Our community seems to like getting Overwatch skins from Overwatch but also loves our skin ideas for heroes like Zarya. It’s a balancing act.

First off, I want to address the art portion. I’m seeing a lot of good discussion in here but wanted to clear some things up. I want to refer you to this answer from our Q&A a few weeks back

We get any assets and references that would be helpful in the construction of the Heroes model. Often times for Overwatch this is the full High polygon asset. We then rebuild a lot of that high poly mesh to fit the heroes style. Specifically with Genji, it took a lot of removing smaller details and adding some more bulk to places like his shoulders and forearms. Then creating a low poly mesh from the reconstructed high poly is another challenge as the polygon count for Overwatch's models can be 3 times more than a base hero in Heroes. Simplifying something of that caliber takes a lot of effort even though it may look "copy paste." We want to stay true to the flavor Overwatch established.

Overwatch and Heroes have two different pipelines. If we were to take their assets and just throw them in our game there are a couple issues we run into.

• Texture maps: Overwatch uses a method called PBR! This gives materials a real world jumping off point for how light interacts with it. But because of this the textures have to be authored in a way that takes advantage of that system. Our players play Heroes on low to Ultra settings. Because of this our textures have to be authored in a way that gives our players who play on Low a good looking option with a single texture color map while maintaining fidelity at the ultra setting. We spend time hand painting shading where this would be unconventional for the PBR workflow.

• Scale: Importing a model from Overwatch to Heroes means we have to adjust how big the model appears. A straight port will be super tiny. We have to scale it up. Next we have to look at the character scale next to each of our Heroes. I’m sure you’ve noticed the size discrepancy between Azmodan and Murky. Murky is larger than he would be and Azmodan is much smaller than he would be if they were actual size. We have to find the right height for the best read. That’s not where this stops though. We then have to look at the micro details which the above link/quote references. Culling a lot of the smaller stuff and bulking up other elements so that the hero then reads in our camera view.

• Polycount: Overwatch and Heroes have different polycount requirements. As I mentioned, Overwatch’s heroes can be 3 times more in polycount than a Heroes character. Reduction of those assets takes some time.

There’s a little bit more to that but that’s the basics.

Now as to why Officer D.Va isn’t here yet We thought a Goliath skin would be a must for D.Va and really liked that it filled a SC2 meta want from the Overwatch community. There is also a lot of complexity in aligning schedules for two different projects such as Overwatch and Heroes. For example. Overwatch may have time close to the end of their dev cycle to finish a model. Let’s say we need that model in the same time frame to make sure our models closely resemble each other. From a production standpoint this makes things a little complicated and more strenuous between all departments ranging from production, to art, to tech art and implementation. Larger time scales are generally required for something like this and sometimes it just doesn’t fall in line for a specific release. But the good thing about having the Heroes release cadence is that we can release it when its ready and on a 3-4 week release cycle we can get content out as soon as it is ready. Officer D.Va may come to Heroes some day.