Hi, I'm Michael Chu and I'm the lead writer of Overwatch.

(upbeat music)

And I'm here to break down every character in Overwatch.

We're gonna start with the offense heroes.

Doomfist started in the game as simply a name.

We had this movie that announced Overwatch to the world

and one of the characters mentions Doomfist

and just that name was so interesting

that people have been asking us for years,

When are we gonna see Doomfist as a hero?

And we on the team were also really excited

to someday get to make him.

It was actually a few years ago,

was the first time that we even did artwork for him

and one of the amazing things about that first look is that

for years, we didn't touch it until we were actually

going to make the hero and we pulled it out again

and we found that we still loved it.

There are a number of Doomfists in the history

of the Overwatch universe, so it's sort of a title

that's been carried by different characters.

The original Doomfist was a really good guy,

one of the heroes of the Omnic Crisis, but

the current Doomfist, most people would say

a little bit more of a villain.

Genji.

Genji and Hanzo originally started as one hero

but we had designed so much stuff for these two characters,

for the idea of this ninja-samurai hybrid

that we ended up splitting them into two characters.

Hanzo, in development, was called Bow Ninja

and so Genji was called Sword Ninja.

The story of Genji and Hanzo, as characters,

came from a place that you might not expect it.

I really like watching all these food documentaries

and I watch this one, Jiro Dreams of Sushi,

which has a subplot about these two brothers

and I thought a lot about the idea of this

older brother who had to inherit,

kind of, his father's restaurant

and carry on that legacy and then the younger brother,

who is free to do sort of whatever he wants,

and, so, Genji is the younger brother.

He doesn't have the baggage of Hanzo.

He doesn't have to worry about

carrying on the family legacy and, ultimately,

that creates a lot of friction between Hanzo and Genji,

where Hanzo thinks that Genji's got the good life.

He doesn't have any pressure.

Genji doesn't want any part of what his family's up to

and, ultimately, this explodes and battle between

Hanzo and Genji, leaving Genji

kind of the way you see him now,

which is that he was almost killed and he had to

get all this cybernetic enhancement done by Overwatch

that made him into the hero that you sort of know today.

Genji is voiced by Gaku Space.

He has lots of lines both in English and Japanese

and one of the great things having the help from Gaku

is that he's sort of able to tell me,

That doesn't really work in Japanese,

let me help you out there, because I'm

not a fluent Japanese speaker.

McCree.

When we were naming him, we were trying to come up

with the perfect cowboy name

and we had these two lists of names,

like, first names and last names

and we went through everything.

Nothing was feeling quite right

and someone suggested, Hey,

what about the name Jesse McCree?

Jesse is a designer at Blizzard and so

we heard that name and we're like, Okay,

and we kind of stack ranked Jesse McCree against

every other name we'd come up with

and, at the end of it, we still thought

Jesse McCree was the best cowboy name,

so we ended up going with it.

Jesse had to sign over his name to us and so

now he will forever be linked

to our favorite cowboy character.

McCree is voiced by the incredibly talented Matthew Mercer.

Funny story about casting Mercer as McCree is that

he originally saw the game

when it was announced at BlizzCon.

He said he really wanted to be a part of the game.

At that point, we hadn't actually

started working on McCree yet,

but we had this poster that had

all the original heroes lined up

and because we like doing things like this,

we snuck in a couple heroes on the side

and one of this was this cowboy and

Matt told me once, he said he looked at that art

and he said, You know, that might be a character

I could do, and that's how it ended up.

Pharah's story is really interesting

because her whole life she wanted to join

the Overwatch Organization.

Her mom, Ana, is a really prominent member of it

and also, her father was a public servant

and so that sort of ran in her blood

and her dream was to someday be able to do the same thing

as a member of Overwatch.

But before she had that opportunity,

Overwatch got shut down and so,

now she's a member of Helix Security, which is

sort of like an international security company

and she's dreaming of the day

that maybe she could join Overwatch again

and hopefully she'll get that chance.

Reaper.

He was one of the original heroes and we

told very little about him but since then,

we've delved into his backstory a lot more.

