Overwatch's Orisa Activates In Late March

Orisa, the robot soldier built by the world's coolest 11-year-old girl, will officially join the Overwatch roster on March 21, 2017, according to the official Overwatch Twitter feed.

Overwatch's developers call Orisa an "anchor tank," meaning a character who teammates can rally around while taking control points, pushing objectives, and causing general Overwatch-related mischief. Previously, game director Jeff Kaplan said that Orisa was designed specifically as an alternative to the shield-wielding Reinhardt.

While developing Orisa, the team at Blizzard used Zarya's gothic skin and Bastion's canon as a base, and while that was just "a combination of cobbled together parts," Kaplan says that the character was also "instantly fun." Design-wise, Orisa was heavily influenced by the game's Numbani map, and the war-mech sports the same kind of curved, high-tech trappings and a similarly earthy color scheme.

Additionally, the Blizzard crew wanted to experiment with quadruped characters. As one of Overwatch's artists says, Omnics (Overwatch's fancy name for robots) come in all shapes and sizes, and Orisa's four legs and centaur-like build provided the art team with an excellent opportunity to play with unique body types.

While Orisa doesn't make her official debut until next week, the character has been available for the past few days on Overwatch's public test realm, where Blizzard can test and tweak changes before pushing them out to the base game. While players at Eurogamer weren't blown away by Orisa's abilities or personality, others were more pleased, although most people who've spent time with Orisa say that she feels more like a combination of existing characters and less like something brand-new.

Still, if there's a more creative group out there than Overwatch fans, we have yet to see it—from zines full of cheesecake art to inventive ways to cheat, the Overwatch community is bursting with both ideas and enthusiasm, and if anyone can find ways to make Orisa interesting, it's them.