Blizzard seems to be caught in the middle of being blasted by two sides of the Overwatch community for the infamous ‘same face’ syndrome. This comes right after the developers announced a big overhaul that seems to have successfully brought resurgence to the concurrent player count since their initial high.
Overwatch 2 dropped the number in its title, and un-ironically, that was the turning point that the game needed. Added to the fact that a bunch of new heroes were announced, the fanbase seemed to be beaming with positivity.
Until a bunch of fans from the community pointed out the obvious issue with Blizzard’s designs, which is that the characters have the same face. The major reason behind this controversy lies in the promotional material for the new character Anran, where she looks like a completely different character.
Two sides of social media reaction
Social media erupting in order to call out Blizzard over the same face issue is not something that is completely new, but this time the outrage has been echoed far and wide. A lot of users on Twitter/X had been speaking their minds, trying to understand the issue, and, in retrospect, get a reaction out of the devs.
While some of the users also took this opportunity to make fun of Blizzard. At the end, the actual voice-over artist for the character had to come out and address the issue. It seems that the devs got the message and made official suggestions about making adjustments to the facecard.
But unfortunately, this is not the end of this story, as there are always two sides to a coin. The Overwatch community has its fair share of aggressors who have taken up this opportunity to exacerbate the situation as politically motivated.
At the forefront of this ideology is the notorious Twitter/X user Grummz, who recently made a post pointing out the opinion of the Chinese community for the game. Most of whom reportedly want the original face not be changed.
Another user named 2DM_Amazing, who is an Esports caster, also seems to have shared the same sentiments about the Chinese community not wanting to have Anran’s face changed. He made a post saying “IN THE CHINESE COMMUNITY OVER 13K PLAYER VOTED AND 90% OF US SAID BIG NO!”
The Game Director came out to address the situation
At the moment its hard to gauge the motive behind opposing the original sentiments around “same face syndrome”. But with the kind of users flocking to this new side of the debate, it is not too hard to guess that the ulterior motive is just feeding off online engagement for the sake of negativity.
Either way, Overwatch game director, Aron Keller, after listening to the community, has already made the call to act on the situation. In an official video note directly from him, we got to learn that the devs are actually looking to make changes to Anran.
“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.” He said in the video.
The majority of the community reactions to this news seem to have been positive, and only time will tell if the end result of this change will be able to make both sides happy. Though there is doubt whether one of the sides will stop at this point anyway.
