Battle for Olympus - Narrative Design

As a senior narrative designer on Overwatch 2, my responsibilities include writing and recording voice lines, coming up with new characters, authoring supportive lore, and a ton of game design and implementation in our wonderful internal toolkit.

The Greek Mythology-themed “Battle for Olympus” event in Season 2 was a great example of a typical assignment for me in the post-launch world. I was responsible for supporting this event from a Narrative Design perspective, including:

• Adapting the personalities of 7 heroes to their Greek mythology personas — I aimed to maintain the recognizable identity of each hero while adding lots of fun new interactions and stories between them, drawing on the rich source material of Greek mythology

  • E.g. Pharah became Hades, Ramattra became Poseidon, and Junker Queen became Zeus; lines for scoring kills between these characters referenced their sibling rivalry…

• Developing a narrative frame for a free-for-all game mode in which gods and monsters battled for throne of Olympus

• Writing many skin-specific voice lines for each hero featured in the event

• Writing a bombastic Zeus Junker Queen announcer for the Battle for Olympus free-for-all mode

• Guiding voice sessions with actors and directors to record all of the above

• Hooking all the new lines up via the Overwatch team’s proprietary visual scripting toolkit

Player reception to this work was highly positive, leading to much discussion on social media!