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Overwatch | Moira interview with lead writer Michael Chu

Every few months, the competitive team shooter Overwatch gets a brand new hero. At BlizzCon earlier this month, the next hero was announced to be Moira, a support character who could use biotic energy to heal allies and damage foes. We spoke to Michael Chu, lead writer for Overwatch at Blizzard Entertainment, about her origins, her place in the Overwatch storyline, and what Blizzard game she'd like the most in a fictional theme park based around the company's games.

Could you go into the inspirations for Moira?

We were really interested in a new support character when the team was looking at the landscape of Overwatch, we felt like there was a need for that and the community felt similarly, so we felt pretty good that people would be happy to have a new support character. She fills a need for us, and then as a character, we were interested in the idea of making a less benevolent healer: with the healers we have in the game, you've got Lucio who is like liquid positivity, you've got Mercy who wants to take care of everyone, there's Zenyatta who's like "hey, let me give you some advice, and also let me help you out," you've got Ana who is "I'll help you out, but I'll also give you a little sarcasm, a little dry motherly advice," so we wanted to try someone who was a little different. 

It's a character archetype that I really wanted to look into, so we settled on this character of Moira. The other thing that was really interesting to us is that we wanted to have a character who had a long history in the Overwatch universe and also had relationship with a lot of the different characters, we always think that characters like that are really fun for telling the story of the game, and sort of providing insight into the world, and so she sort of came out of that.

With her backstory as a geneticist, could you go into why you went down that route for her as opposed to any other kind of scientist?

I'll kind of answer in general on her backstory: the thing about Moira is that we wanted her to feel very much like a scientist. We have a lot of scientists in the cast already, and we talked a lot about how she would be differentiated, and one of the points that came up is to make sure she's not too much like Mercy, because they were parts of similar groups, they saw similar events. One of the things that we really focused in on was this idea that scientists pursue knowledge and understand, they're doing their research and experiments because they're trying to understand, and that's very much what Moira is about, Moira wants to understand how genetics work at a very specific level, to the point where she knows how it works and how it can be manipulated.

She's mostly just interested in that knowledge, and that differentiates her from other scientists on the team: if Winston discovers something, he's going to build a Chronal Accelerator, he's going to build a rocket engine, Mei is trying to deal with climate problems in the world, but Moira is primarily interested simply in the scientific process and the understanding, and so that is what she came out of. Then we knew she had to be a support character, so it's like, well, if she's a support character she's got to have something that can plausibly do healing, we felt like there was some sort of 'okay, maybe her angle into healing is through genetics,' and we also knew that we wanted her to tie in to Gabriel Reyes (Reaper), and give something in his backstory, we thought a geneticist worked really well for that.

Moira healing
Moira healing

So in the backstory video, we saw a scene of her experimenting on herself - would you describe Moira as a transhumanist?

I don't think so! Experimenting on herself is more that we've talked a little bit about her questionable ethics when it comes to research, and I think it's to illustrate that. She's not to much interested in the application, it's more that she's willing to go to lengths to achieve her scientific research goals. One of the examples I usually use is, say there was a disease outbreak or something, and there is an experimental vaccine. Moira would say "I've created a vaccine that will fight the disease, we should immediately begin giving it to people," whereas other people would say "hey, y'know, this is good, but we need to do some trials, we have to make sure that it's safe." In that sense, she doesn't like the apparatus, from our perspective there's good reason for these things, but she feels like, probably because she's brilliant and because she just wants the knowledge so badly that the caution is something that she doesn't put as much store in as the greater scientific community.

How is genetic experimentation on yourself seen as more radical than space gorillas?

The Overwatch universe posses so many different avenues! I think that the idea of, as the researcher, you would perform the experiment on yourself, it's such an uncontrolled way to do research and also I just think that with the kinds of things she's experimenting on, experimenting on herself is not the best idea for her as well.

Winston Overwatch
Winston is one of Overwatch's characters, a super intelligent gorilla who was raised on the moon.

