Overwatch's 32nd playable hero is Echo, a flying artificially intelligent robot with the ability to mimic other heroes and borrow their abilities. Echo has popped up in Overwatch's fiction a few times over the last two years, and it was with her appearance in the McCree- and Ashe-focused story video "Reunion" that the team really started developing the character for inclusion to the game. But Echo's origins stretch back much further than that cinematic from 2018.
"Typically, heroes in our game can come from a bunch of different angles," Overwatch lead designer Geoff Goodman explained to GameSpot. "So often they come from design by prototype--like, we really need a sniper or something, we should try to get a sniper there, and build a character around the gameplay. In other common cases, we'll have somebody whose story just gets created for background, or an artist has a cool idea, and they just draw something. We don't have a gameplay part yet. So we have all these cool characters hanging out. And in Echo's case, it was more that we had the art for her for a long time ago. Technically, the real origins of her as a character goes back to Titan, which was our earlier projects that got canceled before Overwatch 1."
Titan was an MMO project Blizzard was developing in the years following the release of World of Warcraft, but the project was eventually scrapped. Much of what was created for Titan eventually was repurposed into Overwatch, and that included a number of characters. Concept art for Echo was among the things originally made for Titan, and Goodman said it was one character the development team particularly liked, which helped Echo to be eventually added to the new game.
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