Besides fixing the boobplate, look at all those added details that greatly improve this design; the added armor to the legs, the shape changes to the pauldrons and couters, the tabard, it all looks so much better. Now this is a skin I would love to have, if I played as Brigitte.
-Icy
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Can you believe we never bingo’ed the Final Form of the wizard from Diablo 3? Well, fret no more! Where do I even start; this looks like a chafing apocalypse, honestly. Not only is she going to freeze in the icy locations, she’s going to get bitten by some zombie and contract an infection. And that’s if the zombies are kind and don’t bite her right on the femoral artery, which is nicely framed for those zombies that crawl on the ground.
But who needs protection when you have a vaguely skull-like cod piece thing?
-Icy
Imagine all the armor she could wear if she just used the metal from her ridonculous headpiece for protecting her vital organs!
~Ozzie
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Brigitte and Overwatch’s continous female design problem
We talked already about Brigitte’s costume, but there’s a whole lot of other issues about her character design that shouldn’t be overlooked. Again, it’s a nice idea to have a new lady in actual armor in the game, though we wouldn’t be BABD if we didn’t point out some obvious and less obvious problems that can be spotted with her.
She’s, after Moira, another white European lady in a row, while still the closest to black female representation among playable heroes is Orisa, a robot (and before anyone says it – nope, none of the dark-skinned female characters are black). For a game that prides itself in having diverse international cast, Overwatch can not imagine people of color color coming from places that wouldn’t be POC-dominant already (also lots of their heroes of color somehow happen to be morally dubious compared to white ones). And just because Brigitte is a pre-established character doesn’t yet excuse prioritizing adding her to the game over someone with different background.
It’s kind of funny how after being unnamed for no reason in her last major media appearance, the Reinhardt animated short, now Brigitte got elevated from a supporting lore character to one of main heroes. This, paired with ridiculous lack of consistency in her cross-media appearances gives us a strong feeling that no-one at Blizzard is overseeing writing and art direction of Overwatch as a franchise. Fans who spot constant retcons in the story would agree.
Speaking of no visual consistency, seems like from comics to the animated short to the actual game Brigitte finished her long journey from a unique-looking person to another standard issue pretty face.
And no, different artists working on each of those appearances isn’t an excuse for how only her hair and skintone remain relatively consistent. Her crucial features like jawline, freckles, nose shape and size, how big her eyes are and how strong her chin is shouldn’t alter so widely just because of art style change. Blizzard is perfectly capable of making and using style guides – and when they don’t, it’s either by choice or negligence.
And if you wondered what we meant by “standard issue pretty face”, this pic, for obvious reasons, has gained some major mileage around the Internet:
Congrats, Blizzard! You officially care about diverse female appearances as little Disney does! (image sources: [x] & [x])
Not to mention that Blizzard can’t make up their mind on what Brigitte’s body type is supposed to be. Is she thin and curvy as virtually every other Overwatch lady? Is she almost as buff as Zarya? Something inbetween? Who knows.
I saw some fans trying to excuse her twig arms from Christmas comic as being possibly earliest in the timeline, but no official channel would confirm or deny any speculation. Overwatch is pretty satisfied with fans using their headcanons to justify whatever information the story canon won’t commit to. Why make an effort when fans can do your job for you?
~Ozzie
“Brigitte Lindholm, squire to Reinhardt Wilhelm, is a former mechanical engineer who has decided to take up arms and fight on the front lines to protect those in need.”
If I didn’t know anything about this character and was just reading her background blurb, I would be imagining a character design more akin to this:
Why build a regular armor and shield when I can pilot a 12-foot-tall exoskeleton? Her father builds turrets during combat, it would have been cool if she had skills related to building and adjusting her own armor in-combat.
Her design doesn’t inform me of her character at all, which is a problem with several of the Overwatch cast (mostly ladies, I wonder why that is). She wears armor, but so does Pharah; is she also a soldier? She has no welding mask or a tool belt that would indicate that she’s a mechanic type. I get that she doesn’t want to just fix things on the sidelines, but she does throw out armor for her allies. It isn’t a stretch to flavor it as her fixing her team’s equipment in the heat of battle, and she does get a welding mask in a different skin but not the primary one?
Her color scheme is almost the same as Mercy’s, with silver (instead of white), yellow and black being the core, which really isn’t helping that same-face problem, Blizzard. Not to mention the shapes are very similar to Pharah’s. There’s just nothing new here design-wise, and I am disappointed.
-Icy
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Okay, so we’ve received approximately… more requests than I can bother to count to comment on Blizzard finally announcing Brigitte Lindholm as a playable character and releasing her on the test server.
Now, initially I put off commenting on this because she had only one skin and the minimum features to allow people to play her on the test server. This felt suspicious to me, because put simply: The default skin is, in isolation, good:
There are minor issues, such as her hair, waist and the weird hip cape designed to remind us she has a (presumably sexy) butt.
However, once the Legendary skins came out, the conversation became more complicated (expect more posts in the near future) because well, the come in two themes (knight and mechanic) and… let’s just look at them:
Yes, it seems that while someone at the Overwatch art team managed to get her primary look to be pretty good, the powers that be decided her Legendary Skins (ie the prestigious ones) need to have the standard sexualized nonsense.
On top of that, despite that visually she is a distaff Reinhardt (who still does not have a sculpted codpiece) and her video announcing she is not content to be a support character and wants to tank… she is Support:
Reminder: She maintains all Reinhardt’s gear… so there’s no in game explanation why her shield is roughly one third the strength.
With a very few exceptions, pretty much every time I see a game brag about diverse body shapes – I wonder if they hired the same “expert” consultant that Levi’s did:
Since everyone can predict us talking again about Overwatch in the near future, this week’s throwback is the video game industry’s bafflingly narrow definition of what “diversity” among female characters looks like.
~Ozzie
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Having a heavy armored horse part, but wearing… this on the human part makes total sense for a centaur, right? After all, with two torsos they have, like, two sets of internal organs.
I guess lungs and heart under those basically exposed boobs are just spares, who needs them as long as the horse organs are safe and sound, right?
~Ozzie
For a character who doesn’t even qualify for 4 of the squares, Lunara scores pretty high on the Bingo. Impressive??