Reaper is voiced by Keith Ferguson,

who is one of the nicest people that I've ever met,

so, I like to say that when we're doing

voice sessions with Reaper, it's probably

a little bit of therapy for him.

When we did our Uprising event,

we were able to actually, for the first time,

show Reyes before he became Reaper

and so he appears as a voice over the communications set

and I think everyone was so surprised by it,

they're like, Wait, wait, who is that?

And he says, Reyes here.

And everyone freaked out 'cause they'd never

heard kind of what he was like before he became Reaper.

Soldier 76.

He's actually the personal creation

of our creative director, Chris Metzen,

so, a character that was near and dear to his heart,

which he was kind enough

to let us incorporate into Overwatch

and so because of that, we're all very,

we're very careful and we really want to make this character

that Chris loves.

Soldier 76 is voiced by Fred Tatasciore.

Sombra.

Sombra is voiced by Carolina Ravassa.

One of the things that we were really looking for

with Sombra's voice is we wanted someone who

had the attitude but also had this sense of competency.

And I think Carolina really brings that to the role.

We also wanted Sombra to be very tough and

one thing that I think really separates her

from some of the Overwatch characters is that

a lot of the characters in Overwatch

have this heightened way of speaking.

They're either very serious or they're almost playing a role

but Sombra almost sounds like someone

that you would meet on the street

and she talks in a very naturalistic way

and I think it really sets her apart

from some of the other characters.

Tracer.

She is so bright and optimistic and cheerful,

like, when you hear her on the battlefield,

she just cuts the room with that sunny voice and

one of the things that you might not think of

that is really iconic to Tracer is her giggle.

And we had to do so many giggles just to

get the perfect, you know, (giggles).

Well, that's not a good giggle, but

we worked with a actress, Cara Theobold, and

she has this natural giggle, so,

we've probably had her giggle more than anything

or any other character and we have this library and

it's always fun when we get to do that.

All right, so, next, we're gonna talk about

our defense heroes.

Bastion.

It probably has one of the most interesting

development stories for its ultimate,

which is that it transforms into a tank.

That is probably the seventieth

or eightieth ultimate ability we created for Bastion.

We had trouble deciding what fit the character.

It's kind of this robot that's exploring nature

and is really fun and kind.

Some of the other ultimate abilities we had were,

pull out a little remote control

and it would drive around this little drone

that would then explode.

That doesn't seem quite right.

One time, it flew.

And, eventually, we went back

to the story of Bastion and said,

What is this character?

and the base idea is Bastion transforms.

And so we thought, Is there one more thing

we could transform Bastion into?

and, ultimately, we ended up with a tank.

We feel like that actually really fits the character

and the mobility that Bastion gets in that mode

makes a lot of sense.

Bastion is actually voiced by Chris Metzen

who's our creative director.

He goes into the booth and we

have this whole processing setup

that transforms the sounds that he makes into

kind of the beeps and the boops and the whirs.

Chris will tell you that it's more like

playing a musical instrument than a direct translation

and I always have fun with these sessions

because I tell him to do stuff, like,

Oh, I need you to kind of sound scared,

so maybe like a (vocalizing) or,

you know, something like that, and

he'll have to make sounds like that happen

so there's this big disconnect between

what the sounds he makes and

then what you ultimately hear are.

And one of the hardest, most challenging things

is to have Bastion make sounds musically and

once I had Chris do that the first time,

I decided I loved it, so, Bastion will hum

Christmas tunes, he will hum kind of little musical notes

and that part is so hard for Chris to do because,

again, he can sing something in tune,

but it will not translate that way and, so,

I'll have him there trying to whistle

the Overwatch tune for, like, 10 minutes.

Hanzo.

He has a ultimate ability where he fires one arrow

which summons this sort of spirit dragon

that destroys everything in its path

and, in development, it was kind of

originally blocked in using these really simple

geometric shapes and it kind of,

it looked like a caterpillar, so,

the team would just yell during play tests,

Oh, look out, it's the caterpillar coming!

Hanzo is voiced by Paul Nakauchi.

Junkrat.