So Overwatch is seen as a very queer game, not least because it was revealed in a comic that Tracer has a girlfriend, is Moira in any way queer in her sexuality or identity?

So, Moira identifies as female, and we had this thing when we were approaching the sexuality of our character which is that we don't like to just apply a label to a character, and we prefer to address that when we feel like it's integral to the story. For example, with Tracer we wanted to tell the story of Tracer and her life, and more than just her, a picture of all the heroes of Overwatch and what life was like outside of the battlefield, and we also just kind of wanted to do a year-in heartwarming story, and so in that context, it became an obvious aspect of her life that would come out, and so that's why we addressed it there.

Would you want to address it now, in this interview, for Moira's sexuality and identity?

No, I would prefer to have it come out naturally as part of a story.

With regards to Blizzard World, which was announced at BlizzCon, what would Moira's favourite section be?

That's a good question, let me think about this, no one has asked me this! I actually love Blizzard World questions from the angle of what characters' opinions are but I didn't think about Moira's so...what would she be interested in? I think she'd be interested, probably, in the StarCraft area, because it's got a little bit of that futurism stuff. It's funny thinking of her as a scientist, and scientists are sometimes inspired by random stimuli, so, maybe this is too meta,  I wonder if some sort of fictional scientific invention could inspire her actual scientific research, I think that would be amusing.

Blizzard World Overwatch - image of Protoss/StarCraft area
A new map for Overwatch was announced at BlizzCon called Blizzard World, with areas for Blizzard's other games. This is a shot of the Protoss area in the StarCraft zone.

So she'd probably be a Protoss player, I'm guessing?

Yeah! I think the nails would make it difficult though, on her right hand she has those long nails, I think it would be hard to move the mouse with that.

Could you go into Moira's right hand, which has been affected in some way?

Yeah, so I can't go into too much detail, but one of the things that we really like about Moira is this idea of her duality with the healing and the damaging hand, her left and right hand. The artists had this idea that, with her having experimented on herself, and seeing her proximity to Reyes, and also what that hand functionally does, wouldn't it be interesting to see some effects of that on her actual hand?

Talking about her hand is actually really interesting, I really like playing Moira because she has so much expressiveness in the way that her hands animate from first-person. When she's using her healing, she has this soothing almost caress, but then when she uses her right hand, it's a lot stronger, and we actually iterated a lot on that specific animation because we didn't want her to feel out of control. We wanted her to feel like she's completely in mastery of this ability that she's using out of her hand. We actually get a lot of the character of Moira through how her hands are animated and visually depicted.

Moira Overwatch
Moira Overwatch

Moira is almost certainly working for Talon now in the Overwatch lore, but she's neither a good nor evil character in any way, it's very ambiguous, is that a start to further exploring how Talon aren't just evil?

Yeah, that's very astute, because Talon is a collection of all these characters who have differing goals and different ideas on how the world should be. They've now been led in a direction by Doomfist, he has a very strong personality in the Talon inner council, and he has a very specific idea of what should be happening, I think a lot of the current Talon members are following him. But it's very important to us that, with our villains, we try to make them not just feel like 'they want to do bad for the sake of bad,' so Doomfist has this idea that out of the crucible of conflict mankind will evolve, but you look at other characters like Sombra, who is engulfed in this greater mystery and a greater desire to understand the invisible threads of information and power, how they affect things, and how she can manipulate them, I think she is willing to work with Talon on that, but she's sort of in it for herself.

The thing I think about Moira is that Talon, to her, is an end to her research. She needs a way to be funded, and it turns out Talon is a good source for her: because she's all focused on the invention and investigation, Talon's saying 'hey, could you help us, we need to modify this tech for something we're doing' and she's saying 'sure, just let me do my research.'

There is an interesting parallel, I feel, and it's not exact, but Doomfist wants to make the world better through conflict, people will become stronger, and I think with Moira, even though she doesn't necessarily think it's the most important thing, her field of investigation will ultimately, probably, make the the world better because you think about how her technology could be used to cure disease or give a better understanding of how humans tick. So yeah, I would say that the villains of Talon have different motivations and goals, they're just all sort of together under this one roof, and it will be interesting to see how that carries on into the future.

