Warden (unreleased)

Unreleased The Warden is a Survivor that was cut at some point in Early Access' development. The Warden was a robotic melee Survivor that would have built up a store of Energy by getting hit and landing hits with their primary Battering Batons, or upon recalling the baton thrown with their secondary, Magnetic Recall. This energy storage would have lowered the cooldown of their utility Power Vault as it built up, with a higher level of Energy translating into a shorter cooldown. Additionally, The Warden's special, Discharge, would release all of the stored energy in an explosion around the survivor, doing increased damage with larger amounts of energy, at the cost of their entire store. Currently The Warden mainly exists as a series of unreleased skill icons found in Risk of Rain 2's files, which depict them wielding weapons resembling electrical plugs. In the code, these icons are paired with warden or "ward" for short.

The Hopoo Games Q&A with Dev Thoughts 27 revealed a lot more about The Warden, including a detailed mock up of their design, as well as the in-game descriptions of their skills. According to them, the character was an experiment to see if they could lean on outside help for a survivor design, but got cut because it wasn't shaping up to be as fun as they wanted quickly enough.

For unknown reasons this data only existed in the game's files after the release of Survivors of the Void, despite The Warden being cut sometime in the timeframe of 2019-2020.



The first skill icon seems to be for the Battering Batons primary, a fast melee combo that stores Energy with every successful hit.

The second skill icon appears to be for the Magnetic Recall secondary, depicting the Baton being hurled through the air. The third skill icon is likely also for Magnetic Recall, specifically for the secondary function where the Warden would call the thrown baton back to their hand.

The fourth skill icon is for Power Vault, the Warden's utility skill that doubled as a damaging attack. This skill's cooldown would have been reduced as more energy was stored, but the exact statistics on how this would have worked are currently unknown. This ability would have had three charges to start with, implying that The Warden was meant to be a very mobile character.

The fifth skill depicts the character enveloped in a ball of electricity, which lines up neatly with the description of their Discharge special. This special would have scaled damage to the amount of energy built up when it was used, though the information we have does not give specific stats on how this would have worked numerically.

The sixth skill icon of a red beam hitting a box that looks similar to the Railgunner's backpack appears to be for the Warden's passive, Impact Batteries. The coloration is reminiscent of the icon for. Interestingly the icon has what may be a depiction of what the Energy meter would have looked like.