Overwatch’s Next Character Is Echo

After a whole bunch of speculation from the Overwatch community, Blizzard has finally revealed the identity of its hero shooter’s next character. It’s Echo, a robotic character we saw back during BlizzCon 2019‘s Overwatch 2 announcement.

Blizzard dropped an origin story video to give players a sense of who Echo is, which you can watch below. According to Blizzard’s tweet introducing the Echo video, she’s “an evolutionary robot programmed with a rapidly adapting artificial intelligence.” It didn’t say when Echo will be available in the game, however.

We also don’t know yet what “rapidly adapting artificial intelligence” means in terms of gameplay. Blizzard hasn’t revealed Echo’s role or capabilities yet, so we’ll have to wait and see what the super robot will bring to her Overwatch teams.

We do get a little bit of information about Echo’s background from the video, though. She was created by Dr. Mina Liao, a scientist who originally worked on creating the Omnic robots that the Overwatch team was created to fight. Liao was seemingly killed at some point in the past after she was recruited to Overwatch, but her efforts to help the world continue with Echo. Earlier this week, Blizzard teased Echo’s reveal with more background lore information focused on Dr. Liao.

Echo also popped up back during BlizzCon in the “Zero Hour” cinematic that announced Overwatch 2. In that trailer, we saw Echo blasting Omnics and flying around the battlefield at high speed. That might give some hint at how Echo will play in the game, but her appearance in the trailer is pretty quick.