Early yesterday morning, an innocuous post on the Overwatch subreddit provoked a frenzy to unearth secrets about the supposed Overwatch stealth hero Sombra, who has been teased over the last few months.
From Reddit
“So this is complete tinfoil and I’m prepared for this post to go under the rug,” wrote redditor Colonelcactus before posting a clue he found: At the end of a developer update video for Ana, the Overwatch hero released yesterday on PC, the screen goes black. Then, there’s a beep and some apparent static.
“I watched a few other updates and they don’t do this for any others,” Colonelcactus added.
Redditors immediately sprung into action. Gathering in a #sombra Internet Relay Chat channel, fans took apart the last few frames of the Ana update video. They found that, if they cut out the vertical barcodes, ran them through a barcode reader, converted the resulting hexadecimel numbers into binary and represented the binary as black and white pixels, the clue could be converted into a QR code.
The QR code translates into a Spanish voice line: “¿Estuvo eso facilito? Ahora que tengo su atención, déjenme se las pongo más difícil.”
“Was that easy? Now that I have your attention, let’s make things more difficult.”
The investigation took a mere four hours. Total, the Sombra tease was hidden under seven steps — fitting for an alleged stealth hero whose name translates to “shadow”.
While the level of concealment seems comically extreme, Overwatch‘s game director Jeff Kaplan told Kotaku reporter Nathan Grayson that Blizzard had “been teasing Sombra for a long time…”. Players have noticed hints on the Dorado map, including a “Quien es Sombra?” (“Who is Sombra?”) newspaper article, as well as Reaper’s voice line, “Where’s Sombra when you need her?”.
When I reached out to Blizzard for comment, a representative confirmed that “She’s continuing to leave clues for us.”
“Sombra will let people know when she wants more to be known about her. She’s very good at that sort of thing,” Kaplan told Grayson.
Comments
4 responses to “Overwatch Fans Keep Finding Clues About A New Unreleased Character”
Sombra I believe is going to be the Spanish hacker who’s on the right in this pic: http://www.pcgamesn.com/sites/default/files/original%20overwatch%20crew.jpg
Liao is most likely going to be the guy on the left.
Are there really people that don’t believe Ana is Sombra?
Blizzard have straight up said that Ana is not Sombra – and even if they hadn’t, why would they still be posting teasers about a hero they have already revealed?
The article fails to mention that there was hidden code in Ana’s origin story video that translated to a phrase in Spanish that came out in English as “whoever has the information, has the power” (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4sj39m/piecing_together_sombra_after_the_ana_amari_reveal/)
And that people have datamined the PTR and found voicelines from multiple heroes implying a stealth character (source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Overwatch/comments/4sz7o8/i_extracted_some_of_the_audio_files_from_the/), which would likely be referring to Sombra, as stealth seems to be inline with her character (what little we know of it).
I don’t know when to expect to see Sombra – Blizzard are also working on a new map, apparently at the art pass stages now, so I don’t know if we’ll see her before, with or after that map has come out. But I’m excited to see her, a stealthy hacker type sounds like it could be a lot of fun to me.
Given they like pairing characters who’ve had conflict in the past, I’m wondering whether we might see one of the high-ups of the Los Muertos. If their leader was a former Talon operative, it’d give some context as to why Soldier 76 was scrapping with them.
If they did go that way, it’d make for a cool character visually, with the phosphorescent body paint and whatnot.