(Image credit: Valve)

League of Legends looks unrecognizable in 2025 when compared to its cartoonier, humbler 2009 incarnation. And yet, while Summoner's Rift has been dotted with all sorts of new jungle monsters, balance tweaks, and visual overhauls, the actual map has changed only slightly.

Occasionally a different mode is introduced with a new map, but those rarely receive much support—League has been focused on refining a single map and mode of play for nearly two decades now. Dota gets a little sillier—okay, a lot sillier—and Heroes of the Storm prioritizes breadth over depth with all sorts of smaller maps, but the average MOBA feels familiar each time you return. Three lanes, kill creeps for gold, buy a consistent number of powerful items, try not to pass out from sheer anger when it all goes wrong.

All that pales in comparison to February's map rework, which changed the map from a four-lane layout to three. Not only did this mean solo laning—wherein one player had to go it alone in the early game, but received more income for their trouble—no longer existed, it meant ganking and rotating took a whole different form. Ultimately, the switch to three lanes felt much faster and centered more on big, climactic team fights; the fact that the same patch doubled the default sprint speed probably helped.

Fast and loose

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(Image credit: Valve)

These changes each felt like novel one-offs, but taken as a pattern, big swings defined Deadlock's 2025. The game became faster, more intense, and twitchier. As recently as November, lane creeps began dropping their income on the ground to be secured manually rather than passing it to nearby heroes automatically on death—a sizable change that encouraged more close-up scraps in lane.

I don't think Deadlock is capable of this rapid reinvention because it has something figured out that the other MOBAs haven't. Dota and League do a lot to stay fresh, and if Dota decided to fundamentally change how gold is collected or if League added a fourth lane after all these years, that could very well be a disaster. Deadlock can handle this sort of radical reinvention because it isn't done.

It's pretty obvious if you play it for very long. Different areas of the map meet vastly different standards for art quality, and certain heroes look more like prototypes than the real thing (the magician Sinclair is still just a flat, undetailed mannequin, and heroes like Bebop seem very much like holdovers from when the game was a sci-fi shooter called Neon Prime).