Michael Chu is awesome

It has been a year since. It has been more than thousand days total of no Zenyatta lore. I believe Chris Metzen took all the Zenyatta lore with him when he left the team.

digs around for Zenyatta lore, finds a sprinkle of mention in Overwatch cookbook that shambali cook

Nope, still nothing.

I cannot say it’s awesome or compliment someone for a job well done when the situation is like this.

Meanwhile Jeff kaplan tells us that his orbs are just gameplay feature and that harmony/discord don’t exist

Uh yea thanks… exactly what we wanted, to have this powerless character with zero agency, who’s only Genji’s master and wanders the world of Overwatch that is hostile to omnics, but supposedly still has the power to fight and defend innocents and still heal?

Then even Genji patronizes Zenyatta for participating on the fight, saying he cannot mind his back at all times and battle is not his way… but he’s delighted to do so to Mercy who apparently doesn’t need watching her back, according to him. But Zenyatta is not the one who’s pacifist here and can actually fight back… right? RIGHT?

confused hollering

Yea no. I’ll just make my own headcanons from now on. God knows I will continue to need them for this year as well.

third archives event went by and still no lore specific skin for Zen, but we got a clown junkrat ay

Next thing we know Zenyatta was just Genji’s hallucination all along. He has that much substance anyway.

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His writing is very basic, like white girl liking starbucks level of basic.
He’s a fanfiction writer for overwatch.

You know that something is wrong when he answers lore questions on his Twitter, but don’t say nothing about it in a more direct way to the Community.

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Except some fan fiction writers are actually good writers that can make a 50 chapters books. That has 200000 plus words story.

while i love what michael chu has done for teh background story, it feels like he is in perma-hibernation because this new lore is some garbanzo beans.

Explain all the Gency interactions we had in this last event then.

Also, how can he focus on more important events when he’s barely moving the story forward?

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genetically-engineered space hamster*

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Hes an ok writer. The problem is that he KEEPS RETCONNING the lore of overwatch. For example Chu saying on twitter that DVA became a gamer after MEKA eventhough the bio states she retired to be a meka figher. Another one being that Moira cause Reyes to be Reaper eventhough on his bio Mercy helped him and there is even an interaction between Mercy and Reaper stating that she made Reaper. what else do I need to say.

Oh man, you put the nail in the coffin.

At least with the omnic we see at the end, we have the story moving forward a little bit. And yeah, we got little bits of fluff. But the focus isn’t on those interactions, just like Bastet wasn’t about Jack and Vincent, it was about Jack and Ana resolving the crisis in Cairo, which allows them to join the fight against Talon wherever they’re needed. Which, I’m going to guess, might mean crossing paths with the Recalled Overwatch we’ve seen. The lore’s been at a snail’s pace, but it is coming, and the quality isn’t bad.

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Yeah, I don’t know about that.
He’s obviously a sweet guy and I like him, but no.
Most of the developement in OW is insanely slow, and certain aspects of it are not at all good for what they are supposed to do.
I won’t say he’s bad, but he could be doing much better.

Nowhere on Michael’s Twiiter does he say she retired from MEKA - his only mention of her is the correction about what game she plays.

Reapers bio doesn’t mention Mercy and never did. What it does mention is that Reaper was likely the product of genetic manipulation. Saying that Moira was responsible for creating Reaper was not a retcon, it was setting the record straight.

The actual retcons in the lore have been very few, and were just changes to things that haven’t been updated since the Beta - D.Va being a pro at some mecha game rather than being a StarCraft champ, and Mei waking up and leaving Antarctica alone rather than being found frozen.

What I would really like to know is who and how it is decided what pace the lore should have.

What’s preventing Michael from writing short stories like Bastet every month ?

Is there anyone telling him : “hey, dont write anything past Winston’s Recall, we’re keeping all that up for the next century !”

I’m sure Michael has some capacities as a writer. He’s not awesome, but I wanna trust that he’s capable of going deeper than what we have already.

But the more time pass, the more I’m losing faith. I’m one of those guys who started playing Overwatch mostly thanks to the universe and the few lore we had. I never liked FPS games, and then OW came, with a vibrant universe and… and three years in, nothing more.

