The only source for those children being Torbjorn’s kids came from the @PlayOverwatch account (and even then, it was taken out of context), not from Michael Chu. He has consistently said that they are Torb’s grandkids.
I read articles from a few years ago that sounded to me they wanted to cater more to the Tumblr and Twitter side of the playerbase. Didn’t want to mess with headcanons, didn’t want to set things too in stone, posts lore bits on Twitter as well as on the forums, etc. The lore we do get is arbitrary and small.
But the people who play the game, the shippers and the theorists need more core lore to stay hooked. We’ve learned nothing about Sombra’s findings. We know just as much about Junkrat’s treasure as three years ago. We don’t know anything about Zen or Lucio and they have been in the have since the beginning.
These are the things that over three years, we should know a little bit more about. We should know at least enough to come up with more theories and headcanons.
But as it stands all the theories have been theorized about. All the lore has been explored. What’s left? Just thinking about the small petty things like Hammond’s favorite color because that’s all that Chu writes.
3 Likes
Yeah, Kaplan used that excuse many months later. However, in November 2016, after the cancellation was announced, Michael Chu said it was because they wanted to take the story in a different direction. He didn’t mention the fan head canon or anything. That was a piss-poor excuse Kaplan added to it way later in 2017.
It was the excuse Kaplan made when complaints about Lore being followed through on started to surface. Because according to Chu, they had stories and all that supposedly going on behind the scene. And years later, we’re still waiting.
Just like their hiring a Hugo award winning short story author for Lore. Where’s the output? What’s changed in lore delivery? Absolutely nothing. Typical Overwatch team lip service and no delivery, and it isn’t just the Lore. Remember those additional social features, for example? Or all those super-duper-secret new things?
Anyway, here is the article with the Michael Chu quotes that were made at the time of the cancellation: h ttps://www.pcgamesn.com/overwatch/overwatch-first-strike-cancelled
4 Likes
Just hire more writers, or hire someone else better than him. Because at this rate, 3 years without consistent lore is just ridiculous. He either needs more help or straighten out his act.
Speaking AS a writer, self-discipline is important when it comes to stuff like this. Writers are artists, and their goal is to invest people by sharing their vision. Unfortunately, it seems we’re blind so far - blinded for 3 years with only 3 major lore-based events to somehow compensate. I know the team can do better if they just try…
But I don’t see that happening with Mr. Chu anytime soon.
I’m sorry, I’m just…really, really angry right now.
Cheers I guess,
~ PyroPanda
4 Likes
Even if we had “better” writers, they’d still be restricted by the whims of Blizzard and only be able to give us lore when they want to give it. Changing the writers doesn’t suddenly give them the ability to infodump everything we want.
1 Like
Look, I like Michael Chu. And — (the obligatory ‘I think he’s a nice guy’ goes here).
I’ve met him before in person and yes, he was really nice. And when I met him, I asked him about a few different things. They spanned the range from: getting a new character in Overwatch, to asking for more lore for Pharah, and for Mercy.
And I asked him for more lore for the two of them, not in the sense of ‘Can I see this ship happen’, but ‘Can I just get more lore for the two of them, pleeeeeeeease’?
I mean, I just need something to work with here.
Personally, I think Mr. Chu is a nice guy, but the fact that he is a nice guy does not, and should not, insulate him from any criticism. The delivery of the lore in Overwatch has been very lackluster for some reason. It almost feels as if he’s being held back, whether it’s by the higher-ups at Blizzard (or more importantly, Activision), or maybe it’s something else that’s holding him back.
Or maybe he’s not being held back, and it’s just other factors coming into play here? A lack of ideas? Deliberately delivering the lore at such a slow pace as to not upset too many people (or invalidate certain headcanons?)
Also, I’m just pretty disappointed with Storm Rising. It was pretty boring, and the heavy focus on the Genji/Mercy voice lines (and Mercy once again, not being allowed to have any lore unless Genji is somehow involved), did not reinvigorate, or reignite, my interest in the game again.
The lore seems to be stuck in a state of stasis, and it is pretty frustrating that we still don’t have any answers to any important questions, like who answers the recall being first and foremost among them. It’s that, and the fact that we don’t have a concrete timeline of when all of the events that took place in the story happened, and we have to rely on the Word of God for answers to certain questions (e.g. Was Mercy a member of Overwatch at 17? How old was McCree when he was recruited into Blackwatch? Etc. and so forth) that just adds to the sense of frustration. All of this just adds to the sense of inconsistency surrounding the story, and also seemingly compounds the message that Overwatch lore is a jumbled mess, that really needs to be sorted out.
(And yes, I do get the fact that they’re releasing all of this slowly as to not have to contradict themselves in the future. But really, it is frustrating that we have to wait so long for the answers to all of the open ended questions that are still lingering out there.)
Again, I don’t know how much of this is the fault of Michael Chu, but there are legitimate criticisms of the writing and how the lore is being delivered to us. And these are all things to take under consideration, and hopefully, they’ll be improved upon in the future.
8 Likes
has an utter lack of lore outside of hero releases and the archives the once a year event, for the whole of 2018
Great job 
1 Like
I guess you didn’t read Bastet then?
