The Overwatch team gave fans of their game a treat today as popular Twitch stream TimTheTatman and Lead Game Designer, Jeff Kaplan, partnered for a stream introducing Overwatch's newest hero - Echo. The objective of the stream was to garner interest in the new hero while also showing off her range of game-changing abilities along the way.
The Echo showcase started with Tim and Jeff messing around in the Practice Range as they explored the various abilities of Echo. One of the biggest surprises came with her being a DPS hero when many were predicting that she would be a support character. Being a DPS hero, though, Echo comes with a variety of powerful abilities including sticky bombs, flight, focusing beam and a game-changing ult where you "copy" an enemy hero, becoming said hero where your ult-charge jumps up to over 600% for 15 seconds. Tim kept remarking on how cool the hero was and when seen in action, it's hard to argue against that notion.
After breaking down all of her abilities, Tim and Jeff took to arcade mode to test out Echo in battle. The gameplay was pretty amusing despite the pure random mess of the gamemode, but the best part was Jeff Kaplan pocketing Tim's Echo with Mercy, allowing him to show off all the abilities in a somewhat "actual" match setting. What stood out the most was Echo's ultimate and the decision making involved for deciding who to duplicate for the situation on hand. Echo looked great in action but possibly a little over-powered at the moment and only time will tell what sort of changes will take place.
Though he has played Overwatch during his streams, TimTheTatman's focus is on an assortment of other video games and this was the perfect opportunity to show off Echo to a diverse range of gamers that might not necessarily have been interested. The stream garnered more than 120K viewers, a staggering number, and watching Echo in action provided a much-needed spark to the interest in Overwatch overall. The newest hero should be available to play within the next few weeks.