If you look at him from a design standpoint,

you can see that he's lost limbs and his hair

is literally on fire because he's just

fearless when it comes to explosives.

Junkrat is voiced by Chris Parson.

Mei is a beloved Overwatch character.

We cast in China to find someone

who could speak Mandarin and also English

to be able to do the role of Mei

and we ended up working with Elise Zhang,

who, if you've ever met her, is basically Mei the character.

She is happy and cute and enthusiastic and

it's just been really fun to see her in that role.

Torbjorn.

Torbjorn, from a visual standpoint,

is interesting because the Overwatch team,

when developing the look of Overwatch,

wanted to take this character and

sort of evolve the look of art

that had come before from other Blizzard games.

So, when you look at Torbjorn, you can definitely see

the inspiration of the dwarves of Warcraft,

but we really wanted to do something else with it

so we added the more futuristic elements to him

and turned him into an Overwatch hero.

Widowmaker.

Recently, we added a map to the game.

It was the Chateau and we were creating this

French manor and we were trying to decide,

well, what should we do with this and

we thought, You know who would live in a manor?

Widowmaker, and so we decided that

this chateau was actually the ancestral home

of Widowmaker's family that she's now returned to and, so,

when you go to the map you can kind of see that

she's in the process of redecorating

and refurbishing the place.

Now, Widowmaker lives in a castle

and she wants you to leave.

The next group of heroes are our tanks.

D.Va.

Ever since the Omnic Crisis,

Korea is routinely attacked, you know,

every couple of years or so by this massive omnic

that comes out of the sea and

mech pilots, these mecha pilots

come out to defend the country.

For decades, Korea used drones to fight them off,

but then one day, when this omnic monstrosity reappeared,

it had this ability to jam all the communications

and so Korea was forced to employ pilots

to be able to fight the threat and so

when they were looking at who the best candidates

to pilot these mech suits were,

they decided to turn to the professional gamers of Korea

because of their abilities and their

gameplay strategies and their APM.

And, so, D.Va is sort of considered to be the best

gamers in Korea to be a member of the squad

and so she's in this squad with these other pilots who,

you know, have similar skills like her.

There are some other gamers and then you've got

pilots or like an F-1 driver.

When we were designing Orisa,

we wanted to create this character

that sort of pushed the visual design language of Overwatch.

And, so, when you look at her, she's quadrupedal,

she has really interesting design elements

and she sort of doesn't look like any other hero

we've made before and, certainly,

doesn't look like a lot of the other robot or omnic heroes

that we've created before.

But because of that, there were some challenges.

We found that it was difficult to relate to her

because some aspects were so unique

and I remember that we were in a brainstorm

and we were always talking about

who Orisa is, what was she built for?

We had this idea that she was, like,

kind of like a police enforcer for the city of Numbani,

but I had this idea, what if Orisa

was actually built by a child

and the character of Efi appeared.

She's this young, genius, A.I. roboticist

who decided that because she was inspired

by all these stories of heroes that she could

build her own hero.

And so she took the pieces of this old mech

and then improved them, added a personality core,

and when you think about Orisa,

thinking about this character Efi

really helps to bind the story ideas together.

You could see Orisa as this character

that was made by this idealistic young girl.

Orisa, in the story of Overwatch,

has sort of just been switched on like a month or so ago,

so she's still really learning about the world around her

and learning what it means to be a part of that.

Kind of reminiscent of another hero, Reinhardt,

and one of the fun things about that

is that Orisa really looks up to Rienhardt.

We joke that Orisa and Efi probably sat in

the lab together watching cartoons or seeing stories

about the old Overwatch and one thing is that

a lot of Orisa's emotes and her animations

are sort of callbacks to Reinhardt.

In fact, she even says some of his lines.

Orisa is voiced by Cherrelle Skeete.

Reinhardt.

He is the first hero that I worked on.

We were trying to come up with the story for

this character who uses a big shield,

has this giant rocket hammer, and is wearing this

crusader armor, just armored head to toe,

like a medievals but also futuristic knight.

And we had this idea, you know,

he's so big and larger than life

that we wanted a character that fit that

and we drew inspiration from, kind of the Don Quixote story.

