Too Much Deadlock Spawned Slay the Spire 2's Doormaker

Zero hours. That's how long Doormaker will spend terrorizing players in Slay the Spire 2 going forward, because Mega Crit wiped the Act 3 boss from the game entirely in Major Update #2 last week. But before it was scrubbed from existence, the boss managed to tank the game's Steam reviews and become one of the most complained-about enemies in the roguelike deckbuilder's early access run. Now we know where it came from, and the answer is wonderfully stupid.

In the latest edition of Mega Crit's community newsletter, co-founder Casey Yano fielded a question about whether Doormaker was a reference to the web serial Worm. His response, shared among other community answers: "Doormaker isn't a Worm reference, I was playing too much Deadlock." If you've touched Valve's hero shooter, you'll immediately clock the connection to The Doorman, one of Deadlock's portal-slinging characters. Apparently enough hours with that kit left enough of a mark on Yano that it bled into his own game's boss design. I love that one of the most controversial enemies in a deckbuilder's history exists because a developer couldn't put down a completely unrelated shooter.

From Hated to Deleted

Doormaker wasn't just unpopular; it actively drove review-bombing on Steam. Players found the boss's balance so frustrating that Mega Crit couldn't find a sweet spot no matter how many adjustments they made. Rather than keep iterating, the studio replaced it outright with a new boss called Aeonglass. The community's reaction to the removal has been largely positive, though naturally someone has already uploaded a Steam Workshop mod that adds Doormaker back for the masochists among us.

Yano's newsletter also pulled back the curtain on other creature origins. The Ceremonial Beast, one of Slay the Spire 2's more visually striking bosses, was originally based on the Forest Spirit from Studio Ghibli's Princess Mononoke. Yano says the initial concept was "a bit solemn and grotesque" before artist Marlowe updated it to feel "more regal and spirity." He also confirmed it was the first boss designed for the sequel, dating back to 2021. And for anyone who's wondered about the fairy Ancient Nonupeipe, her name is an easter egg referencing the "NOPE" placeholder icon used during development. When two of those icons sat side by side in the relic bar, it read "NONOPEPE."

Elsewhere, Yano explained why the Kaiser Crab isn't called Emperor Crab or King Crab: "I'm tired of things being 'Emperor X' and 'King Y.' We have all these wacky words for kings, sultans, etc, and it's always the bland western one." I appreciate that level of thought going into a crab's title. He also mentioned the team is "messing with a bit of color change stuff" to help players tell characters apart in multiplayer when multiple people pick the same one.

As spotted by user tckmn in a detailed write-up, Major Update #2 also fixed a nasty PRNG bug that was making supposedly random outcomes far less random than intended. One example: the Neow's Bones Ancient relic was handing out the Debt curse 54 percent of the time. The fix also inadvertently surfaced the Rebound card, which had never been appearing in the Trash Heap event due to the same broken number generation. Slay the Spire 2 remains in early access on Steam, with beta patches arriving roughly every two weeks.