After a months long ARG that has driven players and game sleuths mad with its endless puzzles, Blizzard have finally confirmed what we knew all along: that sneaky hacker Sombra will join the game in its next major update.
Sombra was revealed during the BlizzCon opening ceremony with a new Animated Short that sees her, Reaper and Widowmaker making an assassination attempt on the head of Volskaya Industries. When Widowmaker and Reaper are thwarted, Sombra takes the initiative and uses her stealth/offensive skillset to find a moment alone with their mark.
The move toward a stealth character is an interesting one because it adds something entirely new to the game’s meta — cloaking. This puts her in fairly close proximity to Team Fortress 2‘s Spy class, able to disappear for short periods to sew chaos among the ranks of the enemy team.
Where the Spy was an eternal aggravator capable of killing players with a single backstab or a headshot from his powerful revolver, it doesn’t seem that Sombra is capable of the same feats of ridiculousness.
This is not to say she isn’t potentially very powerful — she is. Her skills, as listed on the official Overwatch site include the aforementioned Thermoptic Camo, a Machine Pistol, Hack which allows her to either hack her enemies to stop them from being able to use their abilities or hack health pick ups to keep the enemy team from healing up. Sombra also has a Translocator Beacon which will allow her to toss the device to a point far away from herself and then teleport herself there. Finally, EMP, her ultimate, cuts through enemy barriers and shields and hacks any heroes caught in the blast radius.
Time will tell on what we can expect from Sombra when she enters the game, but we can already see her taking over the “Fucking *Insert Hero Name Here*” mantle established at launch (Current Hall of Famers: Pre-nerf McCree. Genji, at all times.)
Sombra will hit the Public Test Realm next week and will likely make her bow in Overwatch proper soon after.
Take a couple weeks off, Game Detectives. You’ve earned it.
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