Echo is a rather elegant looking robot that has joined the ranks of the Overwatch roster, where teams fight each other infinitely over pushing a cart back and forth across maps. Her abilities are frankly fascinating in a manner that other post-release heroes have been missing; she copies other characters currently in play, allowing her to use their abilities and charge ultimates surprisingly quickly. It brings about a new level of depth that, while unfortunately limited to that one singular character, has done a healthy amount of shaking everything up in the twenty-four hours that she’s been in play.
Officially, from Jeff Kaplan, Echo will be the final hero released for Overwatch, as all other heroes are ear-marked for release with Overwatch 2.
This hasn’t gone over entirely too well, as one might expect. It’s common knowledge at this point that Overwatch had its development paused so everyone could work on Overwatch 2, roughly a year after the first Overwatch released. That self-ascribed pause led to a lot of frustration and heartache for players of Overwatch and fans of the Overwatch League; it led to GOATs being around for over a year, bizarrely designed characters being released that continued to cement the GOATs meta, and general stagnation of the title as a whole.
Echo is officially the last new hero in Overwatch
In a previous interview, Jeff Kaplan indirectly said that Overwatch Echo was the last hero. And today Jeff Kaplan officially revealed that Echo is really the last new hero in, and several heroes will be released in Overwatch 2. pic.twitter.com/f8ik49Jow8
— Naeri X 나에리 (@OverwatchNaeri) April 14, 2020
Arguably not a good thing, considering that the entirety of the game is multiplayer focused; without active developers, the community gets burnt out banging their heads against the same walls ad nauseam until a developer opts to take measures.
This begs the question of Overwatch 2 in terms of whether or not fans are willing to opt into the newest title for Blizzard to abandon development a year into it to begin working on Overwatch 3.
Blizzard doesn’t have the greatest track record as of late, and Jeff Kaplan himself reported that he had to fight with Blizzard to allow everyone’s previous unlocks to roll into Overwatch 2 from the original title. This was heralded as a success.
With a wide measure of games that now competently and devotedly continue development on their own competitive team-shooters, Blizzard definitely have their work cut out for them when it comes to being able to produce waves with Overwatch 2, which does not yet have a release date. It will likely be releasing after Valorant has been on the market and fought for some elbow room among team-based competitive shooters, and I’m not entirely sure if Blizzard has the chops to contend with other competitive games that are now on the market with another helping of Crowd Control – The Game.
