Okay, here’s my attempt at a blog post, following all your instructions. I’m going to channel my inner “regular dude who loves to share” vibe:
Alright, so I got this idea to mess around with the symbols in Overwatch. You know, those little icons that show up for each hero, their abilities, and stuff. I figured it would be cool to see if I could pull them out and, I don’t know, maybe use them for something else. Maybe make some custom wallpapers or something. No big plan, really, just wanted to tinker.
First Steps: Where the Heck Are These Things?
First things first, I needed to find where these symbols even live. I mean, they’re in the game, obviously, but where are they stored? My first thought was to poke around in the Overwatch game files. You know, just browse through the folders and see if anything looked like an image file. I spent, like, a good hour doing this. Clicking through folders, opening random stuff. Nothing.
Then I thought, maybe they’re packed away in some weird archive file. Like a .zip file, but some special Blizzard version. So I started Googling things like “Overwatch file format” and “extract Overwatch assets”. That led me down a rabbit hole of weird tools and forum posts. It was a mess.
Finding Some Tools (Maybe?)
I eventually stumbled upon some tools that claimed they could extract assets from Overwatch. One was called “Overwatch DataTool.” I’m not gonna lie, it looked pretty sketchy. Like, some random GitHub project with a bunch of code I didn’t understand. But hey, I was desperate.
I downloaded it, and, surprise surprise, it didn’t just work. I had to install some other stuff, like Python, and then figure out how to run this thing from the command line. I felt like a hacker in a movie, typing in all these weird commands. It was kinda cool, actually.
After a lot of trial and error (and a bunch more Googling), I finally got the DataTool to do something. It started spitting out a ton of files. Folders and folders of stuff. I was like, “Okay, this is progress… I think?”
The Hunt for the Symbols
Now came the tedious part: sifting through all this extracted data. I was looking for anything that looked like an image file. .png, .jpg, .dds (I learned that .dds is a common texture format, who knew?). I opened folder after folder, squinting at tiny icons, trying to see if any of them were the Overwatch symbols.
It took forever. Seriously. I almost gave up. But then, finally, in a folder named something like “*,” I found them! There they were, all the hero icons, ability symbols, everything. They were in this .dds format, which my normal image viewer couldn’t open.
More Tools!
Back to Google. I needed a .dds viewer. Found one, downloaded it, and boom! I could finally see the symbols in all their glory. They were kinda low-resolution, but hey, they were there.
Victory (Sort Of)
So, yeah, I managed to extract the Overwatch symbols. It was way more complicated than I expected. I learned a lot about file formats, command-line tools, and the general messiness of game data. Was it worth it? I don’t know. I still haven’t actually done anything with the symbols. But hey, it was a fun little adventure.
I still think to share all the icons in one place. Maybe another day.
