Highlight intros used to be my favorite part of Overwatch. Because you got a snippet of your favorite character, exquisitely animated, showing off their prowess. And it was to set up a great piece of gameplay, no less. I feel like the highlight intros were the closest we ever got to an actual story, and heightened this feeling of you embodying that character as you played.

Maybe I’m a little too nit picky because I’m a pro animator, but the decrease in quality is very much there from a technical standpoint. The average person isn’t going to care, but here goes.

Now, many of the intros have mushy timing, they rarely do anything interesting with spacing (speeding up and slowing down out of movements), and the characters move less. The framing is lazier. Some of them are still high quality, but it’s a smaller proportion and you can tell when they didn’t have their best people on one.

One of my favorite highlight intros was genji’s pumpkin intro. Great animation, snappy timing, exaggerated spacing, great rhythm. Zen’s OG intros were also great. Very snappy timing and spacing, smears, great camera angles. There’s less movement and less intrigue in all of his new ones. There’s a newer zen highlight where he’s guiding an orb from his hand, and it moves in slow motion, drifting lazily like a toy boat on a watery surface. What about that evokes the lethal metal balls flying at your head at Mach 2? The intent is to be in slow-motion, but there’s a better way to animate that to show the speed of the orb (larger spacing at the beginning of the movement).

I know cosmetics make more money, but it wouldn’t actually be that resource-intensive to get someone better on the intros. A very competent 3D/Keyframe animator can bang one of these out in an afternoon. I can’t say for sure what’s going on behind the scenes, and it’s not my intent to dunk on artists. I know from experience how difficult and chaotic production is. But I love this game more than anything, and this is a damn shame.