Every Overwatch Hero Explained by Blizzard’s Michael Chu | WIRED

hi I'm Michael - and I'm the lead writer of overwatch and I'm here to break down every character in overwatch we're gonna start with the offense heroes dufus started in the game as simply a name we had this movie that announced overwatch the world and one of the characters mentions doom fist and just that name was so interesting that people have been asking us for years when are we gonna see team fists as a hero and we on the team were also really excited to someday get to make him is 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 gonna make the hero and we pulled it out again and we found that we still loved it there are a number of doom fists in the history of the overwatch universe so it's sort of a title that's been carried by different characters the original doom fist was a really good guy one of the heroes of the omlet crisis but the current doom fist most people would say a little bit more of a villain Genji Genji and Hans Oh 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 Bo 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 or 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 be over watch that made him into the hero that you sort of know today Genji is voiced by Kaku space he 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 like that's a really work in Japanese let me help you out there because I'm not a fluent Japanese speaker McCready 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 what okay and we kind of stacked rank Jesse McCree against every other name we'd come up with and at the end of it we still thought Jesse McCready 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 McCurry 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 like 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 them was this cowboy and Matt told me once he said you know he looked at that art and he said you know that's my be a character I could do and that's how it ended up Farah story is really interesting because her whole life she wanted to join the overwatch organization her mom Anna 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 boy 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 communication set and I think everyone was so surprised by it they're like wait wait who is that he says like it Reyes here and everyone freaked out because they never heard kind of what he was like before he became Reaper soldiers 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 that chris loves soldier 76 is voiced by Fred tatasciore Sombra Sombra is voiced by Karolina vilasa one of the things that we were really looking for with sombras voices we wanted someone who had the attitude but also had this sense of like competency and I think Karolina really brings that to the role we also wanted summer to be very tough and one thing that I think really separates her from some of the other overwatch characters is that a lot of the characters in overwatch have this like 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 on the battlefield she just cuts through 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 like get the perfect you know hehe well that's not a good vehicle but we worked with a actress Karthi of old 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 alright so next we're gonna talk about our defense heroes Bastien if I has one of the most interesting development stories for its ultimate which is that it transforms into a tank that is probably the 70th or 80th 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 you know 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 ash and said like what is this character and the I base idea is Bastion transforms and so we thought like 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 is 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 Boop's and the words 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 them to do stuff like oh I need you to kind of sound scared so maybe like a you know something like that and he'll have to like yell to make sounds like that happens 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 us 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 ten minutes Hanzo he has ultimate ability for he fires one arrow which summons the sort of spirit dragon that destroys like everything is 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 test oh look out is the caterpillar coming Hanzo is voiced by Paul Makoti junk rat if you look at him from a design standpoint you could see that he's lost limbs and his hair is literally on fire because he's just fearless when it comes to explosives junk rat is voiced by Chris parson may 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 may and we ended up working with Elise Jong who if you've ever met her is basically made the character she is happy and cute and enthusiastic and it's just been really fun to see her in that role or Bjorn 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 could definitely see the inspiration of the dwarves of Warcraft but we really wanted to do something else with it so we added kind of the more futuristic elements to him and turned him into an overwatch hero Widowmaker recently we added a map to the game it was a chateau and we were creating this French Manor and we were trying to decide well what should we do with this and he's not like you know who would live in a manor widowmaker and so we decided that this Chateau is actually the ancestral home of widow-makers 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 tanks Deva ever since the omnitrices Korea is routinely attacked you know every couple years or so by this massive aamna 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 won one day when this UNMIK 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 the APM and so divas 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 are there are some other gamers and then you've got like pilots or like a f1 driver when we were designing Arisa 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 if 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 on the 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 Arisa is what was she built for we had this idea that she was