At this point, Half-Life 3 has become a meme for its ability to get gamers excited at even the slightest whiff of a mention of its name. For a while now, however, there have been rumors circulating about a Valve project called HLX, which is ostensibly Valve's internal name for a new Half-Life project that some have theorized may be Half-Life 3.

In a recent clip from a Valve Q&A panel at GameSoundCon (shared by @Tyler_McV on X), while addressing a question about HDR implementations in different games, a Valve employee, Mike Morasky, says that "I think Deadlock has their own version of HDR. HLX has its own version, so on and so forth." This mention of HLX is what Half-Life 3 hopefuls have latched onto as evidence of confirmation of the game by Valve itself.

Deadlock, Valve's MOBA that has been in beta testing for nearly two years, has just received another major update, building on its previous UI refinements and adding six more heroes into the mix, to boot. The update is called City Never Sleeps, and Deadlock's development team says that many of the new features and updates in this latest update have been in the works in parallel for several months.

The new heroes are Nurse Harrow, Rat King, Solomon, Deadman Danny, Baba, and Violet, although not much else has been revealed about them other than their tags. As with previous hero drops, the new heroes can be voted on from within the game, but there is a now a double hero vote for your first win of the day, and voting takes place in the pre-game lobby, where you can argue about who to vote for with your teammates.

Deadlock has been in invite-only early beta testing for over a year now, with previous updates introducing a steady trickle of new content alongside substantial stability fixes, UI polish, and quality-of-life changes. The latest update to the free-to-play MOBA-meets-hero shooter, however, introduces a whack of new content, including a new game mode, six new heroes, and new enemies to hunt down. Along with the new in-game content, Deadlock's ongoing UI overhaul, map updates, and quality-of-life options also receive a number of helpful additions. The UI now looks a lot more cohesive throughout, thanks to changes to the chat UI, the introduction of several interactive elements, including new damage indicators and numbers, a custom Steam recording timeline, objective health bars, and a completely reworked settings menu with a bunch of new options, including reticle control. The Patrons—NPC objectives players have to defend or defeat—have also been reworked and reintroduced as the Hidden King and the Archmother.

The biggest news in the latest update is by far the new game mode. Street Brawl is a fast-paced game mode that puts players in smaller 4v4 match-up in a best-of-five format. Players vie for control of the city, and each of the rounds only takes "a couple of minutes." Shopping during Street Brawl has been stripped back, with players able to add three items from a random pool to their inventory each round. There is also no farming, as player resources are reset each round. Valve has also revealed six new heroes, which will be released at the usual two-per-week rate. Aside from the teaser images posted on the mini site, also available below, not much has been revealed other than the heroes' names and their appearances. Judging by the available information, the new heroes consist of everything from melee brawlers and weapons experts to mages, a summoner, and even a support character.

Deadlock, Valve's new free-to-play MOBA game, has officially been updated, with the latest major update once again switching up the landscape by announcing a host of new heroes, new map changes, and the introduction of The Hideout, a new player lobby area. The latest Deadlock patch, which went live on August 18, will only introduce Mina, a new glass cannon with vampiric ranged attacks. The other heroes will be released over the following two weeks after the update goes live. Players will be able to vote on the next hero with votes they earn after each match they complete in-game. This will conceivably give the Deadlock development team a little more freedom to address game balance and issue patches between each hero's release. The announcement also confirms that the previous hero labs mechanic will be paused, seemingly indefinitely, as Valve moves to the new hero development structure.

The new update also introduced The Hideout, which is a new personal area—similar in concept to the Landing Craft in Warframe—that replaces the Dashboard. Players can invite each other to their Hideouts, and the developer has teased personalization and events in the Hideout. The Hideout also includes a small practice range, where you can test character movement and abilities before hopping into a game and without having to load a new area. The character selection screen has received a visual rework, with a number of the heroes and maps receiving design and visual updates alongside the new UI. Compared to the last time we reported on Deadlock's new heroes, the game seems to have found a much more defined visual style and consistent user interface. The announcement also teases that these visual updates are only the start of what's to come, with a more cohesive visual overhaul for much of the game coming soon.

More than 700 games and applications feature RTX technologies, and each week new games integrating NVIDIA DLSS, NVIDIA Reflex, and advanced ray-traced effects are released or announced, delivering the definitive PC experience for GeForce RTX players. Last week, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation came to NARAKA: BLADEPOINT, and even more games launched with support for DLSS. This week, DLSS 4 with Multi Frame Generation will be available at launch in the new 5v5 shooter, FragPunk, while Star Wars Outlaws shows off DLSS 4 enhancements in a new RTX On trailer.

Additionally, Dragonkin: The Banished and Rise of the Ronin are launching with support for DLSS Frame Generation and DLSS Super Resolution. Vector Strike entered Early Access yesterday featuring DLSS frame Generation and DLSS Super Resolution. And Deadlock and Grand Theft Auto V Enhanced now boast DLSS and Reflex support on PC.

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.