So Overwatch 1 lore is pointless?

What I mean by pointless is everything that happened in overwatch one related to the cinematics and things we’ve seen have mostly been in the past and irrelevant. The only cinematic that really matters was the first one we saw with Winston recalling all of the heroes which leads us into overwatch 2.

Most of the overwatch one cinematics and stories we saw with just a build up to modern day which is overwatch two

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How come you think that all past events are irrelevant?

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Not that they are a relevant but all the years we’ve been watching cinematics and playing through overwatch one nothing has been up to date.
The only up-to-date thing was the first thing we saw which was Winston

So? It’s still lore and it’s still expanding on characters and their backstories.

shrugs
I just find it weird that all the years, majority of lore hasn’t pushed the modern story forward until Overwatch 2

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Those were mostly just to build up characters and explore their reasons for joining Overwatch. I imagine more characters will appear as you progress through the campaign, and we won’t need to take up time with backstory we already know. While I agree they took their sweet time to actually progress the story, I’m glad we’ve witnessed the build up start to pay off with Zero Hour and the Brazil mission.

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We never got that Lucio animated short to introduce him. It’s funny because one of the first levels in overwatch two brings in Lucio fighting in the resistance.

Taking their sweet time is an understatement they flat out missed some stuff

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Yeah, same goes for Zenyatta who we saw in the trailer. Sad off-support boi hours.

OW1 isn’t to tell us a story. The animated shorts - the comics - the origin stories are meant to introduce us to the OW universe, to hook us to it, to make us love/dislike characters so when they really start telling the story with OW2, we’ll know where the characters came from before make them move foward.

Think of it has a chess board :

They put all the pieces on the board. In OW 2, the pieces will move forward : we will move them foward in the PVE Story mode.

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The lore we’ve gotten so far is basically the origin stories of the heroes who are forming new Overwatch again + the obligatory origin stories of new hero releases, and some comics to provide context/backstory for most of the launch heroes (except Lucio and Zen, RIP). This lore is not “useless,” but I will say, the anachronistic way they’ve chosen to tell the story does not, for me personally, bode well along with the drip feed means of telling it. If the intention was to build up hype for the grand return of overwatch to the world, it kind of missed… also, introducing new faces that are clearly important without literally any buildup such as when Echo first appeared in Reunion and when the evil Omnic guy at Temple of Anubis appeared talking to Doomfist, it wss intriguing, yes, but also kind of made me roll my eyes because I knew we would have to wait so long to find out even their name (in the case of evil omnic guy)

I don’t really understand the point in revealing certain things so much later after launch, such as that Liao was a software engineer type of roboticist and that she’s deceased, or even small things like that Soldier had a boyfriend once but has been doomed to loneliness for the rest of his life, and who Pharah’s dad is. I guess the way they tell the story is just waiting to reveal lore when it feels “natural” or even when someone asks, but things like these make me think, “was there any point to letting people speculate?” that’s just how I feel though…

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Except OW lore has progressed? Honor and Glory (the present day parts) takes place after Recall. Reunion takes place after Recall. Rise and Shine takes place after Recall. Infiltration and Shooting Star take place around the present day. All 3 short stories take place after Recall. Yes we’ve had a lot of stuff that takes place in the past, but a lot of that is to explore and introduce the universe and get us attached to the characters so that we actually care about them when the present day starts moving forward much faster than it currently is

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This isn’t really the Marvel cinematic universe though. imagine if we never gotten overwatch two, they would just be leaving us with a bunch of unanswered story beats

The Universe was to be expanded. Look at Warcraft and WoW…

They wouldn’t let a franchise die just like this. OW 2 was always a plan - they knew it from some time now.

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Except it’s basically making season 2 of a show without season 1. The shorts etc. were season 0. That’s the complaint. The non-cannon game play we do is basically season 1.

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If you want to talk about just the shorts that are related to the main story arc.

  • Recall - The Recall

  • Alive, Dragons, Rise and Shine, Honour and Glory, Reunion - Direct responses to the Recall

The only ones that can be considered neglible or unimportant are Hero, The Last Bastion, Infiltration, and Shooting Star. And even then, Infiltration was part of a larger Talon side story that got developed further in the comic Masquerade, which is one of the most important pieces of Overwatch lore. Where Recall is the assembly of Overwatch, Masquerade is when the main villain takes the reigns and starts putting his plans into motion.

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I’d actually argue that Infiltration also was key in developing Zarya’s story, bringing her character away from Russia (which is anti-Overwatch) and into the wider field of characters, which we saw in her comic Searching. It also elaborated on Sombra’s theory of a plot that’s running the strings of Talon from behind the scenes- that whole Eye thing which I don’t doubt will be brought up again. While hero didn’t have much of an impact necessarily, Ana’s story Bastet established that Jack didn’t think it was just Talon behind things.

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Why do you think there was such demand for a story mode? You’re not the only one who found it weird.

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Infiltration didn’t do anything for Zarya. Searching, the comic that branched off it, served to develop Zarya from purely xenophobic and hating Omnics, to someone who at least tolerates Lynx 17 and saves their life.

It didn’t do anything for Sombra’s conspiracy. Likewise, Searching did 0 progression towards the story. The setting before Infiltration and after Searching are identical. All that changed was Zarya’s outlook at Omnics.

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It makes more sense that way if you really think about it. If they would have just shoved us in the modern day timeline of Overwatch, noone would have known what was going on. With the prequal coming first, it gets all of us up to date beforehand to know what led up to Overwatch’s disbandment and whats going on next. Plus on a non story related portion, Overwatch was a huge risk for Blizzard who aren’t known for making games like this in the past. It was much easier and less risky to push out the base game with multiplayer than to sink who knows amount of money into adding many more features.

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and at Katya Volskaya.
If Zarya still would be Katya’s soldier, she would catch Sombra anyway but she didn’t, she left her task of catching Sombra for own unknown reason. I think Sombra showed Zarya that Katya used technology from their enemies, from omnics.