like kind of like a police enforcer for the city of NIMH Bonnie but I had this idea what if Arisa was actually built by a child and the character of Effie appeared she's this young genius AI 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 kind of the pieces of this old mech and then improved them added a personality core and when you think about Arisa thinking about this character effets really helps to bind the story ideas together you could see like a recesses character that was made by this idealistic young girl Arisa 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 Arisa really looks up to Reinhardt we joke that a recentiy people i sat in the lab together watching kind of cartoons or seeing stories about the old overwatch and one thing is that a lot of a Reese's emotes and her animations are sort of callbacks to Reinhardt in fact she even says some of his lines Arisa is voiced by Cheryl ski Reinhardt he is the first hero that I worked on we were trying to come up with the story for this character who used the big shield has this giant rocket hammer and is wearing this Crusader armor just armored head-to-toe like a medieval feet 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's 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 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 like three decades of combat on his body he's just scarred and he has cuts and bruises all the time Reinhardt is voiced by Darren de Paul road hog road hog is actually an older character so road hog lived in the outback before everything kind of fell apart and so for him when he sees junker town and he sees what's become of his home it's very sad for him road hog has also had to find a way to survive in this cutthroat unrelentingly harsh wasteland and so that's really changed him you know he was the sort of character who just wanted to be left alone to kind of 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 road hog is voiced by Josh Peter store Winston we're always coming back to Winston to look at the kind of emotional center of the overwatch universe which is really amusing when you think about it because overwatch is a story about earth and we like to explore have the diversity of Earth and all these different places and heroes from different backgrounds but the one character perhaps appropriately who carries all 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 in fights for Winston is voiced by Crispin Freeman [Music] Zaria was created so that we had this really strong female character and we were inspired by kind of Olympic weightlifters it must have been around that time that you know we were watching the competition and we felt like wouldn't this be a cool character and so we came up with this idea of this this person who was about to prove that she was the strongest in the world but at that time on Nick's 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 kind of 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 Zaria is voiced by Julia Gavin ski last but not least are the support heroes Anna existed as a character long before she actually was a playable hero in the game when we were developing Farah we knew that we wanted Farah to sort of come from this lineage of heroes and the most important one of those being on ahooo was overwatch a second command this amazing sniper who fought during the ominous and someone who fara 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 liked snipe healed would be something that would appeal the 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 back story on ax 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 his 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 ahna is voiced by Ayesha 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 we when we settled on the idea of making the sniper we thought on it 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 Johnny cruise and when we heard Johnny 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 like 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 out of battlefield angel mercy is voiced by Lucy Pole Moira Moira is a very controversial scientist she basically believes that there are too many restrictions placed upon scientific research he 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 villainous hee would be really fun when we looked at the talent 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 Black Watch so she knows everyone who was in the Black Watch 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 was related to Reyes and to Black Watch and so well we didn't know the specific details about the character we knew that there was the space in the overwatching 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 Symetra 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 Symetra 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 describe her technology for example we said what about like 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 hardlight which it doesn't really mean anything but if I tell you she engineers things out of hard light okay I kind of understand that and we don't have to really get into what's going on Symetra is voiced by Anjali bomani zenyatta sunyata is an omni c'mon at some point in sanada'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 onyx that felt this way and a number of them came together in Nepal and formed the Shambhala monastery which is a group of Dominic monks who meditate about what 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 sunyata is voiced by Fyodor Chen I'm Michael choo and those were all the heroes of overwatch we are over [Music]

Channel: WIRED

Views: 5,128,365

Keywords: overwatch, overwatch lore, lore, heroes, overwatch heroes, doomfist, doom fist, overwatch characters, overwatch characters lore, overwatch story, genji, hanzo, mccree, jesse mccree, pharah, overwatch characters backstory, overwatch backstory, overwatch explained, explained, reaper, soldier 76, sombra, overwatch voice, overwatch voice actors, tracer, bastion, chris metzen, d.va, blizzard lore, winston, widowmaker, lucio, hero, michael chu, blizzard, wired

Id: lPXKBFXS3wk

Length: 21min 41sec (1301 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 22 2017