Overwatch 2 Devs Break Down Juno's Development, Backstory (Exclusive)

The Overwatch 2 team provides exclusive insight into developing new hero Juno.

By Spencer Perry - August 19, 2024 12:44 pm EDT

On Tuesday, August 20th, Overwatch 2 will launch Season 12, New Frontiers, delivering a slew of new content for the game as well as their 41st hero, Juno. Ahead of Juno's actual arrival in Overwatch 2, Blizzard has debuted an origin story for the character in the form of a new motion comic. Narrated by voice actress Xanthe Huynh, the comic reveals that Juno's family was part of a secret mission from the in-game company Lucheng Interstellar to settle Mars, Project Red Promise, and that her return to Earth is specifically to get help for her family still living on the red planet. ComicBook was able to speak with members of the Overwatch 2 team to find out more about the development of Juno as a hero, as well as her place in the game's roster.

Initially revealed to the world as BlizzCon last year under the codename Space Ranger, Juno's official debut in Overwatch 2 brings not only a new support character to the game but delivers a first for the game: their first "Martian." Juno arriving on Earth after traveling from Mars must be like the moment in Community when Donald Glover enters the room holding the stack of pizzas, only to find the party is on fire. She thought she would show up to get help for her family back on Mars, but has been confronted by a world with Omnic extremists and a new Overwatch team. Having grown up on an isolated piece of Mars with only a handful of adults around her, the experience of landing on Earth will be a lot for her.

"She's probably super overwhelmed," said Joshi Zhang, narrative designer for Overwatch 2. "Whatever's going on in our universe right now that players might be thinking of, she probably is taking it all in at the same time with the same level of security, because there's just so much... she doesn't even know what a school bus is."

That sense of feeling overwhelmed but still managing to carry on and complete the task at hand became a major focal point for defining who Juno is as a character for the Overwatch 2 team. For Zhang, this was not only a personal connection, but something that feels especially prescient for players.

"Something I thought about a lot while I was developing her voice and writing her lines was this idea of, she's pushing through it because it's all that she's got," Zhang added. "She's doing her best all the time. And if you relate to that, and you're also pushing through things and doing the best with what you've got, and there's so many things that are new to you...well, Juno's a hero, so maybe you are one, too."

In terms of the character's voice, Zhang opened up about the unique way of speaking that Juno has in the game. Many players were quick to notice that she almost never uses contractions in her voice lines, saying "I am" rather than "I'm" or "You are" instead of "You're." Part of this came from just being a character born and raised on another planet, but also her surroundings on the Mars base, namely, the twenty or thirty adult scientists that live there and spoke to her like an equal.

"We do want her to have this sort of different feeling," Zhang said of Juno's speaking style. "I don't know if it's a conscious choice, but it comes from her. The way that I think about it is she's surrounded by a bunch of people that are scientists. She's surrounded by a lot of older people. She wasn't really exposed to that much media growing up. I think maybe she watched a couple of cowboy movies. But other than that, she's not talking to kids, she's not getting familiar with the lingo. She's just surrounded with a lot of people who are going to be speaking professionally to each other."

The birth of Juno as a character for the Overwatch 2 roster came from someone on the game design team thinking about a specific archetype, testing out ideas of a fighter pilot-like character that had lock-on missiles. According to Overwatch 2 art director Dion Rogers, the initial designs for a character with that specific type of ability was not only a flying character like Pharah and Echo but also someone in a mech suit. Things took a major step toward the Juno that players know now, however, when a simple question was posed, "Could there be aliens in Overwatch?" After some consideration, the answer ultimately was no, but Rogers kept thinking about it.

"I was curious by the question," Rogers added. "I was like, 'Okay, but if we did, what does that look like?' It shows that connection of the team, how each team member contributes to the final look of a hero. Once we had this idea that maybe she's from Mars, because that works in the Overwatch universe; you'd imagine we've colonized Mars since we've colonized the moon, maybe we've reached there, right? (Concept artist Daryl Tan) did an iteration where the character started to look like an astronaut a little bit, or someone who had a space suit on. That's how the character evolved."

Considering the many teams that it takes to bring an Overwatch 2 hero to life, game design, art design, and narrative just to name a few, it feels like a chicken-or-the-egg question to ponder how all the elements come together to create what players end up seeing in game. Even though the development life for a character is long, the collaboration always ends up delivering.

"it's super organic," Zhang said. "We have such a diverse team with so many incredible talents that people just have great ideas. And so it's really about this culture of people on our team saying 'yes' and 'let's do that.' It's not like retrofitting into something else, I wouldn't say that at all. It's really more like people have great ideas and we inspire each other constantly, and great things happen when that happens."

