Overwatch 2’s new hero, Junker Queen, is the embodiment of Blizzard’s sequel

Overwatch’s newest hero, revealed just a few days ago, has been a presence in Blizzard’s hero shooter for nearly five years now. As the disembodied voice of Junkertown’s ruler, she’s only been seen, officially, in scraps of artwork. But Junker Queen was finally, fully, and thoroughly revealed on Thursday, and she’ll be playable later this month when the beta for Overwatch 2 goes live.

Blizzard fleshes out the Queen’s backstory in a new cinematic, “The Wastelander,” the first new short film for Overwatch in years. In the trailer, a Junkertown girl is exiled and returns to Junkertown to fight the King. But it appears Junker Queen will rule benevolently, rallying the citizens of Junkertown to build a strong community in Australia’s irradiated wastelands.

“They’re probably wondering what sort of changes I’ll make,” Junker Queen says, standing over the defeated King in the final moments of her cinematic. “Well, buckle up. They’re about to find out.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Junker Queen — real name Odessa “Dez” Stone, and voiced by actor Leah de Niese — is a spicy new addition to Overwatch’s tank lineup, unlike any other hero in the game so far. She’s unquestionably tank-sized; Junker Queen stands an imposing seven feet tall. And she’s hardy, in her back story, her personality, and in her role on the battlefield. But setting her apart from the armor-clad and shield-bearing remainder of Overwatch’s tank lineup, Junker Queen is fast and in-your-face, blurring the line between a tank, damage, and support character. She charges into battle, can heal herself, and can even boost her allies’ health and movement.

“One of the coolest things about Junker Queen is that she’s unique, in that she makes the rest of the team deadlier,” said Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie, lead narrative designer and writer on Overwatch 2.

Her and she both embody the ideals of Overwatch 2’s new approach to tanks and helped guide the design team’s philosophy to make the game’s bruisers more aggressive as Blizzard reworked Overwatch’s meta.

“We had been experimenting with her kind of idly for a while, but we didn’t really start on her in earnest until really pushing toward Overwatch 2’s release,” lead hero designer Geoff Goodman told Polygon in an interview last week. “She’s very aggressive as a tank — not really the hold back/hold-the-shield type. That was a big part of our design guidelines for tank designs. Overwatch 2.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Goodman indicated that Junker Queen would pair well with anyone else, which includes Reaper Mei Junkrat or Brigitte. “She’s also the first character since Lucio who is able to speed boost people, so I’m not entirely sure if that will mean that she will create alternate comps to Lucio or if people will play both,” Goodman said. “We have to worry a little bit about how fast people can ultimately go, but right now you can get going really fast with those two together. I think that that’ll probably be at least an initial strategy we’ll see right away.”

Overwatch 2’s approach to tanks like Reinhardt and Orisa has been to make them less defensively focused and to get them into the fray more often and more aggressively, Goodman said.

“She’s got this awesome personality we wanted to maintain in her animations, and […] in her gameplay kit,” Goodman said. “You can see in her eyes, there’s always that glimmer of ‘I’m ready to go, let’s do this, let’s get in there.’ Her gameplay kit is really reinforcing her character and [her design] to get in close.”

Some of Junker Queen’s abilities are riffs on other Overwatch heroes. Her primary weapon is a hitscan shotgun, à la Reaper. Her Commanding Shout ability gives her and nearby teammates a temporary buff to health and movement, à la Lucio. And her Ultimate ability, Rampage, applies an anti-healing effect to enemies it hits, à la Ana’s Biotic Grenade. Other parts of her toolkit introduce new gameplay elements. Overwatch 2, including a new “wound” effect from certain attacks that will drain enemy health over time and passively heal Junker Queen. She’s also armed with a throwable knife that can be recalled with her magnetic glove, doing damage (and inflicting wound) on the way out and on the way back.

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

And yes, she carries a big ax, named Carnage, that’s been with her from the early concept art teases that players saw in 2017, when the map Junkertown, the Queen’s home, was added to Overwatch.

Goodman said that Junker Queen’s artwork was a compelling starting point for a new hero — developers liked her look and fans were clamoring to see her in the game — but was also somewhat restrictive. “She’s kind of always been known to have this big ax,” Goodman said. “It’s kind of where we started with her: Let’s make sure we have a big ax attack.”

“Sometimes we create heroes with no artwork at all to start with,” Goodman said. “And we’re just thinking about raw gameplay mechanics and how they may play. And then try to come up with a cool hero around the mechanics on the prototype we’ve made. And other times — in the case of Junker Queen and Ashe, for example — we had already established [their look].

“And I always laugh at our concept guys like, ‘You guys love your melee weapons. You’re killing me. I’m trying to make a shooter!’ There have been other instances where we’ve really tried to push a melee character, but it’s really difficult to do in our game. So I actually didn’t even want to go down that road with her.”

Junker Queen’s scrappy, aggressive ability kit aligns with her visual design and her narrative. She is part punk rock, and her clothing has scant armour. It is clear that she wears bits of Omnic robots and her shotgun, and not an off-the-shelf weapon. “She’s from Junkertown, so all of her stuff is like pieced together, cobbled together weapons,” senior outsourcing supervisor Kacey Helms told Polygon. “Nothing’s manufactured, clean, or pristine. It’s all like, ‘I found this, this, and this, crammed it together and made a gun out of it.’ So it’s really cool that her kit also visually shows that she’s from Junkertown.”

“Obviously it’s a full-on love letter to Mad Max, right?” Helms added. “Everything about it just screams your childhood and stuff you grew up watching. However, her look is a bit more modern. [her design was] like, how’s it going to work with what she does day to day? Is she a walker? Is she a sedentary ruler who just sits and watches? No, she’s up and doing stuff. So her outfit really shows that she has a lot of movement, it’s not going to hinder anything that she’s doing. But generally, she wants to look badass, so she has cool hair that’s all mohawked out, spiked up, and wrapped up so that she can get in there and get all up in your face. All of her stuff’s torn, her shirts, her shorts are torn, and she’s not really worried about what she looks like so much as she is like, there to get stuff done.”

Image: Blizzard Entertainment

Junker Queen “gets stuff done” in her origin story cinematic, capably and ruthlessly (to a point) overcoming the gladiators of Junkertown’s Scrapyard to depose the current king. Her fourth-wall breaking dialogue and chipper demeanor make her back story feel light. It helps that she ultimately spares her former opponents’ lives in her cinematic, titled “The Wastelander,” and seems well deserved in seizing control of Junkertown. Junkrat is her main rival, as Overwatch has shown.

My conversations with Blizzard developers revealed a reverence for the Queen and they were excited to see her out there.

“Just the way she moves around and the way she swaggers, it just really makes her personality come to life,” Helms said. “She’s there. She’s loud. She’s gonna be in your face. And she doesn’t care what you think about her, which is great.”

“She’s incredibly cunning,” added Jurgens-Fyhrie. “She’s sharp, she’s has a little bit of a sadistic edge, but she’s always having fun and the Junkers adore her and fear in equal measure.”

Beyond “The Wastelander,” expect to see Junker Queen’s story and personality fleshed out in the game itself, via dialogue among her and Overwatch’s 33 other heroes. Jurgens-Fyhrie says that Overwatch players can expect more chatter than ever between characters — not just between the Queen and her closest associates, Junkrat, Roadhog, and Wrecking Ball — boasting of some 1,800 new interaction lines coming to the game.

Junker Queen will become one of two heroes who debut in the new comic. Overwatch 2The game will launch this fall. Blizzard will release it on October 4th as a free-to play game for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5.