You can play unreleased Deadlock heroes in Sandbox with these console commands

If you’re one of the many players eagerly awaiting the next hero drop in DeadlockYou might be excited to hear that you can actually pre-play unreleased heroes using console commands. This is only available in Sandbox mode, and not all of them are available yet.

But you can still try them out even if you’re stuck in the T position. Valve games built on the Source 1 and 2 engines are known for how much players can customize them using the extensive console and many commands. To play unreleased games Deadlock heroes early on, you’ll need to use the “selecthero” command in the console (opened with F7) and then type in the hero you want to try out (type dump_hero_names to see a full list of available heroes). For example, if you want to try out the strange Slork, you’d type “selecthero hero_slork” and give him a spin in the Sandbox folder.

For your convenience, here are all available, unreleased hero names:

• hero_kali
• hero_nano
• hero_astro
• hero_gunslinger
• hero_yakuza
• held_tokamak
• hero_destroyer
• hero_rutger
• held_synth
• held_thumper
• held_mirage
• held_slork
• heroes_cadence
• hero_bomber

Not all of these are very far along in development and won’t be a pleasant experience (they’re stuck in T-poses and have no animations or temporary effects), but they’re still available to try out and see what they’re about once they’re out. Some are actually quite fleshed out, most notably Astro, Nano, Wrecker, and Mirage (he has portrait and fleshed out abilities, but shows up as an ERROR temp model in our tests).

Valve is constantly working on developing new heroes and adding them to Deadlockand rework existing ones to make them more suitable. Recently, one of the game’s lead developers confirmed that reworks would be coming to most heroes, at least to some extent, so the game’s roster, especially the unreleased ones, could look very different when the game comes out.