Overwatch First Look

During the opening ceremonies of BlizzCon, the stream cut to the Overwatch Stage, where Jeff Kaplan was on hand to show off a new cinematic trailer focusing on everyone’s favorite StarCraft II character turned Overwatch Hero, McCree.

This cinematic is cool for a whole lot of reasons. First off, it shows how the starting location for Route 66 got all messed up. Big explosion, a train crash and all. It is super cool to see an old-school original map in super cinematic high resolution too. There are a ton of cool details that you don’t get in the game. Mostly due to the optimization and how multiplayer games are rendered when played. Reunion also shows off a bunch of potential new characters for the lore, including Echo, Ashe and everyone’s favorite new omnic, B.O.B.

Here is a quick look at Ashe. Her skins, emotes, highlight intros and her skills and abilities in a No Limits match on the PTR.

Ashe is pretty far along as far as PTR heroes go, leading many players to believe she will be released sooner than anticipated. When most characters are first shown and then added to the PTR they typically only include their default skin in the Hero Gallery. Ashe instead has nearly everything already developed and on the PTR, with the exception of her Overwatch League skins.

Once you are dropped into a match with Ashe, you slowly start to find out she is a menace in the right hands. Her skill ceiling is high. Not the highest, but it will keep her as a rare pick that fits a niche role in the meta that will be absolutely deadly in the right hands. The biggest surprise with Ashe comes in the form of her ultimate ability, summoning B.O.B.

B.O.B. will charge forward and do a lift move, knocking any unfortunate heroes he hits into the air. After that he will linger for a bit, unloading fire from his arm cannons with the accuracy of a turret, but what makes him interesting is that he is fully interactable by other hero abilities. Brigette can stun him with a shield bash, Zenyatta can heal him with an Orb of Harmony, Ana can Nanoboost him with her ultimate. B.O.B. is pretty much a 7th character thrown onto your team for a short time. He can even capture points and move payloads!

As with any new hero once Ashe gets put on live servers for PC, Playstation 4 and Xbox One, expect a round of nerfs as Blizzard starts looking at hard data on the hero. I could see them reducing B.O.B.’s health from 600 to 500 and reducing the radius of Ashe’s dynamite explosion. Honestly, who knows what kind of changes will be coming down the pipeline for Ashe.

Ashe is playable on the PC version of Overwatch right now via the PTR. She should be joining the live servers within the next couple weeks.