The 'Overwatch' Community Has Made Some Kickass Stuff

Blizzard’s Overwatch has been on shelves for a little over a month now, pulling in millions of users and delivering content patches to prepare for the launch of competitive play in July. Since release the Blizzard community has been hard at work to support the game through various fan-made projects featuring artist renditions of their favorite characters, crossovers between Overwatch and other gaming franchises and countless play of the game parodies. There’s a metric ton of excellent content out there supporting the game from a creative perspective, but a few specific project trends stick out above the rest.

Here’s some of our favorite Overwatch content fans have created.

Overwatch Anime Intros

Overwatch may not have a cohesive story to play through on your own, but the game does feature a detailed backstory alongside an origin story for every individual character within the game. Leading up to the release of the game Blizzard took full advantage of their development team and produced a series of exceptionally well made cinematic trailers for the game – each designed to flesh out a key part of the games universe.

Despite our pleas for additional animated Overwatch trailers or even a short film, Blizzard has yet to release any additional cinematics for the game since launch. So fans took matters into their own hands, working to turn the wonderful work of Overwatch into Japanese-style anime with the assets Blizzard has released so far. There’s hundreds of different takes all over YouTube and the end product is nothing short of perfect. Hanzo, we’ll eagerly be waiting for you to take the big screen.

Dark Souls: Overwatch

Overwatch is a game respected for its colorful atmosphere and extremely diverse cast of characters, but have you ever wondered what it might look like with a darker color palette? Redditor Doctaword has you covered. Last month during a pet project, Doctaword spent a week re-creating many of Overwatch’s heroes as you might find them in Dark Souls and boy do they look like they belong in Miyazaki’s franchise.

In his uploaded portfolio Doctaword portrayed Mercy, Reinhardt, Hanzo, Tracer and Roadhog as bosses within the Dark Souls universe each with a darker, more sinister focus than what we’re used to. He also put the player character from Dark Souls into a few of the pictures to provide a sense of perspective compared to the size of your average human; and here I was thinking Reinhardt was intimidated enough in Overwatch.

Hearthstone Overwatch

Even Blizzard’s popular free-to-play card game Hearthstone has received some Overwatch love from the community. One player from Hearthpwn named Frozen_Inferno_1 ended up creating a series of Overwatch themed cards, complete with abilities and intricate mechanics that actually fit into Hearthstone quite well.

Each card is designed with an Overwatch heroes core abilities in mind too. Take Mei for example, who is known for her freezing abilities on the battlefield. Not only is her card designed to be part of a frost mage deck, but it provides a battlecry ability (when placed on the field from the player’s hand) that allows you to discover a frozen spell such as Frost Nova, Frostbolt or Ice Barrier. While Blizzard probably won’t ever make a crossover pack like this a reality, it’s still a great concept we can continue to dream about for years to come.

Play of the Game Parodies

Overwatch’s infamous ‘Play of the Game’ moments have become the communities central focus since the release of the game. Typically, plays of the game tend to focus on player eliminations over all else in a match which leads to a hefty amount of McCree, Hanzo and Bastion players taking the cake at the end of a round. Unfortunately, it doesn’t leave much room for heroes like Jon Snow to take the stage.

Thankfully the community has him covered. Since launch dedicated fans have spent countless hours editing together parody ‘Play of the Game’ moments from popular movies, television and other games into the mix with excellent results. Spoilers ahead.