3. Art Direction
— — Thanks, Eleni. I’m sure whatever Doctrine is up to is 100% above the level. Now, we’re going to throw it over to the Prince of Darkness or Prince of Sunshine who went dark for Hero 54, Mr. Dion Rogers.
Dion Rogers: This is awesome. Hello, everyone. It’s so great to be back at BlizzCon, introducing you all to our next hero. And I’m here to take you through the ways we made sure all that edge and elegance showed up on the outside.
The art team kept a few traits at the forefront of our minds when designing Doctrine’s overall look. No matter how brutal his crimes get, we wanted him to look dignified and polished while doing them. For us, it’s vitally important that you can tell he’s capable, intelligent, and dangerous with one look, especially in the hero trailer.
He didn’t start off that way, though. Our initial concept was more of a straightforward scientist character with a lab coat, glasses, kind of an academic vibe. As Eleni mentioned earlier, once we wondered what a vampire would look like in the world of Overwatch, we went down that road.
It was like a lightbulb went off for us. Well, maybe more of a candelabra if you’re sticking in that world. Either way, it was a breakthrough. We took the high-fantasy concept of a vampire character and married it into the tech-heavy world of Overwatch. And bringing those two worlds together led us right here. Doctrine in all this genius gothic glory.
His overall look draws from vampires in pop culture, and you can see a lot of the scientific inspiration in his final design, too. His cape intentionally looks like a lab coat. We kept the glasses because everyone knows glasses make you look pretty cool. (laughs) Beyond the drip, he looks young, doesn’t he? But we know he’s about a century old, so his facial features and expressions reflect that of an old soul.
And his cybernetic accessories send a loud message. All that tech belongs to him, was created by him, and is the materialization of his greatest weapon. His mind. Creating a design that celebrated Doctrine’s culture was really important to us. We decided to have him hail from Zimbabwe. Both to represent our community and fans from Africa and to develop a shared heritage, creating a built-in bond that gives Doomfist a believable reason to put his trust in Doctrine.
And it smooths over the awkwardness of planning a coup against Talon, I guess. We settled on this effortless hairstyle with ornaments and gold jewelry. Yet another hint: Doctrine is high-class and maybe a little high-maintenance. When thinking about how to visually represent a culture in Overwatch, we can’t pull from what the culture looks like today.
We kind of do a time jump and theorize what that culture might look like in Overwatch’s kind of optimistic future. In this case, we leaned into tech and opulence to represent Zimbabwe in Overwatch’s universe. Speaking of tech, that’s another huge part of Doctrine’s entire deal. He has a lot of interest in cybernetics attached to his arms that are all his own designs. But one specific colony(sp) rises above them all. As you can see, we went a little baddy with these designs.
Doctrine’s drones are ultra-high-tech assistants that help him build his cybernetics. They’re helpful and dutiful to their master and his allies. But these drones are much less predominant to Doctrine’s enemies. For that part, I’m going to hand it over to someone who knows a thing or two about bloodthirsty supports, our Doctrine’s hero designer, Scott Kennedy.
| BLIZZCON 2026 OVERWATCH: WHAT'S NEXT PANEL TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. Narrative Design | 3. Art Direction | 4. Hero Design | 5. Animation/Audio |
