So, people are figuring out that Blizzard is not good in keeping the artwork consistent with the lore. But at least, Kiriko being 21 is consistent with the previous given lore, her bratty attitude and her mother being worried like she is in the animated short.
ANYWAY.
Sojourn’s age is actually a problem. She is 47. The Crisis started 28 years ago. 47 - 28 = 19.
You see, there is a whole novel about her and the begining of the Crisis. Her age is never said, but we do have times and dates… And now, we know that she was 19, accoring to her biography.
BUT
It is said in the novel that she has been in the army for 4 years and was being promoted to Captain at the very begining of it because of that.
She also spent her whole teenagers years in and out of hospitals, and she got her first surgery to have cybernetics at 13… She can’t have joined the Canadian army at 15!!!
So, if anyone at Blizzard see this, please, give Sojourn at least a fews years more to be consistent with the lore that you released not even a year ago…
EDIT :
Okay, so, I’ve read the novel (again xD) and I’ve got few more thing to point out :
At 16, she was “allowed to enlist in the primary reserve” (p145)
When talking to Jack, he said that he “couldn’t wait to turn 18 and enlist” and she said “Me neither” (p115)
She remember the first time she got sedated for a surgery “almost 20 years ago”… you can’t remember that if you’re a baby, so she must have been somewhere around 4-5 years old minimum.
And I won’t talk about Valentine (her twin sister) having a “relatively normal adolescence” and been in the swimming team and such - but before having her omnic nany (that she and her hursband hand to make a loan to buy) it was a very complicated for her and that she married her hursband “a year after graduation”, and that she couldn’t dream of finishing her studies before having the omnic to take care of Bonnie…
EDIT 2 : They fixed Sojourn’s age, she is know 51, it’s so much better, thank you
Don´t forget, she has a Twin Sister, and when they were 19 at the beginning of the Omnic Crisis, her Sister has a 5 year old Daughter! Meaning, her Sister gave birth with 14 years and was probably pregnant with 13!!!
Mercy is would’ve been head surgeon of Overwatch in her early 20s? If Widowmaker is 35, how old was Gerard!? Was Mei was a world reknown Climatologist in her teens?
Mercy is would’ve been head surgeon of Overwatch in her early 20s? If Widowmaker is 35, how old was Gerard!? Was Mei was a world reknown Climatologist in her teens?
This was all the case in OW1 though, we had their ages before and none of those characters’ ages have changed (other than the 2 year aging that everyone’s gone through). Yes, Mercy did everything very quickly, they confirmed in the past she completed her education faster than most. It is still a bit of a stretch yes, but it’s always been there. Widow and Gerard could have had quite an age gap, or he just reached a high level in Overwatch while in his 20s. Mei’s age is biological, not chronological, so she was 31 when she went into stasis (and she was born 43 years ago).
For Mercy I think it’s because she was already a genius during her teenage years and was ranked up very quickly. It seems to me that this was explained in his story.
I have already pointed out this huge inconsistency issue in this post. but yes you are right, it should also be specified that he has 4 years of experience in the army. I guess it’s even more relevant to correct Sojourn’s age by adding another 4-5 years to her.
from an old post by michael chu talking about Ana origins photo (from old forums in 2016):
Answer: The picture from Ana’s origin was said to be 20 years ago. She’s currently 37, so she joined Overwatch at the age of 17. By then Overwatch had recognized her ability as a renown surgeon and has a masters in Nanobiotechnology. How can that be possible?
Michael Chu: While Mercy is extremely intelligent and completed her education at a younger age (and in a shorter amount of time than usual), she definitely did not join Overwatch at age 17.
where is the problem?
have you calculated Mei’s 9 extra years in hibernation? the developers have always specified that the one on the biography is only Mei’s biological age, but that +9 years must be considered for her actual date of birth.
but be careful: this reasoning ONLY applies to Mei, it has already been confirmed that this does not apply to characters with whom a temporal rejuvenation can be speculated (mercy, tracer or widowmaker).
this is not correct reasoning. she was born human and has a birth date. and omnics also have a birth date: Zenyatta was born before the omnic crisis under the management of omnica corp and before Aurora’s awakening. Ramattra is an R-7000 Ravager model, built by Anubis at the beginning of the omnic crisis (28 years ago, in fact)
Gabriel is currently 60. Widow is currently 35. Overwatch disbanded 10 years ago, when Widow was 25. At that point, she was already part of Talon. The rest of the timeline is vague, and I know people age differently, but it feels like Widow should be much older or there’s a pretty large age gap between her and Gerard. Widow getting married, kidnapped, and then killing Gerard and joining Talon must’ve happened in just a year or two while she was in her early 20s.
Why do even need ages in the first place ? Just let the the audience (mostly by now disinterested audience) decide who looks older than who. To be honest I wish they never made a timeline of the characters, because not only does it create inconsistencies I feel like there are far more older characters than younger ones. I know I could be wrong but still. Any one is welcome to correct me.
I agree with what Gwadael and you are saying. I just meant to say that them going back and fixing her age to a more accurate one wouldn’t be a big issue, because it doesn’t with interfere in her design.
I eddited the post because ZI read the novel again, and… yeah, no, Sojourn is definitely way too young in her new biography, she can’t have been 19 at the begining of the crisis…
Yeah, Sojourn is still far too young. 51 is better,, than her egregious original 47.
The crisis was not (originally)28 years ago. It was 30 years ago from the first game taking place in 2076, that’s long been established, we know the start date very well, it started in 2046. We’re now two years on from 2076 in the game, given the fact everyone’s two years older. So it’s now been 32 years since the Crisis. So the Omnic Crisis started when she was 19 years old (51-32=19)…
Even in the event it’s been retconned with Invasion (Not that I’ve played it, blizzard have lost me as a customer until Major Things are Addressed)… that’s still some serious bunk given how many times I had to listen to Winston Overwatch say “30 years ago, the omnics declared war.” She still would have only been 23 at the outbreak of the war. Her sister would still have had a baby at 18 and graduated / gotten married at 17. It just falls apart.
