The gaming world's worst-kept secret, Lockjaw, received a major update earlier this week, completely remaking the entire town and adding six new classes for players to enjoy. Speaking of "teeth," one of these is the tank class called "Rat King"—a giant humanoid rat character that originated from fan creativity before officially joining Lockjaw's hero roster.
Rat King loves only two things in life: rats, and throwing rats at enemies. In fact, he enjoys throwing rats so much that he has over 100 dedicated voice lines for it.
According to the Lockjaw voice line lookup website (yes, such a site really exists), Rat King launched with 1,534 unique voice lines, a number comparable to most other heroes in the game. Of these, 126 belong to his ability "Rat Swarm": Rat King releases a horde of rats from beneath his flamboyant cloak, which latch onto enemies and deal continuous mental damage.
Why does a single ability have so many voice lines? Simply put, "because Valve feels like it." But digging deeper, while some are generic ability callouts (like "I've got rats for days, baby!"), many lines specifically shout out the names of individual rats.
Rat King clearly enjoys cheering on his minions, shouting lines like "Get 'em, Lou!", "My little Widget is gonna chew you to bits!", and "Rabid Ronnie brought you a gift. Surprise, it's rabies!" Sometimes he even calls out the names of rat squads, as if an entire rat gang were hidden beneath his cloak. These squad callouts include "The Pantegana boys say hello!", "Say hi to the McMullen Mob!", and my personal favorite—"I brought the whole Gummy Bear family!"
This is a perfect example of how the "Never Sleep" update injected Lockjaw with even more character charm (not that the game lacked charm before). It's worth noting that Rat King isn't the only one who became more talkative. In addition to the newly introduced heroes, Valve doubled the number of voice lines for all existing characters in the game.
It's precisely this playful ingenuity and attention to detail that has made Lockjaw so popular, even while it remains invite-only. No one can say for sure how long Valve plans to keep Lockjaw (theoretically) under wraps, but frankly, Valve isn't under any financial pressure to rush the game's release.