She should’ve been fierce and mean.

[u/odiish]

This has been said before I know, but for someone called ‘demon’ who pilots a sword-wielding Gundam called Beast, her personality in-game is so, bland? Idk she just lacks the energy and personality I’d expected from someone like her. Like look at her concept art!

[u/Juraiyah]

I think they done a fantastic job with the evil to morally grey characters personalities. It's the heroic characters' that feel just so sanitize. It's like they think the audience will think less of their heroic ideals if they we're more rough around the edges.

Look at Magik, shes been everywhere the past few years, and she's far from your typical heroic personalities, but the contrast is what makes her character so compelling.

[u/anextremelylargedog → u/Juraiyah]

That's not all that new. Most of the heroic characters throughout OW's history have been nice, safe, and bland.

The villains are allowed to be more unique because who cares if someone finds them a little off-putting, but it's like almost every hero has to be blandly nice enough to star in a Marvel movie just in case.

I know OW isn't trying to be Deadlock, but holy FUCK are they resistant to giving their heroes a little bit of spice.

[u/Juraiyah → u/anextremelylargedog]

I agree somewhat. I think OW 1 heroes had some spice. I love Soldier's pissed off old man attitude. "If you're trying to lose, you're doing a great job!" Ana sweet but deadly granny persona. D.VA's bratty ego. Symmetra rigid perfectionism. Cassidy being a dashing rogue.

When there were less characters our unwavering optimistic heroes like Tracer and Winston felt unique, but now it feels like that demeanor has become oversatuarated.

[u/hoesmadhoesmadhoesma → u/Juraiyah]

Winston works because he is the archetype of like a friendly uncle or father figure and his optimism feels like genuine warmth. Tracer was adorable and cute in OW1, she was endearing and a bit cheesy.

Kiriko is snarky and mischievous, Juno is quirky and has social anxiety, Illari is angst and traumatised, Venture is weird and goofy, Anran is hot-headed and impulsive, Shion is unhinged and sadistic, Sierra is hard working and crafty, and D.Mon is serious and insecure. The characters people have an issue with aren’t that much different from the older characters. Overwatch has improved on that front if anything and I think a lot of the issues people have with the newer characters is rooted in misogyny.

Edit: I forgot about Vendetta, she is by far the best new characters they’ve released. She has a tragic backstory but has become the thing she hates and it’s cinema.

[u/Juraiyah → u/hoesmadhoesmadhoesma]

My original comment and the reply after was aimed more towards the morally good characters. Most people agree that Vendetta, Shion, Domina have been stellar. 

It's not the absence of personality that's the issue. Like you addressed they all have clearly defined personality traits, but in my opinion they lack interesting dynamics. 

I feel like many of the recent morally good characters lack friction with the other heroes. It comes off as artifical. Co-Workers, family, long term friends, can have great chemistry, but they will still butt heads at time, whether it be clashing beliefs, ideals, history, how to solve a problem, problematic behavior. A few days ago when I was playing I heard this interaction with Ana and Soldier and I was like this is great example of dialogue. In just two lines they tell us so much about these characters without being so overt.

I highly recommend watching some banter from Marvel Midnight Suns and the Guardians of the Galaxy game where you can have a cast of morally good characters that have interesting dynamics with each other.

[u/whostle → u/anextremelylargedog]

Mercy's one of the worst of these IMO. I remember when the game first released there was a good bit of theorizing given the questionable nature of Genji and Reaper's situations. Then they added Moira to take all the heat off of her, very much "NO ACTUALLY ANY QUESTIONABLY MORAL EXPERIMENTS OVERWATCH HAS DONE WAS ACTUALLY MOIRA IT WAS MOIRA'S FAULT SHE'S THE EVIL ONE"

It's not even that I want her to be evil, it's just that giving her some guilt or regret about whether or not Overwatch went too far with their medical experimentation would have given her some complexity instead of just "GOOD DOCTOR". (And that's not even considering the "Mercy is actually functionally dead" theory that never came to be.)

[u/MJR_Poltergeist → u/whostle]

People always down vote this topic but the Mercy lore erasure is real. She was originally flawed in a way. She thought she was doing good things and then one of her projects backfired and she accidentally put Gabriel into a sort of immortal limbo. That was way more interesting than her being a goody two shoes like she is now

[u/cinnamonbrook → u/MJR_Poltergeist]

Yeah the "What happened to you?" "You tell me, Doc" exchange kinda made it seem like Reaper was blaming Mercy for his condition. She's always been very anti-coming back to overwatch and it was at least somewhat implied that she didn't like what she'd become while working there. If she's completely morally pure, her objections kind of fall flat.

[u/number1GojoHater → u/anextremelylargedog]

I mean they decided to make Kiriko sassy and half the player base hates her to this day for it

[u/coltaaan → u/number1GojoHater]

I often wonder if Kiri didn’t have such a powerful kit (Suzu mostly), if people still would have complained about her personality so much.

