The City Never Sleeps - Map Overhaul, Six New Heroes, and the State of Development

The City Never Sleeps

A New Look for the Cursed Apple

The Cursed Apple is ever changing, and these streets are nothing like you remember. The City Never Sleeps update brings a massive visual overhaul to the map and neutrals, along with a lot more.

What's New

• Map & Neutrals: A massive visual update to the map and neutral camps.
• Six New Heroes: Six new heroes join the roster.
• HUD Updates: A refreshed in-game HUD.
• Quality of Life: Numerous quality-of-life additions across the game.
• Accessibility: New accessibility options.
• And more - the full patch notes are available at https://www.playdeadlock.com/cityneversleeps

Where Development Stands

Alongside the update, the team wanted to talk about where the game is in development and what to look forward to. They have been incredibly happy and surprised by how passionate and supportive the community has been over the past couple of years. Every day someone shares something cool from the community with the rest of the team, and they are thankful for the constant support and useful feedback, despite the game being unfinished.

Building a multiplayer game is very hard and risky. The best way to minimize that risk is to get the game into players' hands from an early state, so they can help shape it and say what is fun and what isn't. This is part of that: more insight into what the team has been focusing on internally, as the game is developed with your help and guidance.

Several Things in Parallel

After the Old Gods New Blood update, the team felt there was still a good amount of work to do on the core game before moving on to more polish phases of development, like updating older hero artwork. Unlike previous updates, which were singularly focused on the key parts of that update, this year the team has been working on several different things in parallel. A good number of them are in today's update. Others have been in progress over the last few months alongside it.

That even includes progression and hero/hideout customizations. These are features the team wants to be able to adjust and significantly change based on feedback before the game is fully released.

Speculative Work

Some recent work is more speculative. The team isn't 100% sure it will be released, as that depends on how playtesting goes, though results so far have been promising:

• Large item redesigns and additions
• Alternate game modes that expand the scope of the game

Coming in Upcoming Updates

Some things are important to the team but haven't been reached yet, and will be the focus of upcoming updates:

• Midboss: Both the model and, to a degree, the layout.
• Guardians and Walkers: Still on the list for a future update.

Hero Remodels

Hero remodels were always planned for later, towards the end of early development, once other core aspects of the game were more fleshed out. That doesn't mean they aren't important, only that they are a known quantity that doesn't need to be done earlier than other things. The team will likely start working on them gradually in the near future, for inclusion in upcoming updates alongside other work.

Thank You

The team hopes you like this update. Thank you all for your continued support during development, and don't forget to Vote!