Because there is potential with that world… so come on, why leave us hanging ! But yeah, they dont seem to give a flying… about the story.

Lately, they’ve put (another) add for an OW writer…as a professional screenwriter, I applied and was already denied, just a few days later. So, have they hired someone new already ? I hope they have and I hope that means they intent to deliver on that front…

So, I’ll wait and I’ll hope we can get present-day lore very soon… but sadly, I’m not that confident… I’m sure Michael has ideas and stuff he wants to explore, so come on, dude, prove us wrong, prove us you can really tell a compelling story because so far you havent !

But in the end, there’s probably some exec telling him “nah, dont advance the plot, cause otherwise we’ll have to retcon stuff and come across as fools with no larger scheme in mind.”

And that sucks, because we are many crying for the story to move forward. What’s even more infuriating is that they never talk about that. Each time a dev gives an interview on a stream or wherever, they talk about the game and balance and new features… all that is good, but can we have just some form of aknowledgment that there are plans for the plot to evolve ?

Can anyone in the team just tell us “we hear you, you story afficionados and we are thinking about the plot and it will move forward at some point !”

Just that would come a long way to reassure us that they dont intend to move past Winston’s recall next millenium.

Anyway, all that to say : there is potential, Michael probably has some capacity as a storyteller… just prove it ! Just tell us you have plans ! We dont need to know these plans, we just need to know there are some ! Just aknowledge the fact that the plot is moving slower than a stoned-up sloth and that you hear out criticism and plan to remedy that ! Please !

And to all those saying “well OW is an FPS, can you give us just one other FPS with so much lore”… well, they’ve always branded OW as more than an FPS and, speaking at least for myself, it is exactly the fact that they’ve promised us a universe and a story that brought me to this game !

Okay, that post went all over the place, but just a few stuff I needed to get off my chest !

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…to be fair, when I come to the ‘story discussion’ forum the things being most hotly discussed aren’t ‘plot’ or ‘storyline’ things but those very ‘bits’ you talk about. The breakfast stuff, ‘who likes who!?’ ‘will so and so ever hook up with so and so?’ ‘what are so and so’s dimensions’ and so on.

Do people actually want larger sweeping plots to be revealed out of all this? Or do they really just want bits? Haven’t people cited quotes before that basically stated ‘the writers don’t want to overturn players headcanon’ as if that was a good thing for a serious writer? If some random tween’s headcanon from Flagstaff is more important than whatever they might have planned ‘plotwise,’ I doubt ‘plot’ is that terribly important to them. Or at least, it hasn’t been.

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You don’t have company executives to answer to and to tell you what you can and can’t reveal.

He answers questions on Twitter and the forums because people ask him specific things - very little is volunteered information.

Important detail, will up date. Thank you.

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Well, what Chu definitively has going for him is his Character building.
Most Heroes are cliche enough for the overall tone of the game.

It’s very interesting to me that his weakness lies in much simpler things as creating a timeline and such.

There being so little lore, is probably not his fault. Stuff like releasing comics and shorts are expensive are most likely part of the marketing budget.
Then the Story needs to be kept as open as possible to ensure you can add Heroes as any given time.

Every writer writes a fanfic. :slight_smile:

I think it’s because the actual plot theories have all been dried up. What’s the point in discussing Junkrat’s treasure, or Sombra’s missive if nothing new is found and everything has already been discussed? Most people just go to those old threads of they want to find anything out. Anymore it’s just finding things to talk about.

I just wish he would answer any questions that pertain to plot. I’ve seen some very good questions here on the story forums that if answered wouldn’t give too much away, yet they don’t get answered. It just causes frustration. Especially when we have so many loose plot lines.

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Sad thing is a lot of characters have the potential to be explored more in depth (Zenyatta, Lucio and Symmetra being a good example)

Heck they could do a whole short where Zenyatta becomes self aware and an individual instead of another cog in the machine. Or how he initially reacted to Mondatta’s death (maybe a possible origin for his discord from his grief) anything :frowning_face:

So many characters have at most two sentences while others have paragraphs upon paragraphs :unamused:

A lot of people have pointed it out. Feels good knowing I’m not the only one who’s noticed.

So many threads, character development and plot lines left incomplete.

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