Blizzard is about to drop five new heroes into Overwatch at once. That quintet of newcomers will include Jetpack Cat, a Support-class hero who has a decade-long history and was once deemed “too ridiculous for Overwatch.” But things have changed a lot since Jetpack Cat was originally ideated for and rejected from the game’s roster of playable heroes. A flying furball fighting alongside Reaper and Tracer no longer seems unreasonable.
Jetpack Cat will be the third playable animal on the Overwatch roster, following launch hero Winston and Wrecking Ball, who was added to the game in 2018. Jetpack Cat, also known as Fika, will bring new mechanics to the game as Overwatch‘s first permanent-flight hero who can also tether to her teammates and fly them around the map. Jetpack Cat can also, devastatingly, pick up her enemies, dropping them into unfavorable positions or to their deaths by flinging them off the map. The flying cat’s going to create some chaos and some inventive plays, based on my hands-on time with (and against) her.
Image: Blizzard Entertainment
As a support character, Jetpack Cat’s primary function is to heal her teammates. Like Juno, her primary fire, Biotic Pawjectiles, both heals allies and damages enemies. Another healing ability, Purr, has Jetpack Cat emit a healing pulse that can also knock back opponents. She’s also highly mobile, thanks to her Frenetic Flight ability that lets her accelerate quickly. To be clear, all of Jetpack Cat’s abilities stem from the jet-propulsion rig that she flies around in. It was invented by another hero, Brigitte, who brought in Fika as a stray cat and outfitted her with a flying contraption.
Way back in 2017, former Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan revealed the existence of Jetpack Cat as a hero concept for the game. But at the time, Kaplan said, the flying cat didn’t feel like a good fit for Overwatch‘s narrative. Jetpack Cat “felt like we were slipping out of the universe,” Kaplan explained at BlizzCon 2017, where he revealed early concept art of the then-scrapped character.
Earlier iterations of Jetpack Cat envisioned the feline as either a heroic special agent or as a lazy fat cat who used the jetpack like a La-Z-Boy. The final version, set to be released on Feb. 10 with Overwatch season 1, presents Fika as an inquisitive house cat who plays with her jetpack like a toy.
Oh, and veteran actor Jennifer Hale, who also voices Ashe in Overwatch, is voicing her.
During a recent visit to Blizzard, Polygon got hands-on with Jetpack Cat and spent time with the developers who brought her to life. Art director Dion Rogers explained why now felt like the right time to bring Jetpack Cat to life — and why a flying cat no longer felt “too ridiculous for Overwatch.”
“Overwatch was about a year old [when Kaplan said that] and so we’re still defining the world,” Rogers said. “We were still discovering what makes sense for Overwatch. I can imagine, in that moment, Jeff would probably be like, Nah, a cat doesn’t work, right? But then Wrecking Ball comes along, and you can see we kind of piggybacked Winston’s story to kind of justify who Wrecking Ball was. As we went on with Overwatch, we learned for things to work, they just needed to be grounded a bit. It needs to be grounded in science or some sort of real-life thing.”
Jetpack Cat’s Support abilitiesImage: Blizzard Entertainment
Exactly how Jetpack Cat will be further grounded hasn’t been revealed, but Rogers hinted that Fika may be “suspiciously” smart.
“We already have two animal characters in the game,” he explained. “Winston’s basically a human, he was very intelligent as an ape. And then Hammond, he’s actually very intelligent. He just speaks through his robot. So we also wanted a cat not to be that. It’s not another animal that had some scientific experiment that made [her] smart. […] People who own cats, you realize [that] we feed them, we change their little box, we allow them to sit in our laps. They’re smarter than they appear. We wanted to inject that. How do we make this cat that looks suspiciously smart, basically?”
“You will see as you play the game, or hear the things that the cat does, that might reveal a little bit more about the cat. We’ll see a journey [and] why the cat exists in the world. But [Jeff Kaplan’s] comment was correct at the time: We were still discovering the universe and how things fit in. But we definitely want a universe that anything can happen in.”