Overwatch Moira
Overwatch Moira

So, Moira is Irish: is that her natural hair colour, and is it just because she's Irish?

Haha! You'd have to ask Arnold Tsang [lead character concept artist on Overwatch] about that, but I believe that is her natural hair colour. It's funny, it was one of the things that people long-requested for us, we didn't have a redhead on the team, so hopefully people will be happy to see Moira there! It's really interesting when we're making a new character, because we don't look at a map and say 'here's a place where we need to put a character,' it's still very much an emotional and creative process for her, and someone, I don't know who and it might have been me, suggested that Irish would be interesting, and we ran with it.

One of the amazing things about it was that I always wanted this character because she had these visual elements that sort of evoke fantastical characters, like a mage or warlock, I think she's as close to a character like that that we'll get in Overwatch. I wanted her to have this sort of otherworldly, mystical sound and tone to her voice, so when we were casting for actresses,  we had Genevieve O'Rielly, who is Irish, and when I heard her I was like 'that's it, that's Moira.' We didn't plan on it from day one, but somehow it came together and I think it's really great.

Moira's neither one of the youngest nor the oldest character in Overwatch, being in her 40s, what sort of challenges does that pose in making a new character that has 20, almost 30 years of adult life experience?

I find the characters who have more experience to be really fun, because one of the things about the Overwatch universe is that we see it as this collection of different time periods: there's the modern day where Winston is recalling Overwatch, but there are all these other periods like the Omnic Crisis and the golden age of Overwatch when they were at their height. The thing that's really fun about creating these characters that pass through many of these time periods is that we can really think about how they were in each of these time periods and what different events changed them, and then as we peek into that in the game or other stories we can show these character changes.

A great example of this is Reinhardt, in his latest short Honor and Glory. We know what the modern version of Reinhardt is, he's this big guy who loves to fight but he's getting on, he's maybe taken a few too many knocks to the head, but it was really exciting because we knew also where he came from, and to be able to tell a story for one of the older characters and say, 'look, he was different back then, he was still larger than life and loves battle, but he has this arrogance and cockiness which has been tempered by this experience,' that's one of the really fun things about these characters: seeing how they evolved throughout the entirety of Overwatch history.

One of the challenges though is that, whenever we add a new hero, the timeline starts getting more and more compact, there's more contingencies on everything, so the logistical weaving of these characters into the overall story becomes more challenging each time we add more.

Overwatch Moira ultimate
Overwatch Moira ultimate

A lot of the story in Overwatch is told externally to the game - through the website, through animated shorts, through comics that aren't available inside the game - how do you balance that more limited story within the game with showing it externally to make sure all players know who a character is?

Efficiency is the most important thing when it comes to inside the game, because of how people react to the story content that's within it. The most effective thing we have is probably the world itself, environmental storytelling is a very efficient storytelling method, and so whenever we have something that you can put in the environment where we know people will be running around and looking at things, we really like that.

The other thing we have is the voice lines, which we use to, as efficiently as we can, communicate relationships between different characters, the way characters feel about different environments, or the way people feel about the execution of their jobs. Inside the game, what we're trying to do is reflect the greater overall narrative of Overwatch, and our hope is that, if something seems interesting to you when you're not playing the game, you might be interested in reading one of the comics, finding out about the characters, or just learning more about the history of the world.

What is your favourite Moira easter egg?

It's not really an easter egg, but one of my favourite things about her is that she has a voice line which is "the state of you" and it's one of my favourite expressions. Thinking of expressions from around the world I just think it's so expressive and the way she delivers it is wonderful. She has a few different lines like that, with Blizzard, many years ago when I was working as a game tester on Warcraft 3, I got to go to Ireland for six weeks while working on the game, so I've really enjoyed being able to hear the Irish tones and work some of these things that I heard people say back into the game, that's probably my favourite easter egg!