Overwatch’s latest update points to one thing: Doomfist

Big things are happening in the world of Overwatch. A new update that rolled out today on the game’s public test region — aka the PTR, where players can try out upcoming changes to the game — indicates one thing: Something big is happening with Doomfist.

Earlier today, Blizzard tweeted out a new teaser image on the official Overwatch Twitter accounts. The image showed a location that Overwatch players are intimately familiar with, the opening spawn area on the Numbani map, only now the airport terminal appears to have been severely damaged.

A group of OR15 defense machines appear to have been destroyed by an “unidentified assailant,” according to the tweet. Notably, one of those OR15s appears to have been punched right into a wall.

That tease is a follow-up to another teaser that dropped earlier this week, when Blizzard introduced Overwatch players to Efi Oladele. In an interview with fictional outlet Atlas News, Efi was revealed to be an 11-year-old robotics and artificial intelligence prodigy from Numbani. Apparently she plays a big role in Overwatch’s growing roster of heroes.

Many Overwatch players have been speculating — and many have been hoping — that the next playable character coming to the game was Doomfist, an evil force that has loomed large since Blizzard first revealed the game in 2014. (In Overwatch lore, the mantle of Doomfist has been assumed by multiple characters, each of whom carried a powerful oversized gauntlet. In the original Overwatch cinematic teaser, Reaper and Widowmaker are trying to steal the Doomfist gauntlet, only to be thwarted by Tracer and Winston.)

That Doomfist gauntlet has been kept safe within a payload vehicle on the Numbani map in the game, but today that map changed in two very important ways.

First, the destruction of the airport terminal in Numbani seen in this morning’s tweet is now reflected in-game.

LikChan on Twitter

Second, and perhaps more telling, is that the Doomfist gauntlet appears to have been stolen from its enclosure on the payload vehicle.

via Imgur

What does this all mean? It’s likely that someone or something now has their hands on the Doomfist gauntlet and that Overwatch players will soon have a new threat to contend with. Players have speculated that they’ll come face-to-face with Doomfist in a new PvE mode, and that Efi will create something to ward off the Doomfist threat, thus ushering in Overwatch’s 24th playable hero.

Game director Jeff Kaplan told us earlier this week that “things will unroll very quickly” for Overwatch’s next hero and that “over the course of next week people are going to learn some of the cool stuff that Efi has built.”