Rogers added that the development of Juno reminded him of how they created tank hero Winston. The design for that character started as an illustration labeled "Orangutank," with the design team liking the idea but not quite sure how it would fit into the larger game itself. A back and forth ensued between the game design and art team about how it could work.

"This back and forth happens with most characters, and then the narrative team wrote a story, 'Okay, what if he's intelligent? This Dr. Jekyll, Mr. Hyde-style ape,' then that refined the drawing even more. So Juno went through a similar experience throughout each team member contributing to the final version of her."

When players pick up Juno in Overwatch 2, they may be wondering one major thing about the character's kit: what is going on with her Ultimate ability? Unlike every other hero, where you can see their Ultimate physically happen either from their weapon or around them, Juno's falls from the sky. Orbital Ray delivers a giant beam from the heavens down onto Earth that provides healing to Juno's allies and also increases their damage. But where does that come from?

The in-universe logic behind this is that when Juno's family on Mars pieced together a ship to send her back to Earth, it had two components. There's the piece that flew her through space, and there's the element that kept her alive and later landed her on the surface. Though her pod is now nestled in the attack spawn on Dorado, most of her ship remains in orbit, which is where Orbital Ray originates from. Even though you can't see Juno's ship when the Ultimate happens, art exists of what it looks like floating in orbit about Earth.

"We made a ship that looked a little too resource heavy at first," Rogers said. "And so we said, 'Hey, let's imagine they had to take parts from a habitat and things like that to create this two pronged ship... the thrusters that get her there and the habitat that keeps her alive as she travels to Earth. And so that Ultimate comes from when she reaches Earth, a part of the pod breaks off, and that's what lands on Earth, and part of the ship remains in the sky, following her."

"This ship is hodgepodge'd together by her family," Zhang added. "It's almost like a village raised her. So they put a lot of love into designing (it). How do we make sure she's safe wherever she goes? And so they put this satellite on the ship, so that once she ejects out of the ship and she's got that pod on Earth, she can still call up to them. She might not be able to contact them, but there's a piece of them keeping her safe."

When players learn about Juno's origins and her backstory, they may assume that the name for the character just came from the fact that she was born on Mars, tying back to the Roman mythology that named the planet to begin with (Juno being Mars' mother). But it goes deeper than that, much deeper. Joshi Zhang revealed she pitched the idea of naming the hero "Juno," unpacking the many layers that went into deciding that specific name.

"So she's born on Mars, right? And one of her parents, Jiayi, is from Singapore, and in Singapore they speak Mandarin... so they kind of are naming her after Project Red Promise. If you actually look at the Chinese characters of 'Ju-no,' that means 'vermilion promise,' loosely. So the person who's granting this name to the person, what's going through their head? To Jiayi and to Kim, this is like, she's the embodiment of a red promise. The project is called Red Promise, and then Mars is red, and then vermillion is a really auspicious color, so it all came together."

"We don't take it lightly when we name the hero," Rogers added with a laugh.

When Overwatch 2 players got a first look at Juno's kit during an early playtest, there was some worry that her kit overlapped too much with some other characters. For the entire life cycle of Overwatch as a game, support hero Lucio has been the only one with a regular speed boost ability, but Juno arrives with her own variant of that as well. Dion Rogers addressed this, adding that in the end the plan is always to make each character's kit feel personal to playing them in the game:

"Generally, when we make a hero, we're trying to deliver a fantasy about playing this character. She's kind of this flying astronaut character from Mars, and so her abilities and her design and everything represent this fantasy of the hero. It also allows a bit of player choice. So she can speed up heroes similar to Lucio... and now (players) have a hero that can do a similar thing as he does, but obviously he does it slightly better than her, but is a bit of choice for the players when it comes to some of the overlapping abilities. We definitely have no shortage of crazy abilities, but this one was about the fantasy of this fighter pilot-type astronaut hero."

Players should also expect fun skins for Juno as well, with Rogers noting one thing that won't be a hindrance on designing them: the space helmet Juno wears won't be a requirement for all of her skins in the future.

A major point of confusion for some Overwatch 2 players is how the larger narrative of the series will continue to be told. After it was reported that plans for the PVE missions in the game had been scrapped entirely, the future of the "story" of the game has been a major question mark.

"We definitely want to continue to tell stories in Overwatch," Rogers said. "You can see how much went in, and we're still exploring and trying new things with where we are with the game currently. But you can see with Juno, we're trying to share her connection to the world of Overwatch, the connection to people on Overwatch, with Mei and family, and then how she develops when she's on on the planet."

Overwatch 2's Season 12 New Frontiers launches on August 12.

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