An Athena Overwatch in-game appearance has been requested by Blizzard fans ever since she debuted in Winston’s “Recall” short on YouTube. While Athena serves as the game’s announcer who counts down at the beginning of every round, she has no physical presence in the game—and how would she, given that she’s a computer?
Well, the most recent Athena Overwatch theory is that she is actually Echo, the character shown in the McCree short, “Reunion,” that debuted at BlizzCon 2018. This short also introduced the new Overwatch hero Ashe, as well as her partner and ultimate ability B.O.B.
Athena Overwatch – Is Echo Athena in Overwatch?
While it seems plausible that Overwatch’s Athena could have a physical body, like EDI in Mass Effect, Jeff Kaplan confirmed in an interview with Eurogamer that Echo and Athena are not one and the same:
Sometimes what an artist like Arnold does is say, ‘There’s too much white space, I want to put a logo on,’ so he just put the Athena logo on the model. And the community embraced that model as being Athena. Athena is actually Winston’s AI, which is a separate thing—this character is separate from being Athena. The players also know Athena as the narrator of the competitive matches as well. But this is Echo, who is somebody completely different.
However, it has been confirmed that Echo at least is due to be released as an Overwatch hero in the future. Kaplan said:
She is a future hero. She is somebody who we’ve been excited about for many, many years, and she was part of the original Overwatch characters Arnold concepted, so she’s been in our thoughts for a long time.
So, while Echo isn’t Athena, Echo is going to be released as a hero at some point in the future. Also, just because Echo isn’t Athena doesn’t mean that Athena won’t be getting an in-game appearance as a hero. According to Kaplan, Blizzard is working on six heroes right now, so there is a chance that a version of Athena could be one of them.