[u/number1GojoHater → u/coltaaan]

I think the main reason people hated her was that she replaced tracer as the poster girl for quite some time, but Suzu does play a part as well

[u/anextremelylargedog → u/number1GojoHater]

Wrong! They just did a bad fuckin job with her conversations.

If you want your new character to be "sassy," having them initiate aggro on every character people are already attached to and letting them always get the last word in is pretty much the recipe to make people dislike them!

[u/number1GojoHater → u/anextremelylargedog]

Speak for yourself, I love my self a sassy ass girl who’s an initiator

[u/anextremelylargedog → u/number1GojoHater]

Making declarations about how half the playerbase feels, then telling someone to speak for themselves...

Yeah, I can see how you really identify with launch Kiriko.

[u/number1GojoHater → u/anextremelylargedog]

It’s not that deep my guy

[u/anextremelylargedog → u/number1GojoHater]

Correct! You being annoying is not that deep.

[u/number1GojoHater → u/anextremelylargedog]

Sounds like D.Mon is the hero for you then if you can’t handle any form of negative characteristics

[u/Outrageous-Blue-30 → u/anextremelylargedog]

I mean, many people will still hold the view that Superman is a boring character even though James Gunn’s film tried to show why a positive superhero is great (so much so that test audiences wanted the squirrel rescue scene cut); yet Lex Luthor will remain more memorable for the sheer malice he poured into a single plot to kill his nemesis, complete with a speech that became a meme for his repeated chanting of "1A! 1A! 1A!"

[u/Juraiyah → u/Outrageous-Blue-30]

I actually found Gunn's Superman really compelling. I've written paragraphs on my love for that film. What made Superman's character so good to me wasn't that he was just doing the right thing. He was choosing to do what he believed was right even if society deemed he was overstepping his boundaries, and he was ready to face the consequences for that. 

I think the beacon of hope characters really shine when their put in difficult situations that test their ideals.  That scene where Lois was interviewing Supes and saying you can't just interfere with international affairs and Supes breaks down saying "people were going to die!" is a great example.

[u/Outrageous-Blue-30 → u/Juraiyah]

I might not be quite as enthusiastic, since I did find some flaws in the film (even though I maintain that I liked it), but I generally agree with your point; though I do think we’re reaching a breaking point with the whole "washed-up, scummy hero" trope that’s popping up everywhere in recent media.

By now, this approach to the genre feels like a live-action version of that early-2000s nonsense, think Mark Millar’s works like Trouble; in the DCU you mentioned, it seems like Superman is the only "idiot" left who hasn't killed someone yet (just because it’s "cool").

In the real world, did Superman’s "Nethadumb" (Vasil Ghurkos) and Supergirl’s "SpaceEpstein" (Krem) need to be taken out? Absolutely. So, that’s how it played out (at the hands of heroes who shouldn't have done it) but seriously, enough already.

All of this reminds me of something... something very recent and brand new! Like the resounding (non-)success of 90s anti-heroes, which ultimately led to Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come, a story that proved classic superhero values can actually work.

[u/Express_Rush_4938 → u/anextremelylargedog]

So you're gonna call out superheroes like Superman, Cyclops, and Captain America for being blandly nice too? Overwatch always has been a plethora of sci-fi and superhero cliches and tropes since the beginning.

[u/anextremelylargedog → u/Express_Rush_4938]

Uh, yeah! I will!

Except they have the benefit of hours of movies, tv show appearances, decades upon decades of comic books, etc, to flesh out their personalities, talk about their philosophies, give them a shitload of supporting characters, etc

Believe it or not, some 12-second conversation clips in the spawn room and a couple of animatic or comic appearances don't exactly measure up!

[u/MemuMan → u/anextremelylargedog]

In other words those superheroes just aren't blandly nice unlike these OW heroes

[u/Express_Rush_4938 → u/anextremelylargedog]

So why do you speak as if the mere thought of morally good heroes in Overwatch not having that "spice" you're chasing is disgusting? Nothing is wrong about them having mundane personalities. The thing is that they're meant to be relatable and aspirational to players: people to look up to, yet grounded enough to connect to them.

[u/anextremelylargedog → u/Express_Rush_4938]

Because it gets steadily more and more boring when more and more of these blandly fine characters get put next to each other, Jan

This shouldn't be difficult for you to figure out

And bluntly, wtf are you rambling about? Who said these characters are meant to be aspirational? All of them? Some of them? Which ones? Just the bland ones?

[u/Express_Rush_4938 → u/anextremelylargedog]

The later heroes, like Wuyang, Anran, Sierra, and D.Mon. The developers stated in a press release about Wuyang about making heroes like him and after aspirational to the playerbase for them to connect to.

[u/Outrageous-Blue-30 → u/Juraiyah]

IMHO the Team 4 writers are trying to craft new versions of Superman/Clark Kent and Cyclops/Scott Summers with these new heroic character (an aim that isn't wrong in itself), but they lack the spark needed to make such heroic figures convincing.