Just days after pouring cold water on the Doomfist hype, Overwatch might be teasing its next new hero. A post on the game's official blog introduces a new character to the game's backstory: 11-year-old inventor Efi Oladele. But this is the same team that drip-fed the identity of Sombra, Overwatch's latest hero, over more than half a year, so it may not be as simple as it seems.
The in-fiction interview with Efi establishes her as a Numbanian child prodigy in the fields of both robotics and artificial intelligence. Open and shut, right? She must be the new hero, probably with a bunch of abilities where she summons robots to disrupt the enemy team. But I doubt that Blizzard would be cool with letting players shoot an 11-year-old on the other team dead (it's already weird enough to see cheerful characters like Tracer fall limp with an arrow through the head).
The answers could still be in the interview. Near the end, Efi says she already has an idea for what she's going to do with a hefty grant she was recently awarded but "it's a secret for now". A few paragraphs earlier, Efi says her dream "is to build something that can keep us safe, like the new OR15s". I can't find any other reference to OR15s in Overwatch's lore, but judging by her field of expertise and established Overwatch naming schemes (Bastion's unit number is E54) it sure sounds like she's talking about building a robot. As everybody knows, it's 100-percent ok to shoot robots, so I think her new invention might be the actual character we'll soon see pushing the payload.
Though there is probably a reason that Blizzard started out by introducing Efi. Maybe she'll control her robot safely from afar like a drone pilot? That would give it room for some more personality without encroaching on Bastion and Zenyatta's self-aware omnic territory. Though it might be a little too close to D.Va's mech pilot angle. We'll have to wait and see what Blizzard decides to show us (or accidentally leaks) next, but I'm already pretty excited.
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