Blizzard Under Fire for Same Face Syndrome After Overwatch Reveals Its New Heroes

Blizzard has just revealed the huge changes that are coming to the game on February 10: the game is dropping the "2" in the name and getting 5 new heroes, which sounds amazing, but more than the news, players were shocked by how similar one of the characters, Anran, looks to Juno.

"How do you have a team of artists and still end up with same face syndrome as bad as this?" asked one X/Twitter user, and I couldn't put it better.

The issue is that she looks nothing like what we saw in an earlier cinematic, and at first, I really thought it was just a new Kiriko skin. There are a lot of accusations one can throw around about Blizzard being unable to make distinct Asian women or about trying to prettify its female heroes.

I'm not going down that rabbit hole, but it's sad to see the company losing its vision. So bad is the fans' rage that some even edited the image to look more like the lady presented in the original cinematic.

If you want to enjoy the chaos, there is a whole #NOTMYANRAN hashtag on X/Twitter. There is even a petition to redesign Anran, and considering the backlash, I wouldn't be surprised if Blizzard is already remodeling her.

Anran is not the only one who looks like her "older siblings." As another X/Twitter user noted, "Emre looks like Hanzo and Cassidy had a child."

Players also accuse Blizzard of "getting inspired" by other games, shamelessly copying some features. 

Despite the controversy, you can't deny that, recently, new Overwatch heroes are mostly conventionally attractive, fit, tall, and hot. It turns out, it's not (only) because of the developers' (and players') horniness. 

Senior Producer Kenny Hudson shared that it's partly due to technical reasons.

"Something that we kind of look into when we're doing our heroes is how can we make them unique, but still give them a good platform, proportionally, height, scale proportion to not only build cosmetics for them and future-proof things, but to stop the technical hurdles of other things," he said. "So, one of the things that really helps with that is if you give longer limbs, taller legs, a bigger core, it actually makes it easier for our artists to physically put new geometry on those models. And so, that's how it kind of turns out."

Wrecking Ball, for example, had the team in "crisis" mode when they tried to come up with new skins. So, Blizzard decided to focus on "something you know" when crafting new heroes, "before restructuring its creation pipeline and learning lessons that could then be used to tackle more unconventional characters," writes GameSpot.

"Now we're in this realm where we can make more Jetpack Cats because we've learned all these lessons," Hudson added.

Don't forget to subscribe to our Newsletter and join our 80 Level Talent platform, follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, Telegram, and Instagram, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.