When this year’s winter holiday event was announced for Overwatch, Jeff Kaplan teased a long-awaited Hanzo skin that would finally be put into the game. The legendary skin, called Casual Hanzo, is an adaptation of how Hanzo had appeared in the “Reflections” Overwatch comic last year, but after waiting for a full year (and numerous fan art depictions of what they thought his skin might look like), fans weren’t happy with the translation. Here’s how Hanzo looked in the comic panel:
The complaints center around three issues. First, the Casual Hanzo skin has a grey beard that weirdly goes up and has a bald disconnect between the side of his head and his hair. That small, subtle piercing on the bridge of Hanzo’s nose was blown up and made a little too noticeable. And finally, his pants seem to be riding pretty low, giving him the appearance that his torso is abnormally long. These are the main problems that most Overwatch players have with this new skin, although you’ll hear a few other complaints scattered around.
Blizzard announced that they would be working on updating the skin to fit more with players’ expectations of how Casual Hanzo should look. You can see the comparison between the old version and new version below.
Most noticeably, Blizzard addressed the three big complaints by changing his beard color and hair line, shrinking the piercing on the bridge of his nose, and raising where the crotch of his pants sits so that he doesn’t look like he’s low riding. There may be other subtle changes as well, but these are the primary three that I noticed. Personally I think that the current version looks very different from the original image, with the updated version more in line with what players saw in “Reflections.”
Blizzard has said that the new version of the skin won’t be coming until January (likely not enough time before the holiday break to model and test the changes to ensure they don’t break anything), but once it does, the update will be retroactive and will change Casual Hanzo for anyone that obtained it. Blizzard has always been impressively responsive to Overwatch players, and quickly responding to criticism and changing a simple cosmetic shows that they put their fans first.
What do you think of the Overwatch Casual Hanzo skin changes? Have you gotten the Casual Hanzo skin yet from this year’s Winter Wonderland event?
[Source: Blizzard]
