Great moments in PC gaming: Setting off my first big D.Va bomb in Overwatch

Great moments in PC gaming are bite-sized celebrations of some of our favorite gaming memories.

Early on in my Overwatch career, I was a support player. I healed on Mercy and Lucio in every game and you couldn't ask me to do anything else. I've changed a lot since then; I have a good amount of hours on every hero and I primarily play damage now. But for a brief period of time in that first year, I played one tank: D.Va.

D.Va's ultimate Self-Destruct is one of Overwatch's most splashy abilities. Even if you've never touched the game, you've surely seen videos of people sending a glowing hunk of mech into the air that explodes and just erases multiple people from the map. It's a fairly easy ult to understand compared to something like Genji's Dragonblade, which has him darting around the map with a sword. Self-Destruct is a little Evangelion-inspired plugsuit pilot hitting the big red button on her mech and sending it out into the world to hug people, fatally.

My first big D.Va bomb was unexpected. I'd been regularly playing with a group of folks I met in-game and I got stuck in the tank role. This was early enough that the high-level strategy of Overwatch hadn't clicked with me yet. I heard people talk about "combining ults", like grabbing an entire enemy team with Zarya's Graviton Surge and sending Hanzo's damaging dragon spirits through it, but I had zero context for what that actually looked like until this one game on the escort map Dorado.

There were 40 seconds left and we were defending the first point. The enemy team was rolling up the first hill and our Mei dropped her Blizzard, slowing everyone caught in it and freezing them solid. At that moment, it clicked. Frozen enemies + big bomb = Play of the Game. I fired my boosters in the Blizzard's direction, stopped, and plopped my mech in the middle of the team like a dog drops a toy. Boom. Quintuple Kill, emote, Play of the Game.

I had never been so proud of an ult before that moment. In the span of a few seconds, everything came together and I executed it. It was glorious. It was one of the first moments where I peered a little deeper into the depth of Overwatch's strategy and felt how exciting it was to execute on that. Now, 3,000 hours later and playing its sequel, I'm still searching for these moments.