Blizzard has said it’s discussing a visual redesign for new Overwatch hero Anran following controversy about her look, which arose after she was revealed last week.
Anran is one of the five new heroes arriving in Overwatch today (formerly Overwatch 2) as part of an expansion-like release called The Reign of Talon. Early access to Anran was available at the weekend.
The controversy is twofold, and intertwined. One: people somewhat rightly accuse Overwatch of having a same-face problem – “same face syndrome”, it’s colloquially called – whereby the female character models in particular in the game tend to have the same or similar face. Two: and this seems to be the main source of aggravation here, we’ve seen a depiction of Anran before looking notably different.
Anran is the sister of existing Overwatch hero Wuyang, and when Wuyang was introduced to the game, Anran co-starred in Wuyang’s animated short cinematic, Elemental Kin, and in Wuyang’s adjoining comic, Against the Tide. There, Anran cut a different image, one with a more believable face and a stronger sense of ferocity. It’s a presentation even Blizzard has agreed is at odds with the young, cutesy looking presentation of Anran that’s in the game now.
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Images of Anran from the animated short and comic.
Overwatch game director Aaron Keller said in a videoed message today: “The team is currently discussing what it will take to make Anran look and feel more like the fierce older sister we all envision her to be. We’re so proud of the work that our team has put into Anran and the rest of the five heroes launching in Season 1, and we agree that she can be even better if we get this aspect of her right in-game.
“We discussed sharing this with all of you last week but wanted to wait until we had confirmation of exactly what we can do. We’re hoping to make this update in Season 1 but I don’t have specifics to share just yet. Our hero models are incredibly complicated and we really need to test out what we can do.”
Keller’s comments follow unrest in the Overwatch community but also criticism from the voice actor who portrays Anran in the game, Fareeha Andersen (who didn’t say anything about this at Blizzard HQ when we met two weeks ago, perhaps understandably). Andersen’s comments cut a little deeper, calling out a wider problem with female representation and beauty standards in general.
Andersen said in a videoed message on social media that, “There was an unspoken promise [made in the animated short and comic] that said, ‘We’re going to challenge the beauty standards ransacking media these days – the Ozempic chic, the contour your nose / you have no nose / the tiniest nose. And because of that precedent, I think people feel let down.
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Anran concept art.
“Overwatch is a trailblazer at challenging that, at trying to break those moulds, at trying to explore the bounds of what it means to be good, what it looks like to be heroic. And I think the result we got says something else – it says something that leaves a bad taste in our mouths. It’s not the bold, optimistic swing that we know Overwatch to make. And it’s a look that isn’t congruent with her personality; she looks like the younger sibling, she looks more docile somehow, as the fire hero. She looks more docile than the most peacekeeping support in the game.
“She looks more docile than the most peacekeeping support in the game.”
“I’ve been seeing everyone’s redesigns – and quietly bookmarking them – but I wanted you to hear that this concern is important. This is a hill worth dying on, it’s worth speaking on, because I believe that the more we speak up about the things that truly matter to us, the more we’ll see ourselves reflected in the world around us.”
Overwatch has been commended in the past for its representations of characters from around the world. Early on, it introduced the older Egyptian lady Ana to the game, which was a type of character we had very rarely seen before. Blizzard also goes to lengths to ensure it matches actors with similar backgrounds to the characters they’re portraying, such as it did with Fareeha Andersen and Anran, and Kerem Erdinc and Emre, one of the other new characters coming to the game. Erdinc actually helped spot a Turkish Emre f-bomb problem Overwatch nearly had.
That is to say that I believe this matters to Blizzard, and the quick response from Aaron Keller here is to be commended, although it remains to be seen what Blizzard will actually do about Anran’s design. And if it alters Anran, will it also consider tweaking the faces of other heroes as well?
This week is a big week for Overwatch, which is undergoing something of a relaunch. Blizzard is moving to a kind of annual expansion release model for the game, under the guise of year-long collected storylines of content. The first is The Reign of Talon that begins/launches today, 10th February, and adds five new heroes to the game, with a further five planned over the course of the year. There are also many other changes besides – not least the dropping of the “2” from the game’s title. Overwatch, in a sense, is back.