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After a whole bunch of speculation from the Overwatch community, Blizzard has finally revealed the identity of its hero shooter’s next character. It’s Echo, a robotic character we saw back during BlizzCon 2019‘s Overwatch 2 announcement.

Blizzard dropped an origin story video to give players a sense of who Echo is, which you can watch below. According to Blizzard’s tweet introducing the Echo video, she’s “an evolutionary robot programmed with a rapidly adapting artificial intelligence.” It didn’t say when Echo will be available in the game, however.

We also don’t know yet what “rapidly adapting artificial intelligence” means in terms of gameplay. Blizzard hasn’t revealed Echo’s role or capabilities yet, so we’ll have to wait and see what the super robot will bring to her Overwatch teams.

We do get a little bit of information about Echo’s background from the video, though. She was created by Dr. Mina Liao, a scientist who originally worked on creating the Omnic robots that the Overwatch team was created to fight. Liao was seemingly killed at some point in the past after she was recruited to Overwatch, but her efforts to help the world continue with Echo. Earlier this week, Blizzard teased Echo’s reveal with more background lore information focused on Dr. Liao.

Echo also popped up back during BlizzCon in the “Zero Hour” cinematic that announced Overwatch 2. In that trailer, we saw Echo blasting Omnics and flying around the battlefield at high speed. That might give some hint at how Echo will play in the game, but her appearance in the trailer is pretty quick.

Overwatch’s 32nd hero has been revealed, an omnic named Echo.

Blizzard had teased Overwatch’s next hero reveal in recent days, but made things official this morning with the drop of Echo’s story trailer, which you can watch below.

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While not much else is known yet about Echo, the official trailer description describes them by saying “an evolutionary robot programmed with a rapidly adapting artificial intelligence, Echo represents the cutting edge of technology.” The story trailer shows Echo as a robot made by a member of Overwatch to “help the world.” One shot also shows a young Soldier 76 inviting its creator to Overwatch despite her having a hand in creating Omnics in the first place.

But this isn’t even close to the first time we’ve seen Echo, with the Overwatch community speculating about Echo’s arrival for years now – though the assumption was generally that they would be named Athena. Echo appeared in an Overwatch animated short called Reunion way back in 2018, and has technically been “in the game” the whole time as the payload on Route 66. A similar looking robot can even be seen in an extremely early piece of concept part.

Details on Echo’s abilities aren’t available yet, nor when they might be added (though the official YouTube channel says “Coming Soon”), but we’ll be sure to update this post when we know either.

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Tom Marks is IGN’s Deputy Reviews Editor and resident pie maker. You can follow him on Twitter.

 

If you’ve been sitting on the fence waiting for Apple to finally update the iPad Pro, your wait is finally over.

This morning the Cupertino company introduced its 2020 refresh of both the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro. They don’t feature a new design or the iPhone 11 Pro’s Super Retina Display, but they have been tuned up with an A12Z Bionic chip that promises to be faster than most Windows-based laptops.

Apple’s new tablet is also the first iPad to receive an Ultra-Wide camera—putting it on par with the iPhone 11—and studio-quality mics. Lastly, the new iPad Pro models feature a LiDAR Scanner for depth sensing and AR-powered apps.

What’s far more impressive is the new iPad keyboard Apple has rolled out. Firstly, it features a trackpad for the first time, allowing you to use your tablet like a genuine macOS device. This new Magic Keyboard also allows you to elevate your iPad Pro at a more comfortable typing and working angle.

The new 11-inch iPad Pro starts at $799 and the 12.9-inch iPad Pro runs for $999. Both base models come with 128GB of storage space. Of course, you have the option of picking the larger 256GB, 512GB, and 1TB capacities as well as adding 4G LTE cellular connectivity.

Of course, the iPad Pro doesn’t come with an included keyboard, so you’ll have to pony up $129 for the Smart Folio Keyboard. And if you want Apple’s new Magic Keyboard and its attached trackpad, that’ll be $299 for the 11-inch model, or $349 for the 12.9-inch one (yes, it really costs almost half as much as an 11-inch iPad Pro).

The MacBook Air is affordable again

Apple also announced a refreshed MacBook Air as its second laptop to receive the overhauled scissor switch-based Magic Keyboard.

