Overwatch 2 is already getting new damage and tank heroes in the form of Sojourn and Junker Queen respectively, but hints of a new, fox-themed support hero have also continued to appear, first in the game’s Xbox Showcase trailer, and now in a mysterious line of code buried at the end of the beta.
Jump to a certain point in Overwatch 2’s official reveal, and you can briefly see a blue-tinted, ethereal fox skipping away from a band of pursuers. That arrived on June 12, with the beta following shortly after on June 28 – Sojourn and Junker Queen were both playable, but there was no further mention of anything even vaguely fox related.
That was until July 19, when the Overwatch 2 beta officially came to a close. Eagle-eyed fans spotted a mysterious message that appeared in the game’s chat, right before it went offline:
V2hhdCBkb2VzIHRoZSBmb3ggc2F5Pw==
That’s not a glitch in your browser, or me accidentally copy-pasting the backend of a YouTube link. That’s the message, sent out by Blizzard, to everyone playing Overwatch 2’s beta. So what could it mean? It starts with a V. Female foxes are called vixens. Could be that. Also, the two equals signs at the end kind of look like a tail, and foxes…have…tails?
Nope. It turns out, this is a message written in Base64, a binary-to-text encoding language used in computer programming. The equals signs are an intentional giveaway – used as padding to separate one encoded message from the next, they’re deliberately offered to Overwatch 2 players as a hint that what they’re looking at is written in Base64.
So, all you have to do is drop V2hhdCBkb2VzIHRoZSBmb3ggc2F5Pw== into a translation tool, and voila, you get the real message:
“What does the fox say?”
Yep. That maddening viral video from 2013.
Coupled with what we saw in the release date trailer, this seems like a clear hint at Overwatch 2’s next support hero. It’s a neat easter egg – I like when developers make you work for the full info, and prompt a little online sleuthing – and it seems like basically a confirmation that someone foxy is on their way to the FPS.
We’ll likely get some more information beforehand, but we’ll know for certain when Overwatch 2 launches on October 4.