Blizzard released the newest cosmetics bundle for Overwatch 2, one that the players seem not amused by! The Floral Dreams Mega Bundle dropped in the store today, consisting of floral-themed skins. But the real stunner?: a new Ana skin has everyone scratching their heads. What happened to grandma’s face?
The official PlayOverwatch tweet: “When Mother Nature’s in full bloom, prepare to meet your doom” with flower emojis and hype language. Rather than create hype, the reply section turned into a whole roast fest. Players instantly noticed that something was off with Ana’s facial animations in the promos.
Strafe Esports were perhaps amongst the first groups to call out: “Yo, can we get Ana’s face actually looking like Ana? That animation’s off 😅” And they definitely weren’t alone in this. Several more joined in complaining about the character model in not resembling the Ana they know and love.
Others were afraid it could only be an issue if it happened to females. That got Tea going, and she replied, “Soldier just became a school student last season, no one cared. Reaper’s getting another young skin this season, no one cares. Kinda wild that everything’s only ever an issue with female characters for you guys.”
But those are just a few more issues players have. Another one being the pricing, which is also getting roasted mercilessly. Many users have been vocal on this “$50 for this is crazy” pricing scheme that Overwatch 2 has decided upon for these types of cosmetic bundles. Nicoslayerr summed it up: “these skins are actually decent for once but why are you guys so fucking greedy charging essentially $20 for each one?”
The problem should be fixed before they go on sale. HiltonTitt is straight-out telling Blizzard: “Please do not advertise the Ana skin until you actually fix the issues with the skin.”
Criticism lands on a couple of skins other than Ana as needing fixes as well, in the comments. “Can yall stop slimming down certain heros? That is not the same young Ana model from ow 1. And yall need to fix dokiwatch Brig 😔 said militia_png, so it’s a wider pattern the players are starting to notice concerning changes to character models in OW2.
The weirdest part of all? As far as I can tell, IDs for the actual in-game elements of the skins seem fine? Like, floral theme is pretty neat, and the effects look pretty good to me at least. Killing the entire vibe, though, is your character’s face looking like it belongs to somebody else.
This has also given rise to considerably more bad press on Blizzard’s monetization strategy for Overwatch 2, and naturally, many more cases join the fray. Gamers are tired of forking out huge sums of money for sub-par cosmetics. So, when a lot of people have been pointing ad nauseam to the same problems with Ana’s face, perhaps this cannot be a one-man opinion; there’s more than one thing wrong somewhere in that character model.
The telling aspect of that was how fast the community mobilized around the controversy. Only hours after the tweet went out, dozens of players were already getting to work on the facial animations and pricing. Such immediately negative awareness is a sign of how much attention the Overwatch players are paying to these cosmetics releases and how loud they are with their opinion.
The situation then opens bigger questions about character consistency and visual integrity from Blizzard across all heroes. If Ana doesn’t look like Ana anymore, then what even is the value of character-specific cosmetics?
Heck, that’s all players really want: for their favorites to look like themselves, especially when they’re shelling real-world currency for those far-from-free things. Floral Dreams is really nice with pretty flowers and the effects, but if something’s not right with Ana’s face, that price tag is quite hard to justify.
Maybe Blizzard will patch these things out? Or maybe they’ll just keep ignoring this for now and churn out more expensive bundles. We’ll see, but until then, the Overwatch community is not shy about expressing their feelings regarding the newest store item.