Now that the new MacBook Air has ditched that Apple’s faulty butterfly mechanism, it should be a far more reliable typing companion. Plus, you get the same 1mm of keyboard travel as the 16-inch MacBook Pro.

The MacBook Air also features Intel’s latest 10nm Ice Lake Y-series processors with Intel Iris Plus Graphics, which promise to deliver 80% improved graphics performance.

Best of all Apple has dropped the price of the MacBook Air to $999—$100 less than the device’s initial $1,099 starting price—while also doubling the standard storage capacity to 256GB.

Speaking of doubling storage, the standard $799 configuration of the Mac Mini now comes with 256GB of storage as well.

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Kevin Lee is IGN’s Hardware and Roundups Editor. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam

PlayStation 5’s full specs list has been revealed.

A full spec list for the PlayStation 5 has been revealed first at Digital Foundry.

 

• CPU: 8x Zen 2 Cores at 3.5GHz (variable frequency)
• GPU: 10.28 TFLOPs, 36 CUs at 2.23GHz (variable frequency)
• GPU Architecture: Custom RDNA 2
• Memory/Interface: 16GB GDDR6/256-bit
• Memory Bandwidth: 448GB/s
• Internal Storage: Custom 825GB SSD
• IO Throughput: 5.5GB/s (Raw), Typical 8-9GB/s (Compressed)
• Expandable Storage: NVMe SSD Slot
• External Storage: USB HDD Support
• Optical Drive: 4K UHD Blu-ray Drive

 

Make sure to check out every detail we’ve learned in today’s PS5 showcase. You can also check out the full Xbox Series X specs here.

Developing…

Valve co-founder Gabe Newell says his company’s digital card game, Artifact, was a “giant disappointment” – but points to the educational value of failure, and its positive effect on what’s come next.

Speaking to Ryan McCaffrey for IGN First, Newell explained that he prefers not to dwell too much on the company’s greatest successes, instead focusing on what it’s gotten wrong, and how to improve on that:

“We’re always concerned about what we need to do next, and how we’re evolving, and what are the new challenges”, he explains. “We do postmortems and analysis, but it’s always perspective. Like, ‘OK, so how does that change stuff?’ I’ll spend time thinking about Artifact, and why Artifact ended up being a disappointment, and that’s actually way more useful than thinking about the impact we had on the industry. One is likely to help us make better decisions in the future, and the other is less useful.”

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Newell expands on that point later in the interview, while explaining the thinking behind the 16-year gap between Half-Life 2 and the upcoming Half-Life: Alyx. Newell makes clear that he sees Half-Life games as ways to “solve interesting problems” in game design, and that the company didn’t perceive those kinds of problems during that time. Instead, it chose to make new products, some of which were huge hits, and others that didn’t succeed.

“We can be right and we can be wrong – we make mistakes,” Newell continues. “We did Steam Machines, Artifact was a giant disappointment, we screwed things up. For us, [releasing Half-Life: Alyx] is actually a really powerful moment for us, because this is as good as we get. We want to find out, are we on the right track? We want people to come back and say, ‘Oh my god, the magic still is there – the guys at Valve can take this kind of experience and build something that opens our eyes as designers, that thrills us as players, that reviewers look at and say ‘no, this is legit” And if it’s not then that’s also going to be super powerful and super useful for us.”

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Despite reviewing well, Artifact was heavily criticised for its approach to monetisation, and player counts dropped fast. Eventually, members of its development team were laid off and Valve admitted there were ‘deep-rooted issues’ with the game.

Of course, Valve isn’t aiming for failure, but Newell makes clear that the company doesn’t bury its head in the sand when it happens: “How everybody reacts to it is going to tell us what the next generation of changes and improvements we’re going to make. Unfortunately, failure is more educational than success – I’m going for a little ‘not-education’ this time around.”

Newell doesn’t dig into what exactly the company learned from Artifact’s failure, but its return to an immersive, single-player game with Half-Life: Alyx is certainly a pivot from the game-as-service model Valve’s favoured in recent years. We’re running an IGN First on Half-Life: Alyx all month, and can tell you about the first 4 hours, how Zelda inspired its new gravity gloves, and answer your burning questions.

Of course, we also have the full half-hour interview with Gabe Newell and Half-Life: Alyx developer Robin Walker, where discussion also turns to how The Matrix is a lot closer than we realise.

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News, and he is also a giant disappointment. Learn from him on Twitter.

