// KOTAKU — GAMING
Blizzard Swears Overwatch’s New Mech Hero Isn’t ‘D.Va 2.0’
Overwatch’s D.Va, one of the original and arguably most iconic heroes in the game’s roster, is quite the tough act to follow, but that’s just what the game’s next hero has to do. Yuna “D.Mon” Lee, the new tank character joining the game’s roster in season four on August 11, is the second mech-based hero after D.Va. Like her comrade, D.Mon is an ex-esports-player-turned-mech-pilot, and adding another mech tank to the game, where D.Va’s play style is one of the most distinct, presented a challenge for the team at Blizzard: How could they add a character to the roster that would be able to differentiate herself from D.Va, while still maintaining the identity of Korea’s MEKA Squad fighters?
In a roundtable interview with members of the Overwatch team, narrative designer Eleni Rivera explained that, despite both characters occupying the same in-game tank role and reliance on a mech to fight, the difference between the two esports-players-turned-soldiers is best illustrated by talking about how gamers can gravitate toward different styles of play and archetypes.
“I think one of the biggest things is they both came from this esports champion league. So gaming is a really big core of both of them, but we wanted to make sure that they were very distinct. The way that you do that is you think about two different types of gamers, right? You’ve got your [In-game leader], but then you’ve got the person who’s like, ‘I’m ready to just be the support,’ or maybe ‘I’m just gonna tank.’ And I think that that’s kind of where we went with Yuna and Hana, and that’s where we wanted to differentiate them, so they can still stand out.”
D.Va’s playstyle is to dive in and out, peppering enemies with missiles and disrupting formations by nuking her mech over a crowded space. D.Mon is more akin to a character like Reinhardt, in that she uses a sword and shield, making her a melee character as opposed to D.Va’s more shooter-based kit. According to Blizzard, this is meant to play into D.Mon’s leadership role in the MEKA squad. Narratively, it kind of illustrates how the two are different as well. D.Va has gone off on her own as a member of Overwatch, but D.Mon has stayed in Busan as a steadfast leader to her crew, and mechanically it opened up space to find what a different mech archetype could look like in the game.
“We wanted to expand on the melee tank side of things,” senior game producer Kenny Hudson says. “Reinhardt has been an insanely fun character for 10 years, and we wanted to do another kind of take on that and give those players who like to play up close and personal with their tanks more to choose from. D.Mon’s going to kind of have the same counters as either Rein or Doomfist or those other kind of melee tanks—or semi-melee tanks, in Doomfist’s case—where verticality is going to be the counter, but you’re going to have really good horizontal movement and the ability to kind of flank a little, still be in front, but take up more physical space and maybe set the rules of engagement a bit more with D.Mon. So we really wanted to explore what happens when you give a melee tank a little bit more mobility, but you put it on a resource and you kind of block what she can do when she has that mobility.”
Finding that archetype was a bit of a process. The team looked to other mech media like Armored Core and Gundam for inspiration to nail down the specifics that make her distinct, such as her swordplay and her horizontal slide. D.Mon has appeared in previous Overwatch lore, typically as a supporting character in D.Va’s storyline, and that included artwork showing her with a sword and shield. But while that was always going to be part of her kit, it wasn’t always as prevalent.
“The big swap that we made was D.Mon’s sword and gun actually used to be swapped and the sword was actually on a cooldown,” Hudson says. “One of the problems that we ran into there was having the sword swing feel natural while on a button ability and having it kind of link up