that i'm not good at it because i'm not good at shooters, but they are all notably good at shooters, so they don't really seem to get it. sometimes they say, "try another character," to which i say either "i have" or "i don't want to," depending on the character. once, insultingly, one of them suggested i try osu!, as if i wasn't better at osu! by age 15 than that fucking dork could ever even dream of being in his aggressively uncritical life. usually though, they just say something else is probably the issue; my positioning, my understanding of the matchups, my timing. it's frustrating to try and fail to explain to them that, no, it really is just that i can't accurately aim while navigating a 3d space as well as they can, but i don't blame them for it. they've been playing shooters for long enough that they don't remember not being great at them. they say, "deadlock is barely a shooter," because they are far beyond the minimum threshold of shooter skill to be competitive in deadlock. but i'm simply not there. maybe i never will be, in this lifetime. then again, who knows? but certainly not now. i really love the game, but the collective skill level of my group of deadlock-playing friends outpaces my own.
they have a discord server that i'm not in now, a kind of bizarre frankenstein of people which i guess, now that i think about it, i'm somewhat responsible for. i broke my long-held 0 tolerance policy for no cross pollination between my irls and my onlines-turned-irls by introducing 1 of my friends from back home to the fighting game server-turned-deadlock server. at first i thought it was a mismatch. "please don't embarrass me with your edgy jokes," i remember thinking. that didn't happen. my online friends liked my friend from back home, because he's funny and good at the game and compassionate. now they have a server with some of his own friends and some of my own friends who have become his deadlock-playing friends. i don't feel, like, left out. if anything i'm glad the fighting game server that briefly became the deadlock server is now just the fighting game server again. it's just weird, this crossover. if i dwell on it, i feel uneasy. i wonder why that is?
the really annoying thing is nobody plays anything but deadlock anymore. a bunch of fighting games came out this year and nobody will play them with me. they all just play deadlock! deadlock deadlock deadlock. all i hear about. deadlock forever. endless deadlock. my roommate, easily the busiest guy i know, practically has deadlock hours penciled into his daily schedule. nobody will play avatar with me. nobody played tokon with me. only deadlock.
a lot of them have also been unkind about my unwillingness to play the game. i get that. i've been that way, too, with fighting games, or so i'm told, anyway. whenever i do play a game of deadlock with them i feel like dead weight on the team, and the reminders from my friends regarding my inability to hang can be hurtful, but it's nothing over a decade of competitive gaming hasn't trained me to brush off. the real reason i don't play the game anymore is simply that a game of deadlock runs around 40 minutes and i just can't keep it together for that long.
around a hundred thousand million times a day, i slip into this sort of crazy person spiral that my therapist has been trying for weeks to get me to describe in the detail i'm going to describe it in, here, now, in my deadlock review.
i think, inescapably, about the sensation of being grabbed by the collar and tossed like a doll. i think about how, a few minutes before she did it, she said she was going to call her friends to have them come jump me. i think about how after she did it, she called the police, and how she lied to them and then i lied to them. i think about when they were unable to run a background check on my name, an on-going glitch in the aftermath of a legal name change, and the officer who approached me about it. he accused me of lying about my identity and, for a moment, made me believe i was going to be arrested. i think about this, and i think about how everyone around me has the capability to do something as bad as this to me, or worse, at any time, effortlessly. anyone. friends. strangers. every re-realization of this creates a new villain. my new coworker at the hotel job i quit after 1 day, who tapped my arm in a friendly greeting. so much larger than me. so capable of harm. a student on the campus who looks at me too long. all new antagonists who i will revisit, every day, maybe forever. i think about the people who turned away from me when i told them what happened to me in january. i wonder, of course, ultimately, about what it would look like if it happened again. if it happened today. would it be a stranger or a friend? who would turn away from me now who didn't turn away from me then? when would the ones who stayed start to see the pattern? what would i have done to deserve it this time? at what point will i accept i and i alone am what pushes others, time and time again, to violence?
i'm sitting there, barely reactive to the world around me while the bulk of my brain details the pros and cons of killing myself now, before i've finished catching up to megg and mogg but also before i've allowed myself to be victimized again. i can't do it, obviously, at least not until i finish dragon quest 11, but by the time i come to that conclusion i've died 6 times in 10 minutes and fed the enemy haze well enough for my teammates to start vocalizing the game's need for a forfeit button.