Only a few weeks removed from their second LE SSERAFIM collab, Overwatch 2 has officially rolled back the curtain on the next big collaboration for the game by revealing Overwatch 2 x Gundam Wing. Described by the team as a “bucket list item,” Gundam fans will get to see some fan-favorite Gunpla brought to life in a way that only Overwatch 2 can. Bringing with it four brand new skins, the Overwatch 2 partnership with Bandai’s fan-favorite property is perhaps the most unique of all the collabs that they’ve done, in part because of some new ideas the team is bringing to life as well as surprising boundaries that they’ve decided to push).
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ComicBook had the opportunity to sit down with some members of the Overwatch 2 dev team to dig into the brand new skins that players will be able to grab when the collab goes live on Tuesday, April 29, as well as the ones that they sketched out and considered but had to leave behind.
When the Overwatch 2 x Gundam Wing collab arrives, it will include four all-new Legendary skins, including: Mercy as Wing Zero, Ramattra as Epyon, Soldier: 76 as Tallgeese, and Reaper as Deathscythe. Aimee Dennett, the Associate Director of Product Management for Overwatch 2, revealed that these specific skins presented a unique challenge compared to others because of the hard surfaces and precise designs of Gunpla models and figures. With that comes perhaps the biggest distinct change in the Overwatch 2 team’s philosophy on collabs: they’re more willing to be transformative for their characters.
“Our perspective on that has changed a lot,” Dennett said. “When we first started, it was really important that we maintain the trust of our players, that we’re still going to respect the Overwatch characters. We didn’t want to lose that at all, and so we were very careful about ‘They’re cosplaying, they’re wearing outfits, etc.’ We still keep that perspective because we think it’s the right one.”
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Dennett used the most recent LE SSERAFIM collab as an example of when the team wouldn’t be “totally transformative” about the new looks for the character’s skins. Gundam Wing, on the other hand, presented brand new potential.
“(Gundam Wing) gives us an opportunity to go a little farther than we normally would,” Dennett added. “And I think we’re more willing to take those kinds of risks.”
This is no more apparent in the Gundam Wing skins than with the inclusion of Mercy as Wing Zero. Overwatch 2 Art Director Dion Rogers revealed that the team challenged themselves to make a skin for Mercy that almost fully replaced her model and didn’t even show any of the character’s actual human features. Not having a character’s face on a skin reveals a major departure for the team’s comfort level in collabs, but also doesn’t take away from the iconic silhouettes for each.
“Characters like Mercy, because of her wings, it’s just a big tell on her. There’s no doubt who it is,” Rogers said. “In this case, I think this is the first skin where we fully replaced Mercy. You don’t actually see her skin, her face is gone. But her wings allow us to be that transformative with her because the wings are always there. As long as we keep the wings there, players will recognize the hero.”
The choice by the team to make Ramattra as Epyon was one that Rogers said the team “heavily demanded” be included in the line-up for Overwatch 2 x Gundam Wing.
“I don’t think we could actually have chosen a different hero based on some of the fans,” Rogers said with a laugh. “I’m familiar with Gundam, but there’s people on the team that are very passionate about it.”
As fans might expect, Ramattra having two different forms in game does present a unique challenge for the Overwatch 2 dev team, but taking an Omnic character and making him into Gundam, however, made a lot of sense. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for his fellow Omnics, like Zenyatta, Bastion, and Echo.
“The Omnic heroes are a little more difficult to be as transformative as we want it to be,” Rogers added.
Overwatch 2 players will also notice little details in the Gundam Wing skins that harken to specific elements of each Gundam model. Wing Zero, for example, has a notable gauntlet on the Gundam itself, which the team incorporated into Mercy’s Caduceus staff. Reaper as Deathscythe is another skin where elements of the Gundam have been incorporated into his weapons on screen through smaller model details and new VFX. Though the Overwatch 2 devs couldn’t just give Reaper a scythe in-game to maintain consistency with the Gundam, they did find ways to incorporate it into some of his cosmetics that will also be released with the collab.
“You’ll see that in a lot of his cosmetics, like his play of the games and some of his victory poses actually feature, because we couldn’t really take away his shotguns,” Rogers said. “But we were able to showcase a little bit more through like the victory poses and the highlight intros. And we kind of take it case by case, actually, now.”
“Some of the other cosmetics like the play of the games, et cetera, those are really good opportunities for us to maintain the iconography of the IP, while still keeping our gameplay, keeping the integrity,” Dennett added.
Rogers teased that Soldier: 76 as Tallgeese was the “second most heavily demanded character” by the Gundam fans on the Overwatch 2 team. Like Mercy, the Soldier: 76 Tallgeese skin really represents a shift by the team in being even more transformative than they otherwise would have been even just a year ago. For Soldier: 76, that comes down to shifting him from a character wearing a jacket and heavy pants to one with a metal shield on his back and a centurion mohawk helmet. It’s a big change, visually.
“It speaks to part of the goals that we’re trying to do as we go forward. How transformative can we be while retaining the hero?” Rogers said. “Enough in his silhouette and animations that players recognize him, but they really get the fantasy of the IP collab. So he just fit that really well. Also demanded by the team that that’s the guy and that’s the mobile suit.”
An even deeper element of this transformative shift that the Overwatch 2 team is working with now goes into the level of detail present in Gunpla models that they found ways to incorporate into the skins. Gundams stand upwards of 50 feet tall in the context of the shows that they exist in, but the characters in Overwatch 2 are largely regular-human sized.
Rogers noted that this presented yet another unique challenge for the team compared to previous collabs. They managed to really dig into it by just going out and buying Gunpla kits to get a feel for the individual pieces that go into making them, and how they could apply those into the in-game skins.
“We spent a lot of time with the scale issue of ‘make a big guy look small, but feel like the big guy,’” Rogers said.
Players may notice that the four characters getting skins in this collab have all previously had a skin from other collaborations, meaning a handful of heroes remain that still haven’t gotten a collab skin. One Overwatch 2 hero that still hasn’t received a collab skin, but who got very close with Gundam Wing, was Ana. Art was put together to give Ana the Tallgeese skin, partially because their weapons are so similar, but when placed next to Soldier 76 as Tallgeese, it became clear which was the better fit.
“The biggest thing for us is we want to go with the best fit,” Dennett said. “We don’t want to go with a hero just because, ‘Oh, well, they haven’t had it yet.’ Ana was a good example of that. We’ve been dying to give Ana a collaboration skin. It just hasn’t happened yet…But then when you looked at Soldier versus Ana side by side, it was really clear that Soldier was the way to go. if there’s a tie break, like let’s say the two heroes look amazing, almost exactly the same. It would probably go to the hero that hasn’t had one. But that generally doesn’t happen. It’s usually a no-brainer.’”
Rogers concurred that a lot of attempts are made by the art team to figure out heroes that work within the proposed collab. Another that fell by the wayside for the Gundam Wing was Mauga as Heavy Arms, something fans seemed to immediately theorize when the collab was first revealed to the world.
“Once we actually drew (Mauga as Heavy Arms) out, it didn’t feel quite right,” Dennett said.
Regarding Overwatch 2 heroes that don’t currently have a skin, Dennett did offer a tease for Lifeweaver mains that their hero will be getting a collab skin at some point, just not this time.
The new Overwatch 2 x Gundam Wing collab arrives in game on Tuesday, April 29.
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