by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

UPDATE: It appears the tweet and teaser image have been deleted from the official Twitter feed. However, thanks to Reddit, the image has been preserved: 

UPDATE 6/29: The image has been posted again on the official Twitter feed:

https://twitter.com/PlayOverwatch/status/615565469190258688/photo/1

Original coverage follows: 

The @PlayOverwatch feed just pushed this out a few minutes ago:

https://twitter.com/PlayOverwatch/status/611941590064459776

So what could it mean?

Well, first off, this is likely the start of a tease campaign, similar to what we saw before PAX East earlier this year. Recall that during that campaign, we were introduced to McCree, Zarya, and the Watchpoint: Gibraltar map.

Assuming that this is something similar, we can likely expect more teases as we lead up to Gamescom, which is the only upcoming event that Blizzard typically involves themselves in. That doesn’t start until August 5th, so that’s over six weeks of time for images and speculation to run rampant.

With all that said, let’s hop on the hype train:

First off, one of the first characters that immediately leaps to mind when seeing this silhouette is the “cyborg ninja” character we’ve seen in the cinematic trailer and on some of the major key art images. However, there are some key differences:

• Where our cyborg ninja’s glowing visor has something of a triangular shape to it that comes to a point in the middle of his face, our mystery assailant here has a smooth curve. However, one thing is for certain: this hero is wearing a mask, since the headline in the image describes a “masked assailant.”
• While the stance and silhouette are positioned to potentially hide if our guy is holding a sword, it could just as easily be a handgun or submachine gun that’s being held close to the chest. Recall that aside from Widowmaker’s rifle mode for her sniper rifle, no hero uses a weapon of that type that we’ve seen so far.

Aside from the hero, there’s also question about the map itself. Both the CC footage and the wall immediately behind our new hero refer to a “mainframe.” If I’m recalling right, there’s no location in any of the existing maps that has this kind of layout or area in it, hinting at a new map.

What’s more, the news feed at the bottom mentions a “Watchpoint in Colorado” which doesn’t describe any of the other existing maps. Is it possible we could be getting TWO maps revealed rather than just one?

Finally, the last entry in the feed refers to an “Overwatch Expert Olympia Shaw.” This could either be referring to another new hero, or merely a supporting character who’ll appear in all of the worldbuilding and story materials that will exist outside of the Overwatch game itself.

So right now there’s not much to go on, but there’s certain to be more information over the coming weeks leading up to Gamescom, and we’ll keep you up to speed.