What Is Junkertown? Overwatch's Newest Payload Map In Radiated Australia

The data miners were right – Overwatch’s newest map is Junkertown. Blizzard just revealed a new teaser for the first new Payload map since the game’s release and it looks awesome. In it, we can hear the voice over of someone who claims to be the “queen” telling the denizens of this wasteland to rise up and fight against the omnic oppression. Who the queen is and what she does while sitting on her throne still remains to be seen, though I’m hoping that she could be the newest hero. The Junker duo could really use another pair of hands to help on their heists.

The developers really spent their time showing off Roadhog and Junkrat’s home, complete with a workstation to work on bombs, a stage and a loot room that even Smaug would be jealous of. There are ripped off omnic arms littering the grounds of one chamber, really showing how much the denizens of the Australian wastes really hate the omnics of the Overwatch universe. There’s a reason for that massive amount of hatred and disgust and for that, we have to go back to the Omnic War.

Robots and humans originally lived alongside each other in relative peace – Bastion robots weren’t zooming around murdering people yet. Then the Omnica Corporation built factories that were sentient and could pump out entire work forces with ease, called Omniums. These Omniums were built all over the world, but were eventually taken offline after the Omnica Corporation was convicted of corporate fraud. Years later, the Omniums switched themselves back on and starting creating Omnics to fight human beings.

The Omnic War killed thousands and it took the combined forces of every military around the world and the newly developed Overwatch team to take them out. After the war, humans wanted to make peace with the omnics, giving them a peace offering in exchange for avoiding any further conflict. One Omnium was built in the Australian desert and it was given to the Omnics to do with as they please. Australians who had seen the destruction wrought by the Omnics hated this idea and started to fight back. Roadhog and a group of fellow fighters formed the Australian Liberation Front, with the sole purpose of ending the Omnics once and for all.

In a moment of insane stupidity, the ALF sabotaged the Omnium’s fusion core, causing it to explode. A nuclear level strike devastated the continent, turning Australia into an uninhabitable nuclear wasteland. The people who stayed in this hellscape were called Junkers, needing augmentations and breathing masks just to stay alive. They set up outposts, where they created their own communities without Omnic help.

Junkertown is the first time we’ve seen what Australia actually looks like, and it’s grim. Combining the aesthetic of Mad Max with Overwatch really shows us the grittier side of the game. The shiny streets of Oasis and Numbani, where Omnics are treated as equals, are in stark contrast to the sandy, rusty, grungy roads of Junkertown. In the mini-cinematic, that plays more like Looney Tunes cartoon than an Overwatch short.

We don’t even get to see the inside of the place. Fans dying to get an inside look at the outpost are going to have wait until the map pops up on the PTR sometime on Tuesday.