Deadlock’s Druid

As Deadlock establishes its place in the gaming conscience, more and more of its characters are developing recognizable reputations among various online communities. Ivy has a Know Your Meme page, Silver is making waves in the furry fandom, and Abrams enjoys the star power of being the box-art face of the game. But there’s a good chance most of you haven’t heard of Deadlock’s Druid, probably because he doesn’t technically exist, unless you count unused lines and dummied-out code.

Here’s the closest thing he has to an ‘appearance’ in the canon:

Mina and Victor have a couple unused voicelines referring to ‘the druid’ as an allied player hero. Whether Valve scrapped him or is still working on him nobody can say, but I figured I’d at least chronicle what little we know about him (or her) since I am a druid main in pretty much every franchise that includes one.

Druid isn’t the only unused hero in Deadlock’s long development cycle, but he is different from most of the other unused heroes. The vast crop of them were in the code for ages, with beta models and occasionally broken or unfinished abilities, and you were able to play as them in a special ‘Hero Labs‘ game mode that was testing them out. Calico, Holliday, Sinclair, and Vyper graduated from this game mode into the full game, while the others were scrapped and removed from the source code on August 18 2025. Druid was added to the source code in that same patch, and is still playable via console commands.

How to Play as Druid

Before turning the game on, you’ll need to enable the developer console. In your Steam library, right-click on Deadlock and enter -console-dev in the text box under Launch Options.  After opening the game and spawning in the Hideout, simply press F7 and paste selecthero hero_druid into the console, and viola! You are now an untextured ERROR sign, certainly a novel rendition of a druid compared to the leafy foresters of other media.

Visually, the only way to tell you’re actually playing Druid is your ‘player icon’ being his name in white default letters. Right now, none of his abilities actually do anything, you pretty much can only run and jump around. I was able to kill a McGinnis bot (she felt appropriate given her industrial concept), but only via purchasing Alchemical Fire and fragging her with it. Nonetheless, let’s go over what (very) little we know about his ‘playstyle’ given his skeleton framework in the game’s code:

Druid’s “Abilities”

• “Plant_Obscure_Bush”. This ability sounds like some sort of stealth or camouflage mechanic. (Or perhaps a barrier, as the Cursed Apple is rather lacking in foliage and nobody is going to be fooled by a random bush on the sidewalk.)
• “Plant_Branch_Wall”. Scratch the above, if there is a barrier it’ll likely be this one. Uses the pictured Shrub Wall, which would be interesting given his antithetical counterpart, McGinnis, also summons a protective wall.
• “Sprout”. Includes a prompt to be used on allies, making me think this is his healing ability. (Which, again, mirrors McGinnis.)
• His ultimate is not currently coded, though its default icon is a 💪. (God I hope it involves shapeshifting into a bear, though that’s admittedly unlikely given Silver already has an ult that does essentially this)

And last but not least, one redditor playing around with the beta Druid noticed that if you combo Sprout into Plant_Obscure_Bush, you summon a tree! Make of that what you will.

Conjecture

While we are now delving firmly into estimated guesses and logical deductions, there’s a bit more we can surmise about Druid’s likely characterization and inspirations.

Given that many Deadlock heroes took heavy inspiration from Valve’s earlier MOBA roster in Dota 2, it’s the first sensible place to check for a forefather to Deadlock’s Druid. The two primary ‘forest-loving nature heroes’ are Nature’s Prophet and Lone Druid. NP and Druid share an ability name (Sprout), but it’s about here the similarities end. NP’s playstyle is all about spawning treant minions and teleporting around the map aiding teammates or punishing overextended enemies, and Druid’s ability names don’t suggest any of this, so I don’t personally find him very likely.

Lone Druid, in contrast, is all about fighting alongside your Spirit Bear, whose strength and sustainability enables you to aggressively push map objectives and split your focus on two parts of the map at once. Again, however, Deadlock Druid’s ability names don’t suggest a companion-focused concept at all, though the attitude of being self-reliant feels much more likely than Nature’s Prophet’s overarching transcendence. The Cursed Apple doesn’t feel quite like the right environment for a Master of Trees like Nature’s Prophet; Druid will be firmly out of his element in urban New York, so I suspect he’ll have much more of a scrappy survivalist conceit than NP’s focus on oppressive map control through sheer force of will and druidic power. I just don’t think it’s going to be the conceit this dev team went with for Lone Druid either.

Thematically, as I’ve noted several times, Druid is most juxtaposed against McGinnis, given she’s a mechanic/artificer who builds weapons of technological war and sells her services to Fairfax Industries. If Druid is ever added to the game properly, I suspect the two will either share a history or at least be rivals, similar to Lash and Bebop, and this will be reflected by their abilities either resembling (or countering) each other.

Conclusion

I know this absolutely didn’t need an article, but for whatever reason I can’t resist spending 500 words discussing unused code in video games. From scrapped TF2 weapons to console-only Left 4 Dead 2 content to Doom’s assault rifle to Quake’s Ogre Marksmen, these failed test elements give us fascinating insights into the development process of our favorite games, and I love delving into the uncharted depths of any title’s source code. And who knows? Unlike these other assets, the Druid’s game is still in development, so he may yet see the light of day!