I feel it was more of the opposite. With a handful of exceptions, such as his talk with Sojourn about accepting his new body or “I was a bystander,” Genji’s interactions were almost entirely flirting with Mercy. While Mercy didn’t get much to talk about herself, she did do a lot of talking. Of the four on the mission, she was the one who seemed to act like the actual leader of the squad, giving Tracer/Winston information about the mission and Max while comms were down, being the one to interrogate Max at the end, being involved in bigger things such as Winston and Genji’s general treatment, or the humanitarian crisis in Egypt… She just didn’t get much time to talk about herself. But she did come off as the actual leader of the group, while Tracer seemed to be more of a clueless point man.
3 Likes
Oh hey hi!
I would like to highlight why you are wrong ^^
Since Bastet wasn’t a 2018 release I would suggest you check yourself next time.
Sound good? Okay thaaaanks :))
1 Like
Why did u make this long unnecessary thing. Plz don’t make a tldr
If it is from the higher ups making Chu restrict the lore, it’s the biggest bullet you can shoot yourself in the foot with.
Blizzard in part gained their reputation for putting lore into their multiplayer games. For them to suddenly not want to put lore into one of their franchises, is truely an odd choice. Especially when they’re starting to put lore in one of their biggest mosh pits of a game to date: Heroes of the Storm.
I agree, tracer reminds me of all those manga/anime protagonist where they are extremely naive on a lot of things but somehow still excel at the thing she does.
There are also a lot of other plain characters in this game. Pharah has no personality, dva has no personality, reaper is the typical edgelord, reinhardt is the stereotypical loud but has honor type of big old guy etc
Honestly what do you expect? Everything is very lacking so far. At least tracer has more lore than other heroes.
1 Like
I also have faith in Michael Chu 
I’m so excited to see what they put out next and I feel like there’s something HUGE coming that will (hopefully, but probably not since they are literally impossible to satisfy) shut up the complainers. I’d also like to point out that the updates and lore are free. It’s not like you’re paying to go see a movie that ended up sucking, so I’m always tentative about criticising lore anyway. For one, no one knows what their plans are, so criticising it at this point when the game is still very new compared to other games like WoW is short sighted.
I believe they’re gonna do a great job and I can’t wait for more.
1 Like
The updates are not free and have never been free
To imply that they are free is to imply that Jeff, Chu, and the rest of the dev team are updating this game out of the goodness of their hearts with no pay. That’s not what happens. They get paid obviously, in party through the microtransactions of lootboxes and OWL tokens. Yes you don’t have to pay for them. But there are a small amount of people that pay the majority of the money they make.
It has been like that in every lootbox market. Lootboxes make an absurd amount of money from the people who do pay.
then… don’t buy loot boxes? they’re pointless anyway if you like the game just grind them out
I’ve waited over three years now at least, for the story to make any great leaps forward. We’re still not out of the ‘Recall’ phase yet. This, among being promised by Mr. Chu multiple times that a fix for multiple in game voice lines was coming (And to my knowledge even TODAY those very same interactions are still broken). I came back thinking Storm Rising would be different, but it’s just more of the same. At this point I’m done with Overwatch and it’s Lore, and am happy to say I’ve been having lots of Fun reading into Destiny’s Lore. Maybe in the next 5 years they’ll get their stuff together in the writing department in the OW Team. Maybe.
3 Likes
There is a difference between unfunded (don’t know a better word for it, unpaid for?), and freely accessible. They are not unfunded, the players do put money towards them through the purchase of merchandise and lootboxes. However, they are also all entirely freely accessible, with every short/comic/blog post available on an ad-free official source.
Lootboxes make money, which does get siphoned into departments such as lore. However, the lore itself costs the player nothing to enjoy and also makes minimal direct revenue, if any.
2 Likes
What are you, 12 years old?
You asked for replies to a post and when I give one to you, you act completely and totally juvenile instead of writing a proper response to me.
Why not actually address my points instead of telling me not to write a ‘tldr’? You’re quite rude and immature.
Also, if you think my post is long, wait till you get to college and have to read 30 pages of Atlas Shrugged or La Nausée in one night, and then have to right a 10 page report on it for the next morning.
I’m gonna give you some advice for the future: Don’t be unnecessarily rude to people who reply to your threads, especially when it’s not warranted. Just because someone typed a reply you didn’t like doesn’t warrant this type of rudeness. And no, it’s not justified, even if you didn’t like what I said, and are incapable of formulating a proper response to it. Otherwise, people will be discouraged from replying to you and participating in your threads in the future.
I have to respectfully disagree. Prior to this, the last time Mercy got any hint of lore, was with those Valentine’s and White Day voice lines. The same ones that also happen to feature Genji.
Now, both her and Genji seem to talk to each other quite a lot in Storm Rising. Her last two bits of lore have been about her emphasizing her connection to Genji, and I for one, would really like a break in tradition.
I’d just rather have lore that develops Mercy as her own person, without emphasizing her connection to the old Overwatch Strike Team. Just give her a comic, a short, or heck — even a short story, that tells us more about her as a person and that explains her motivations (and hopefully one that finally won’t feature Genji).
I mean, Pharah got one. Symmetra got one. And both Ana and Jack got one with Bastet. The same can be done for Angela as well.
4 Likes