Ex-Valve Dev Reveals Deadlock’s Anti-Cheat Feature Was First Meant for CS But with a Surprising Twist

Valve’s latest video game, Deadlock has been in playtesting since 2023, and players with access can invite their friends using Steam’s playtesting functionality. The game has received numerous updates but finally, in the recent update, Valve addressed the growing problem of hackers by turning them into frogs when they’re caught.

This is an interesting way to deal with hackers but this is not the first time Valve decided to integrate this feature into their games. An ex-Valve employee recently revealed that the same concept was planned for Counter-Strike but instead of frog, hackers would’ve been turned into chicken.

Hackers In Counter-Strike Would’ve Turned Into Chickens

As per Valve’s Deadlock‘s September 26 patch notes, when a user is detected as cheating during the game session the opponents will be given a choice between banning the cheater immediately and ending the match or turning the cheater into a frog for the rest of the game and then banning them after the game. This has been on Valve’s to-do list for quite some time now.

Holy crap, they finally built codename “FU Surprise Mode”?!

When I worked on VAC, Rich and I designed this for CS but the cheater was a chicken. https://t.co/Q6BKGTCZwj

— BurtonJ (@sptonjohn) September 27, 2024

A Valve ex-employee acknowledged the patch notes on his X account, revealing that when he worked on Valve Anti-Cheat, the team designed the same concept for Counter-Strike but instead of a frog, the hacker would’ve turned into a chicken.

Valve Revealed Deadlock On August 23, 2024

Valve officially revealed Deadlock on August 23, 2024, but the game is still in early development with lots of temporary art and experimental gameplay. The official release date is yet to be announced and access is currently limited to friend invites via our playtesters.

Deadlock is a mix of many popular third-person and first-person shooters out there. As per the Verge, Deadlock is a 6v6 MOBA third-person shooter in which your team of heroes attempts to dominate a map by slowly wearing down the opposing team and pushing them back, but players are also leading an army of NPC grunts down four different lanes to destroy the opposing team’s stationary defenses. The game reached a concurrent player count of just above 100,000, which proves that the game being invite-only will not stop gamers.

What Valve has done with Deadlock is what many popular developers are trying to achieve nowadays, Concord for example. As the game is in the spotlight and players are eager to try it out, we can expect an official announcement from Valve very soon about the game’s release date.

Do you think Deadlock will eliminate its competitors? Share your views in the comments!