Blizzard’s popular team-based multiplayer shooter game, Overwatch, made a huge splash in the gaming community when it was launched back in May of this year. However, according to Polygon fans are starting to get frustrated with yet another anticlimactic message from Blizzard’s ARG involving Sombra, the unreleased Overwatch hero. For months now, Blizzard has led many to believe that the long-running alternate reality game for Overwatch – involving cryptic hints and messages in developer updates – would officially reveal Sombra, yet the months of teasing this character proved futile when the website many had been following for weeks, updated and showed no unveiling.
Fans of the game followed, for weeks, a simple website that they believed would update (over a glacially slow pace) and once the counter on the site reached 100 percent, Sombra would be revealed. However, last night the website countdown ended and the clue only unveiled yet another clue, frustrating the Overwatch community. The amomentincrime.com website only displayed some clue in Spanish:
…Estableciendo conexión…
…Protocolo Sombra v1.95 iniciado…
…Transmisión finalizada – finalizando carga…
…Carga finalizada. Unidad Bastion E-54 comprometida…
…Terminando conexión…
Which roughly translates as following:
… Connecting …
… Protocol v1.95 Sombra started …
… Transmission finalized – load ending …
… Load complete. Bastion Unit E-54 compromised …
… Connection terminated …
Sombra, a computer expert with expert hacking abilities, is thought to be hacking into an unidentified network throughout the past eight weeks, and the last line in the clue, which references Bastion Unit E-54, is the last remaining Bastion unit that Sombra hacked into. The other piece of information that was revealed was in today’s new update by Blizzard. Players quickly dug into new update for Overwatch and saw an HTML code with this piece of information: “v1.4.0.2.324”. Some believe that this is in reference to a future game build, citing that Overwatch is currently on v1.4.0.2.32374.
Some gamers have noted that there appears to be some glitches with several cosmetic items that are available for heroes in Overwatch’s Hero Gallery, indicating that if Sombra does appear sometime soon, Blizzard will already have skins, emotes, sprays and voice lines ready to go for her arrival. Regardless though, the constant teasing of the character and the painfully long clues are beginning to annoy Overwatch players. One Reddit user even posted a long rant titled “Blizzard please do not treat any heroes in the future like you have with Sombra.” And many feel the same sentiments this Reddit user is expressing. When Blizzard released their first post-launch character, Ana, they didn’t prolong the process as they have done with Sombra; they dropped a few hints here and there on Twitter one week and then the following week she was playable.
Perhaps fans will have to be a bit more patient for any more news regarding Sombra. In a few weeks, Blizzard will hold its annual fan-focused convention in Anaheim, CA. Many believe that Blizzard will reveal something about Sombra during BlizzCon on November 4th and 5th. Hopefully Blizzard will give its Overwatch fans what they’ve been waiting and turn some of the recent bitterness into excitement.