Blizzard Admits They Dropped the Ball on Mei's Holiday Skin

It's no surprise that Overwatch's special events kind of center around one or two of the characters. During the Summer Games, Lucio got an exclusive brawl and a legendary skin. The same was true for the antagonists of Halloween's Junkenstein's Revenge. For the Winter Holiday event, Blizzard went with the obvious choice: Mei. She is currently the star of her very own (and terribly underwhelming) brawl. She also has a brand new, legendary skin for the first time since launch. And, as you probably guessed, that new skin isn't exactly impressive.



Yeah, it's festive and all. That part's fine. The issue players have is that she's dressed exactly the same as her default skin. The only change is a color swap and a Santa hat. This, obviously, has been pretty disappointing for those looking forward to Mei's first event. The fact that this skin is considered legendary just rubs salt on the wound. If anyone wants this palette-swapped model of Mei, they either have to fork over 3,000 credits or take their chances with loot boxes.

The cries of angry players did not go unanswered. Even Blizzard's own Jeff Kaplan answered the disappointment with a message on the Overwatch forums. In short, it says "our bad."

Sorry you are disappointed with Meis winter skin. We dont have a specific rule for what makes something Legendary or Epic. We just sort of make a gut call based off of what we think is cool. Coolness is very subjective, and based off of the community reaction it seems like our gauge was off on this one. Our reasoning for it being Legendary was that we completely redid the visual effects for Cryo-Freeze (we turned the ice block into a snowman). We thought that was pretty special and we had done it specifically based on community suggestions from months ago when people were speculating that we might have a winter event. Apparently, lots of people dont agree with us and thats ok. Its all good feedback and were learning something for future events.

More thought went into Mei's new skin than just the costume. One hidden gem about it is that it completely changes her ice block move. Players with the skin now take the form of a crude snowman instead of just an ugly block of ice. When considering that, it's a bit easier to understand why they thought that costume was enough to win fans over. Regardless, it still looks a bit like Blizzard phoned it in on her holiday costume design.