Every Overwatch Hero Explained by Blizzard’s Michael Chu
Released on 12/22/2017
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)
Every Overwatch Hero Explained by Blizzard’s Michael Chu
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