He's currently the oldest character

in the Overwatch hero lineup and he

sort of has seen it all.

He's been fighting ever since the early days and

he was sort of forced into retirement

and now he's freelancing around Europe,

trying to right wrongs.

And we have this idea that he's seen so much

and he probably should hang it up,

maybe he's taken a few too many knocks on his head

but he's this guy who still feels like

he has so much to do.

One thing you can see is in some of the stories,

he'll have his armor off and you could just see

the wreckage of three decades of combat on his body.

He's just scarred and he has cuts and bruises all the time.

Reinhardt is voiced by Darin De Paul.

Roadhog.

Roadhog is actually an older character.

So, Roadhog lived in the Outback before everything

kind of fell apart, and so for him,

when he sees Junkertown and he sees

what's become of his home, it's very sad for him.

Roadhog has also had to find a way to survive

in this cutthroat, unrelentingly harsh wasteland

and so that's really changed him.

He was the sort of character

who just wanted to be left alone to live on his farm.

But now he's had to do things to survive in this environment

and he's really become a much darker character.

Roadhog is voiced by Josh Petersdorf.

Winston.

We're always coming back to Winston to look at the

emotional center of the Overwatch universe,

which is really amusing when you think about it

because Overwatch is this story about Earth

and we like to explore the diversity of Earth

and all these different places and

heroes from different backgrounds,

but the one character, perhaps, appropriately,

who carries all of this is the gorilla

and he's not even from Earth, he's from the moon.

He's sort of taken in all these lessons

and all these feelings that people have.

They started as stories but now

they're things that he truly believes in and fights for.

Winston is voiced by Crispin Freeman.

Zarya was created so that we'd have this

really strong female character

and we were inspired by kind of Olympic weightlifters.

It must have been around that time that

we were watching competition and we thought,

Wouldn't this be a cool character?

and so we came up the idea of this person

who was about to prove that she

was the strongest in the world,

but, at that time, omnics attacked her home in Russia

and she decided that it was more important to her

to fight than to compete and so she never had the moment

to get that validation that she

had trained her whole life for.

So, instead, she gave it all up and she became

just another soldier on the frontline.

Zarya is voiced by Dolya Gavanski.

Last, but not least are the support heroes.

Ana existed as a character long before

she actually was a playable hero in the game.

When we were developing Pharah,

we knew that we wanted Pharah to sort of

come from this lineage of heroes

and the most important one of those being Ana,

who was Overwatch's second command,

this amazing sniper who fought during the Omnic Crisis

and someone who Pharah really looked up to.

We wanted to add a support character who was

a little more skill-based, so,

we thought maybe a character who

snipe healed would be something that would appeal

to characters who usually played more skillful characters.

But we already had a sniper in the lineup, Widowmaker,

and we were wondering if the game could really

support two snipers.

We remembered that we had this character

in the backstory, Ana, and one of the interesting

things about Ana is that she eventually disappears.

People believe that she's dead,

but in actuality, she suffers this injury

in a sniper duel with Widowmaker.

She loses her eye and that actually causes her to

kind of rethink what she wants to do with her life

and it changes her a little bit.

It really puts this focus on her for protecting people.

In her younger days, Ana, as a sniper

really saw her role as protecting people

through her role as a sniper, so she would kill people

to make sure that the people that she

was on missions with could get home safe.

But in the modern day, she has this weapon

which is able to heal people from range,

and so we're sort of able to show

how her character changed over time.

Ana is voiced by Aysha Selim, who we

actually recorded all the way from Cairo.

We wanted to make this really tough, older female character

because we felt like, you know,

entertainment and the world could just use more of them

and so, when we settled on the idea of

making this sniper, we thought Ana would be perfect,

because, obviously, as one of the older heroes in the game,

we could show that she's still really powerful

and still competent and still out there,

a hero just as much as the younger characters in the cast.

Lucio.

Lucio is voiced by Jonny Cruz and

when we heard Jonny audition for the role,

he had so much enthusiasm and life.

