Overwatch 2’s latest collaboration is with the beloved space western anime Cowboy Bebop. The event, which kicked off on March 12, lets five heroes from Blizzard’s team-based shooter cosplay as different characters from the classic ‘90s show. The event follows in the footsteps of other crossover events like the October 2023 one that featured K-pop group Le Sserafim. For this latest crossover, five heroes (Cassidy, Sombra, Ashe, Mauga, and Wrecking Ball) each get a skin and a few other cosmetics, each comes packaged in a $25 (2500 in-game currency), hero-specific bundle (with the exception of Wrecking Ball, whose skin is earnable for free by completing challenges). If you don’t want to shell out $25 for each bundle, you can buy all of them for $56/5600 in-game currency.
Some of the new skins are great. I played a few rounds with damage hero Sombra dressed up as Bebop’s fellow hacker Ed last night, and had a bonding moment with a Mauga player wearing the Jet Black skin. But some Overwatch fans aren’t too fond of the new Cassidy skin, which dresses him up as Bebop main character Spike Spiegel. The longer I stare at the skin and see the goofy logistics of how Blizzard made it work, I have to agree. Especially after it looked so good in the animated teaser Blizzard put out before the event began.
When Cassidy dresses up as Spike, he has a shaggy hairstyle that is similar to the iconic space cowboy himself, but it does look a little weird on the Overwatch 2 model. That’s because Cassidy wears a cowboy hat in nearly all of his skins, but the Spike Spiegel skin just utilizes the character’s extra-wide hairstyle to keep his silhouette mostly the same. It looks weird, and because the cowboy hat is so central to Cassidy’s animations, emotes, and highlight intros, not having it would make many of those cosmetics useless—except Blizzard does give him a hat, but only when those animations are playing. Now, the hat materializes out of thin air and disappears when the emote is done.
In an interview with Comic Book, Overwatch 2 art director Dion Rogers said the team discussed whether or not to give Cassidy a hat as part of the skin, but they wanted to embody Spike as best they could for the collaboration.
“We went back and forth on how to handle Cassidy’s hat,” Rogers told Comic Book. “So you’ll see this is what makes his skin even more unique than usual is he’s not often wearing his hat. A lot of his emotes or animations that come along with it, he’ll still do a hat thing. But generally, 80 percent of the time, he doesn’t wear his hat, which is pretty unique for Cassidy. So that was something that we went back and forth on how he would feel silhouette-wise, there’s a lot of gameplay choices when we remove something from a hero. But to really capture the Spike and have that hero feel like they are them or cosplaying as them. We chose to remove his hat.”
While the magical, disappearing hat has raised eyebrows, some of the other criticisms have been that the hair itself needs a makeover. Right now, Cassidy’s brown hair and texture are still pretty much intact, but some fans argue that tweaks to the style and color to make it closer to Spike’s dark green might make the whole getup look a little better. A few fans have made mockups of what this might look like. However, it’s worth noting that edits in a screenshot might not translate well to a 3D space like in Overwatch 2.
While the hair and hat situation has received a lot of attention and criticism, Cassidy’s actual outfit looks pretty good. The anime hair can be tricky to pull off, but Blizzard really captured the space cowboy’s getup. Maybe Cassidy just needs to buy a better cosplay wig next time.
