To celebrate Christmas, Blizzard announced the Winter Wonderland event for Overwatch in which they’ll be introducing a new game mode and new costumes for characters. Given that this year’s event seems to be themed around Mei, Blizzard also chose to give Mei a “legendary” new outfit.Unfortunately the design fell short of expectations, with many complaining that her outfit was merely a recoloring of her existing outfit, and the inclusion of a Santa hat, as you can see above. Given that loot boxes which contains these costumes are randomized, we can only imagine the frustration gamers feel to gain a “legendary” item that looks so, well, plain. Overwatch’s director Jeff Kaplan has since responded to the complains in the forums (via Kotaku).
According to Kaplan, “Sorry you are disappointed with Mei’s winter skin. We don’t have a specific rule for what makes something Legendary or Epic. We just sort of make a gut call based off of what we think is cool. Coolness is very subjective, and based off of the community reaction it seems like our gauge was off on this one.”
He also adds, “Our reasoning for it being Legendary was that we completely redid the visual effects for Cryo-Freeze (we turned the ice block into a snowman). […] Apparently, lots of people don’t agree with us and that’s ok. It’s all good feedback and we’re learning something for future events.” So from what we can tell, Blizzard won’t be making any changes for now, but hopefully for future events that’s something they’ll take into consideration.