While his studio makes Half-Life: Alyx, Valve co-founder Gabe Newell has been working on something a little more future-forward – brain-computer interface research – and says “we’re way closer to The Matrix than people realise.”

In an interview with Ryan McCaffrey for IGN First, Newell was asked what a typical day looks like for one of the most influential men in gaming. Newell’s answer centred on the fact that he prefers to avoid having a ‘typical day’, but said that, “the area I’m spending a lot of time on has been growing out of a bunch of research that occurred a while ago on brain-computer interfaces, and I think that’s kind of long lead stuff. So that’s the kind of background thread that I get pulled back into when other things aren’t demanding my attention.”

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Later in the interview, Newell returned to the idea as it pertained to the opportunities that Valve has in front of it to change the medium of gaming, as it’s trying to do with Half-Life: Alyx and VR – and he led with a bold statement:

“We’re way closer to The Matrix than people realise. It’s not going to be The Matrix – The Matrix is a movie and it misses all the interesting technical subtleties and just how weird the post-brain computer interface world is going to be – but it’s going to have a huge impact in the kinds of experiences that we can create for people.”

Brain-computer interface tech – the practice of connecting the human brain to a device to allow for control of one over the other – has come a long way in recent years, with researchers now able to facilitate brain-based control over tablets. Newell didn’t make it clear exactly what his work centred on, but it’s clearly in the formative stages:

“I think it’s one of those things where we’re going to learn a lot as we progress – there’ll be some things that turn out to be ridiculously hard, and other things that’ll turn out to be ridiculously easy. Like, I think connecting to people’s motor cortex and visual cortex is going to be way easier than people expected. […] Reading and writing to somebody’s motor cortex is much more of a tractable problem than making people feel cold, and you never would have guessed that. I never would have guessed that until going into it. But it turns out that your brain has really good interfaces for some things, and really badly-designed, kludgy interfaces for doing other things.”

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One thing Newell does make clear is that this isn’t aimless research – he very much sees brain-computer interface technology as a next step for gaming, not to mention other forms of entertainment:

“I think that it’s an extinction-level event for every entertainment form that’s not thinking about this. If you’re in the entertainment business and you’re not thinking about this, you’re going to be thinking about it a lot more in the future.”

As of right now, however, Newell and his team are thinking about how to change the medium in a different way with Half-Life: Alyx – arguably VR gaming’s first blockbuster project. We’re running an IGN First on the game all month, and can tell you about the first 4 hours, how Zelda inspired its new gravity gloves, and answer your burning questions.

Of course, we also have the full half-hour interview with Gabe Newell and Half-Life: Alyx developer Robin Walker, where they talk about far more than just Matrix tech, from how Artifact is a disappointment, but a learning experience, to why a new Half-Life took so long.

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Joe Skrebels is IGN’s Executive Editor of News, and he’s ready for one of those Zion parties. Follow him on Twitter.

Gabe Newell took his Microsoft earnings (he helped develop Windows in the early days of the company) and co-founded Valve Software in 1996. Since then, he’s been there every step of the way as the studio has literally helped shaped the industry – from creating highly influential, Hall of Fame-worthy games like Half-Life 1 and 2, Portal 1 and 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 to building the backbone of PC gaming with Steam.

While visiting Valve for our March IGN First coverage of Half-Life: Alyx, the studio’s first return to the Half-Life universe in over a dozen years, I had the rare chance to sit down with Newell, who doesn’t do a lot of interviews, in his 17th-floor Kirkland, Washington office. In the half-hour conversation you can watch above, Newell talks about the studio’s past with Half-Life, the surprising answer to what his favorite Half-Life game is, mistakes that Valve has made, what keeps a man worth billions of dollars coming to work every day, how he spends his days, what the next decade looks like for Valve (hint: it involves a brain-AI interface), and more!

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For more on Half-Life: Alyx, check out all of our IGN First coverage thus far, including nine minutes of new gameplay, Half-Life 2 developers reacting to a Half-Life 2 speedrun, and more! And stay tuned for our full review of Half-Life: Alyx, coming soon.

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Ryan McCaffrey is IGN’s Executive Editor of Previews. Follow him on Twitter at @DMC_Ryan, catch him on Unlocked, and drop-ship him Taylor Ham sandwiches from New Jersey whenever possible.