After a couple of days of short teases, Overwatch’s newest hero has finally been revealed. Blizzard is bringing some interesting fusions of AI and weaponry to the battlefield in a future patch. Echo in Overwatch is the newest hero, marking the 32nd addition to the game, with a new story and gameplay style to boot.
The new hero is an adapted form of an omnic that has been contained within a robotic shell, and here hyper-advanced AI makes her lethal on the battlefield. The character had originally been teased as part of BlizzCon 2019. During Overwatch 2’s announcement, Blizzard gave the fans some peeks at what was coming in the sequel, and this was one of the characters spotted and teased.
Check it out in the trailer included below.
The story behind the new hero is quite interesting, albeit very dark. Dr. Mina Liao created Echo shortly before she died. This is the same person who in-universe had a hand in creating the omnics, and now she has taken to using a mix of AI and advanced weaponry to help Overwatch fight back against new threats.
As of now, we do not know when Echo will be available on Overwatch’s PTR, but with all the teasers for the hero coming out this week, Blizzard likely has some news coming soon. We did get to see a bit of what it’s like to play as Echo in Overwatch.
The hero has a unique flight ability that will allow her to zip around the map in combat, giving her some positional advantage similar to characters like Mercy and Pharah. There has been no indication whether Echo’s flight is restricted like Pharahs, which is much more focused on vertical movement.
Her offensive abilities were implied to have some kind of AoE attack, but it’s unclear exactly how this works. We don’t have solid damage values for any of her attacks yet, suggesting that her class is up in the air. There’s always room for more interesting support classes in this competitive game though.
