Valve keeping up with the trend of "worst kept secrets". You need an invite to join the alpha but since everyone who owns it can refer their friends, it spread very quickly.
I've been playing it the past few days and it's honestly very fun. Still a bit rough around the edges (especially in terms of balance) since it's in early access, but it has serious potential to be dota 2 levels of popular.
For the unaware, Deadlock is a 3rd person shooter MOBA. It feels like a mix of Dota and Overwatch/Team Fortress. Nobody is allowed to share footage or screenshots, but obviously with so many playing there's a ton of leaks out there.
I don't know if this information is already public but here are a couple of quick inferences I made by looking a the files. I'm not overly familiar with Valve's intellectual properties so I don't recognize any specific characters or franchises.
There's likely a hero named Yamato who has the abilities:
Shadow Form
Power Stance
Infinity Slash
Healing Slash
Flying Strike
There's a lot more hero information but that's the top one in the depots.
The game might be called "Citadel", or it may have just been called that internally at Valve.
The reason I suspect that is because of there appears to be a game folder called "citadel" which appears to be the main game folder.
The game was called citadel and was half life themed, they dropped that for neon prime and made it Sci fi, they then dropped that aesthetic changed the name to deadlock and went to a supernatural early to mid 1900s NYC noir aesthetic. A lot of the files still use the citadel name, but it's just leftover and means nothing anymore.
125hrs in the game over the last 6 weeks, it's great.