Overwatch’s animated shorts are rather good. Thought you’d like to know, just in case you’ve been living under a rock under a truck under a landslide for the last couple of years. The latest, Mei’s “Rise and Shine,” is quite a bit different from what’s come previously and, in the above Making Of video, Blizzard explain why as they go over a few of the decisions that went into putting it together.
For the game itself, here’s everything coming in an upcoming Overwatch update.
While it isn’t particularly inciteful as to how all this comes together – spoilers, animators spend months glued to their chairs making sure Mei’s eyebrows move in the right way – it does give us a glimpse at the ambitions of the animation team. They’re not content simply making battle scenes, even though they make the best ones– they want to try new stuff.
Interestingly, there isn’t a lot of talk about the wider narrative here. They speak on creating a storyline within the individual cinematic, but not on how it ties to the larger Overwatch universe. That larger plotline seems quite fractured currently, and cinematic shorts haven’t moved beyond “Recall,” which is now a year-and-a-half old. Perhaps that’s their next step, or Blizzard are happy fleshing out character after character without ever going wider.