Once we heard his voice, we felt like

there was no way that Lucio could be anyone else.

He has that personality.

He is exciting and he is happy and he's just

all about bringing people up and together.

Mercy.

Mercy ultimately leaves the Overwatch Organization

because she has this conflict as a

kind of doctor, physician, someone who's a healer.

She feels like sometimes Overwatch is too militaristic

in her goals and ultimately, now,

she's just working as a medic, as a doctor,

in sort of places in the world where there are conflicts

and where she feels like she can do good.

Recently, actually, we made some changes to Mercy,

so she now has a additional ability

called Valkyrie in which she can just

fly around the battlefield and her abilities become

more charged and she's really

that kind of battlefield angel.

Mercy is voiced by Lucie Pohl.

Moira.

Moira is a very controversial scientist.

She basically believes that there are too many restrictions

placed upon scientific research.

She doesn't believe in, kind of, taking time.

She believes that humans should be a little more aggressive

in how they approach scientific discovery.

And in that way, she actually lines up her philosophy

very well with the scientists of Oasis.

Oasis is a city that was built

in the Arabian Desert, in Iraq,

where scientists who kind of had the same

ideas about how science should work

founded this place in the desert

where they could kind of work on science

without any restrictions, and so Moira

is controversial to the greater scientific community

but to the scientists of Oasis,

she's sort of right up their alley

and so they recruited her to become

the Minister of Genetics.

So she's in charge of genetics research in Oasis.

We found that people were really

desiring another support character.

We felt the same way and so we created Moira.

We wanted her to have a little bit different gameplay

and, again, we thought that the idea of a

villainess healer would be really fun.

When we looked at the Talon characters,

we thought there really needed to be

someone to take care of them.

Also, from a story perspective,

Moira has a lot of relationships to different characters

in the Overwatch story.

Moira was part of Blackwatch, so she knows everyone

who was in the Blackwatch organization, she was specifically

recruited by Reyes because Reyes

sort of identified her talent with genetics

and Reyes might have had some genetics issues

that he wanted some scientific help with.

Before Moira was released, we actually hinted at her

in a few ways.

One of the ones that people didn't pick up so much

or they obviously didn't draw the connection was

on the Oasis map, before a match would start,

Reaper would mention that he's visiting an old friend

and this old friend is Moira.

We had this idea of a scientist who is related to Reyes

and to Blackwatch and so, while we didn't know

the specific details about the character,

we knew that there was space in the Overwatch universe

that we wanted to fill, so,

when we were looking at who the next support character

was going to be, we felt like Moira would be

a great option and her character really came out of that.

Moira is voiced by Genevieve O'Reilly.

Symmetra.

Everything in Overwatch is sort of couched in this

science-fiction terminology but we don't really

get too much into the nitty gritty,

so when we were developing the idea of Symmetra,

who is this engineer who literally creates things,

in her case, defenses, teleporters, shield generators,

out of light, we talked about a number

of different ways we'd describe her technology.

For example, we said, What about photonic engineering

or something? and, ultimately, we decided that

Overwatch isn't really a universe about the

specifics of the science that we're applying

and so we came up with this phrase hard light,

which, it doesn't really mean anything

but if I tell you engineers things out of hard light,

you're like, Okay, I kind of understand that,

and we don't have to really get into what's going on.

Symmetra is voiced by Anjali Bhimani.

Zenyatta.

Zenyatta is an omnic monk.

At some point in Zenyatta's life, he had this awakening,

he had this realization where he felt like

there was more to the universe than just

his pre-programmed existence.

He was not the only one of the omnics that felt this way

and a number of them came together in Nepal

and formed the Shambali Monastery,

which is a group of omnic monks

who meditate about what it means to be alive

and, in their case, what does it mean to be alive

if you are a robot?

They have a belief in this concept called the Iris.

So they talk a lot about the Iris.

They believe that all beings,

actually not just mechanical ones,

ascend through the Iris and can be transformed

into a higher state of being.

Zenyatta is voiced by Feodor Chin.

I'm Michael Chu and those were all the heroes of Overwatch.

We are Overwatch. (dramatic fanfare)