Overwatch‘s Tracer Receives New Victory Pose, Seemingly Inspired by Pin-Up Art

I don’t know pin-up art from my elbow, but @christianmccrea deftly identified the source here pic.twitter.com/RovfwQliYO

— BooDoo (@BooDooPerson) April 6, 2016

Blizzard just recently released a new patch for Overwatch replacing Tracer’s much criticized over-the-shoulder victory pose with one that’s a little more pin-up in style. You can see she’s still doing the whole over-the-shoulder look thing, but she also looks like she’s in mid-strut. The comparison above shows the inspiration for the new pose, which is a Billy De Vorss pin-up illustration. It feels, as the youths say, pretty cheesecake, though the jury’s still out on whether it’s an improvement or not.

You’ll remember from last week that there was more than a bit of outrage regarding a victory pose for a certain character in Blizzard’s newest game, Overwatch. Tracer, a female character described as “fun” and “silly” had an over-the-shoulder victory pose that struck one gamer as being out of character for her. In short, the pose made her seem overly sexualized, and that seemed out of place for a (again) “fun” and “silly” character.

The game’s director, Jeff Kaplan, agreed, saying they “weren’t entirely happy with the original pose, it was always one that we wrestled with creatively.” This response came after a much shorter initial response where Kaplan said, “We’ll replace the pose. We want *everyone* to feel strong and heroic in our community. The last thing we want to do is make someone feel uncomfortable, under-appreciated or misrepresented. Apologies and we’ll continue to try to do better.”

This initial response sparked a long discussion on the Battle.net forums around whether censorship was involved in the decision. Many gamers felt slighted by the removal of the pose, demanding to know why Blizzard was caving to fan responses that, to them, felt like censorship. These questions were what prompted Kaplan to post his followup where he expanded on the decision to change the pose, saying they weren’t happy with it from the beginning. He continued:

That the pose had been called into question from an appropriateness standpoint by players in our community did help influence our decision—getting that kind of feedback is part of the reason we’re holding a closed beta test—but it wasn’t the only factor. We made the decision to go with a different pose in part because we shared some of the same concerns, but also because we wanted to create something better.

Whether fans consider this new pose to be “something better” or not remains yet to be seen.

(via Eurogamer)

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