Soldier 76 Profile and Videos Now Available

by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

Well, looks like the tease campaign is actually over: Soldier 76 now has an official profile page on the Overwatch site, complete with ability previews, character bio, and a pair of videos that showcase both his addition to the cast and an animatic sequence that provides his origin story.

Check out the videos below and some additional analysis after that.

Some sharp-eyed folks on Reddit also picked up on a few visual clues during the origin video: namely that a character appears who may be related to Pharah, as well as someone who may be Reaper before he goes all shadow-killy-time. No way to tell if this is true without more story materials, but it’s interesting to see Blizzard plant the seeds.

Aside from all the story implications of 76’s origin video, this entire campaign has started to demonstrate how Blizzard plans to deliver on the transmedia story of Overwatch; doing a Lords of War-animation piece to go into character origins is a great way to set the mood, while also being small enough to be digestible online. The intro video and ability previews are both stuff we can expect just as a matter of course, but Blizzard’s decision to heat up the ANVIL (the internal animation division that built the Warcraft series recent webseries efforts) means that they may be getting ready to double down on Overwatch’s story potential.

Now, from a gameplay standpoint? 76 looks like he’s going to be exceptionally dangerous as Offense.

• Between how tight the Pulse Rifle’s accuracy appears to be and how big of a clip it’s got, he’s going to be devastating anywhere from medium to short range.
• The video didn’t highlight the splash damage that Helix Rockets would do, but it seems logical that they’ll be more dangerous the more targets they hit at once, meaning he’s likely a good Mercy-killer if she’s hugging her heal target too closely.
• His Sprint means he can get into the fight from long range very quickly.
• The Biotic Field will be a boon that he can drop for anyone who’s staying stationary for any length of time, but mainly it looks like something that’s there to keep 76 stationary for a second or two. The fact that it appears to heal something like 120 health over a short time means that it should basically top off anyone who’s able to take a second or two to stand in it safely.
• Tactical Visor strikes me some something that’s just as broken right now as McCree’s Deadeye. Might not live through the beta, but sweet sisters of mercy is it amazing to look at right now.

Pair 76 with Zarya’s shield and he’ll be really hard to kill, while he will just mow through enemy opposition. If he drops his Biotic Field on Bastion while he’s in Sentry mode with a depleted shield, Bastion will be very hard to kill. Drop Biotic in the middle of Winston’s Shield Projector and you’ve got an immortal party spot on top of the payload.

It feels likely that 76 won’t pair well with anyone who moves faster than he does. Reinhardt doesn’t seem like a good option because his Charge would outpace Sprint. At the other end of the spectrum, Mercy’s likely to get herself killed trying to stick to 76. Tracer probably works out fine because Tracer gets to cheat death with her Recall, but aside from occasionally catching some benefit from Biotic Field, she’ll probably be nowhere near 76 most of the time.

To a great extent, the thing that’ll be most dangerous to 76 is going to be the enemy team’s 76. He’s just such an escalation from all of the other Offense heroes that it’ll be hard to see if people actually pass over him to use someone else.