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Back in 2023, Overwatch harnessed the dread power of K-Pop, releasing a collaboration with Le Sserafim that included a debut song, five hero skins, and a new game mode. A lot has changed in the last couple of years, but one thing that has stayed steadfast is the Overwatch team’s love for K-pop collaborations, as we’ll be getting a whole new Le Sserafim event next week.
“When it comes to returning collaborations, we never say never,” Aimee Dennett, associate director of product management, tells me. “We don’t want to bring something back just for the sake of bringing something back, but there’s no prior collaboration where we’d say, ‘Oh, we’ll never do that again.'”
The upcoming collab with Le Sserafim will feature recolours for all the original skins from the 2023 event and provide five new themed skins for players to snag. This time, the heroes attending the Le Sserafim concert will be Ash, Juno, Mercy, Illari, and D.Va (who is making a re-appearance).
Just like the first collaboration, Le Sserafim helped the Overwatch 2 team pick out the best heroes for this one. “They play Overwatch, and they can pick characters that they like playing or they feel suits them personally,” Dion Rogers, Overwatch art director, says. “You know, they’re inspired by a lot of the heroes in the game, too. They really loved Juno when they saw her release to the game. So this is something that we discuss pretty closely with them.”
So, Juno was pretty much a dead-set from the start, but Ash was also one of the first picks for the collaboration, thanks to a cameo in the Perfect Night Overwatch 2 cinematic. Towards the end of the video, we see Ash’s loyal omnic companion, B.O.B., working as a security guard at the Le Sserafim concert: “We thought, ‘God, we have to make that a skin, ‘” Dennett says. “So of course, Ash got a skin this time around.”
The upcoming collab with Le Sserafim will feature recolours for all the original skins from the 2023 event and provide five new themed skins for players to snag. This time, the heroes attending the Le Sserafim concert will be Ash, Juno, Mercy, Illari, and D.Va (who is making a re-appearance).
Just like the first collaboration, Le Sserafim helped the Overwatch 2 team pick out the best heroes for this one. “They play Overwatch, and they can pick characters that they like playing or they feel suits them personally,” Dion Rogers, Overwatch art director, says. “You know, they’re inspired by a lot of the heroes in the game, too. They really loved Juno when they saw her release to the game. So this is something that we discuss pretty closely with them.”
So, Juno was pretty much a dead-set from the start, but Ash was also one of the first picks for the collaboration, thanks to a cameo in the Perfect Night Overwatch 2 cinematic. Towards the end of the video, we see Ash’s loyal omnic companion, B.O.B., working as a security guard at the Le Sserafim concert: “We thought, ‘God, we have to make that a skin, ‘” Dennett says. “So of course, Ash got a skin this time around.”
Some characters are easier than others to create a casual outfit for.
Dion Rogers, Overwatch 2 art director
While the lineup of skins is pretty great, I still can’t help but feel like we’re missing out on a Roadhog K-pop skin. Last time, Junkrat got an honorary Le Sserafim skin despite not appearing in the cinematic, so I was holding out hope that he attended the concert with his silent buddy. But giving Roadhog a casual K-pop skin isn’t as straightforward as I’d like to imagine.
“Some characters are easier than others to create a casual outfit for,” Rogers says. “A lot of characters have a base skin with a lot of armor and weaponry, and so we need to maintain their silhouette and the read for gameplay reasons. So, there are many characters that are harder than others to bring down to a more casual outfit. Reinhardt, for example, is a very difficult character. What’s a normal day for Reinhardt?
“Roadhog is also pretty hard. Sometimes, the character’s lack of armor also makes it difficult. Having some kind of starting point just makes it a lot easier to maintain their silhouettes and their gameplay reads while, you know, putting on a new outfit.”
Changing the silhouette of a character would be incredibly damaging in Overwatch 2. Most of the time, you only catch fleeting glimpses of heroes mid-game, and the fights are so fast that players need to be able to identify heroes and their abilities straight away. Voice lines can help with this—I now have an immediate reflex to fade as Moira if I hear “Hammer Down”—but the visual element is still incredibly important.
“So Mercy, for example, her wings are a key part of her silhouette,” Rogers explains. “So sometimes, if we talk to a collaborator and they’re like, ‘Oh, can we remove the wings?’ We’re like, ‘Oh, no.'” Seeing Mercy without her wings could be pretty jarring at first as this is a quick indicator that most players subconsciously look for during matches. But you’d also need to keep other visual features like the animation for her rez ability so that the enemy team knows what’s going on and that they need to try to interrupt it.
Luckily, as this was Overwatch 2’s second collaboration with Le Sserafim, none of these issues really came up. “This is what makes the second collaboration with Le Sserafim really fun because they really understand this aspect already going into it,” Rogers says. “So a ton of our conversations become about fashion and what’s cool to make, instead of overcoming the technical aspects.”
Blizzard Korea is the team responsible for all of these Le Sserafim skins, and they seem ideally suited for the job. “These guys are so in touch with fashion influences and the scene there, they become the perfect fit to do something like this,” Rogers says. “Obviously, they incorporated a bunch of hip hop and street wear this time. They’re able to see the trends there and apply them to the skins.”
The first set of Le Sserafim skins were really cool, but these new ones clearly have more real-world influences. They are also pretty experimental with the character design, without changing important signifiers of the heroes. Illari’s skin is particularly transformative, so much so that I had to do a double take when I first saw it.
The new skins also contain a couple of Easter eggs, one of which was made by one of the members of Le Sserafim. “The little plushie that’s attached to Mercy’s key chain is actually a character design from Sakura, one of the Le Sserafim artists,” Dennett says. D.Va’s spiky bun is something that the artists over at Blizzard Korea picked from current trends, and the RGB weapon glow is inspired by the neon aesthetic in Le Sserafim’s Crazy music video.
Despite the technical issues explained above, Overwatch 2 has been pushing the boat out when it comes to skins for some time now. It all really started with the new mythic skins that were introduced in Overwatch 2’s battle pass, like the Reaper Anubis skin or the Widowmaker Spellbinder mythic, which both added particle effects to skins and gave Blizzard artists the opportunity to experiment in ways that previously just weren’t available. Since then, we’ve also seen particle effects in some legendary skins, like the money spilling out of Soldier: 76’s bag in the Heist skin.
“As we go on with Overwatch, we wanted to actually be a little bit more transformative with skins,” Rogers says. Before, the team was almost too beholden to conforming to a strict set of guidelines of what was possible and what wasn’t. “It created a smaller box for us to work in. So now we just kind of break away from that a bit more than we usually do. There’s this idea to be as transformative as possible while keeping the identity of the hero. So that’s why you’re starting to see a bit more of us playing with VFX.”
Overwatch has always had really great skins— Ana’s Wasteland skin, Genji’s Oni skin, and D.Va’s Shin-Ryeong skin are just a few standout examples among the old classics. But it’s great to see that almost 10 years after its release, the Overwatch team is still experimenting with styles and pushing for even better designs.
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Kurt Indovina
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