https://twitter.com/Caldoran/status/1240851173059387393?s=20

Overwatch recently released a new origin story for their upcoming character, Echo, an omnic who helps Overwatch in lieu of her creator, Dr Mina Liao. Echo is the latest playable character in Overwatch, and thus far, she’s looking pretty devastating. She has the power to mimic skills of opposing heroes, and a slew of abilities which makes her seem pretty overpowered (OP). Based on gameplay footage I’ve seen anyway.

But another surprising fact about the sentient robot has emerged: the fact that she’s/it’s Singaporean. Now pray tell, how did we find this out?

Community lead for Team Singapore, Caldoran, released some gameplay footage of Echo speaking in Singlish. Singlish is the informal language of Singapore, which I’m accustomed to considering I lived there for a few years.

It’s English with Singaporean slang in it, and I’d argue that she could very well be Malaysian. What’s so different about our brothers and sisters from Singapore anyway? The gameplay footage featured a clip of Caldoran playing Echo in the Overwatch Public Test Realm (PTR) servers, and Echo saying “Shiok!”. “Shiok” if you didn’t know, is a term to describe something that brings happiness, or pleasure.

Caldoran did also reach out to the development team at Blizzard and lead writer Michael Chu to confirm it. Chu later replied to the tweet saying:

Liao was, confirm plus chop.

— Michael Chu (@westofhouse) March 20, 2020

Essentially confirming the theory. It seems Dr. Mia Liao was indeed Singaporean, which makes Echo, an omnic clone of Liao, Singaporean as well. I mean, by logic, anyway. I guess it’s less so ground breaking news, but more so a feel good story to show that people from Malaysia, Singapore, and others get recognition on a global scale.

In reality though, it’s just going to be a lot of me, playing Echo, pwning n00bs, and after subsequently destroying them, saying “Shiok!”.