Blizzard explains visual updates to Overwatch's Anran
Overwatch game director Aaron Keller has released a video walking through the visual updates to Anran, one of the latest characters introduced in the online shooter, after its original design sparked online backlash from both the fanbase and the character's own voice actor.
"She didn't fully land as the fiery and fierce sister of Wuyang that we hoped she would," reads the accompanying text on the social media post. The update, which will be applied on April 14, had the team focusing on "strengthening her overall presence."
"We think she could come across older and that her original version was too innocent and playful," Keller says on the video. "Anran is confident, determined, fierce, and a natural born leader, and we want her visuals in game to convey that personality.
The visual tweaks include changes to Anran's eyes, eyebrows, and mouth, with the goal being to "move away from that baby face look and expression" to a more "sincere" and "mature" look. For this, the team has also applied a posture change.
As explained in some comparative images, Anran now features a "more focused look" to her eyes. Her right eyebrow was raised to show more confidence with a smirk, while her face now also has darker shading and freckles. Then, her cheeks and jaw have been defined with a slightly wider smile and mouth.
Image via Blizzard
In February, the criticisms around Anran, a character of Chinese nationality, revolved around what fans call the "same face syndrome," pointing out that character design in Overwatch, especially for East Asian women characters, has gotten homogeneous.
As Kotaku reported at the time, Anran's final design ended up being fairly similar to characters Kiriko and Juno, discarding the sharper facial features and longer nose seen on promotional videos. The final result included a much rounder face, with a shrunken-down nose in a similar fashion to Kiriko and Juno. Alongside complaints from the community, Fareeha Andersen—the voice actor behind Anran—expressed her disappointment over the character's design differences via her personal TikTok account.
"I got to mourn Anran between the design I had hoped for her and the design we ended up with," Andersen said at the time. "Because I think in her comic and the cinematic Elemental Kin, there was a precedent set by it. There was an unspoken promise that said, 'We are going to challenge the beauty standards plaguing, ransacking media these days,' right? The Ozempic-chic, the 'contour your nose, you have no nose, the tiniest nose,' and I think because of that precedence, people feel understandably let down."
Now, in a response to the newly released video, Andersen thanked Blizzard for the change. "Her new look is so STRIKING and you all did so well especially within the tech limitations at hand. I'm so happy and grateful this happened."
In other Overwatch-related news, developers at the studio formed a nearly 200-person union at Blizzard in May of last year. Meanwhile, Redhill Games, which was a co-developer of Overwatch 2 at the time, made an undisclosed number of job cuts in November following the announcement of a restructuring program. And then, last week, Nexon entered a publishing agreement with Blizzard for Overwatch in Korea.