(Now. the 51 is better. It is… since if they’d stuck to the 47 year age, she would have been 15 (with the original date for the Omnic Crisis) / 19 years old (with the Retcon) during the crisis and her parents would have some criminally liable explanation for why her twin sister has a 5 year old child and is married).
Just make her and Jack Morrison the same age. They read as being roughly the same age in the story! They do, they’ve got nearly the exact same backstories, the parallels between them were so clear and obvious to me that it pisses me off that they’ve nearly put a generation gap between them. Now, IMO, Soldier 76 is a little too old for the established backstory they’ve got for him. He joined the military at 18, the omnic crisis didn’t start until either he’s 26 in the original set of dates, or until he’s literally thirty given the retcon, which. It just. It makes you question how long the SEP was… and never mind trying to make reaper’s backstory make any sense either…two years older than Morrison, he’s a more senior military officer but also had a stint as a cop…when exactly?)
So just. They already retconned it once. Just retcon it again. It clearly wasn’t thought out. Make her (and ideally, frankly Morrison too) 24-25 at the start of the omnic crisis.
Yes, they fixed it. But to be honest the damage is done. There are a lot of things that bother me about the lore, but how am I supposed to take the lore seriously when even the devs don’t know/take the lore seriously? Kiriko and Sojourn are the two most obvious signs that the devs don’t give a damn about the lore and aren’t taking it seriously.
As I said, I’ve had problems with the lore for a long time. I actually love diving into such universes and stories and Overwatch had huge potential, which some fanfics also try to use that. But it’s over, I’m no longer interested in what the devs do with the lore. Anything that has to do with OW2 doesn’t exist / is irrelevant for me.
Like I understand the core problem; internal drama at blizzard. They lost Michael Chu, whose vision maybe I didn’t know, but at least it was a vision. They hired on a writer who wrote, IMO, the best short story of the bunch (It was Baptiste’s short that introduced Mauga)… and she resigned within the year.
I don’t think it’s that they don’t care as much as they don’t have a consistent team, they don’t have people who are actually manning the project as a written story project, and so it’s just a hot mess. One of the things I’ve not seen anyone comment on is the fact they retconned Zenyatta’s age too. Zenyatta was listed as 20 years old. (I have the notes because. uh. well. My shame as a fanfiction author exists). He’s now listed as 33. Mentally I just said, “Oh, the original age was when he gained sentience, they’ve now decided to put when he was made.” Except that doesn’t work either because apparently Aurora gave sentience to all omnics… 26 years ago.
Even trying to think about the glaring black hole that’s Kiriko’s age is liable to give me an aneurysm. Like she acts very close with Genji and Hanzo, they knew each other, trained with them…except for the fact at her current age she would have been 9 at the latest possible date for the “genji meatgrinder” event, and genji / hanzo would have been 25 and 28. It’s so dumb. It drives me mad that I was so invested in the narrative back in 2016-2019 that I wrote thousands of words of fanfic and spent so much time analyzing it.
they didnt fixed a thing, we fans put preassure and we did the thing, but the problem is still there, sojourn is too young, she should be like 55 to be an equal to soldier and anna, she being 10 years younger should be a rookie or something back in ow gold days, and her hair is fully white at 51, is the future, everyone should age later.
and her sister went from child pregnancy to teen pregnancy, thats the only reason why they fixed the age, they didnt care to have consistency in the lore, kiriko age is still a problem
It just…it makes me so mad. What do they have against women in their 50s. There’s only one other woman who’s older than 50. It’s Ana. Mina would be that age too but she died at an unknown point in the story.
Their own book about her. Says that she joined the military full time after finishing University. She became a Captain before the Crisis. In the book she says that in the last year of her service she’d been focused on trying to get that rank! So she spends at least a few years there.
Just following the logical progression of things: entered uni at 18, Canada has 4 year tracks, so she exits around 22. She then joins the military, and serves over a year and so when the crisis breaks out, she would need to have been either 24 at the earliest (but that doesn’t make sense given the fact that she’s working to get Captain), so more likely 25 or 26. Or, in plain terms, 52 at the youngest, and preferably older. And this makes sense as well! Her sister married after graduating high school, but her university plans were going to be interrupted if she hadn’t gotten help from the omnic nanny. As in she likely got pregnant during uni. If she got pregnant at 19, had the baby at 20, Bonnie being 5 at the start of the crisis would make Vivian and Valentine 25 years old, or 53 in current era… though frankly speaking because I hate the retcon of the crisis date… 57. Which would be perfectly serviceable as an age.
if I’m not mistaken they said some time ago that by “60 years in the future” they mean an idyllic “starting from the 10-20s of 2000”. it makes no sense to start with 2016 (the year Overwatch 2 was released) because Kaplan also said in 2019 that OW was set 60 years in the future.
I specify this only so as not to get too paranoid with real dates.
No. the codex of the game (buying the pve) is given a timeline, and it is now clearly written that the omnic crisis began 28 years before. the old data should NOT be considered anymore, just as it is given 100% validation by the old statement by Michael Chu who roughly said "the omnic crisis started more or less 30 years ago). in short: we can NO longer give for good the old version of events that said “30 years ago”. Retcon? yes, but it’s a timeline that we have today. It’s not the first game that defines something from the past.
delete officially “30-32 years ago” as start of omnic crisis. the calculations you made change to “28 years earlier”.
Frankly, it’s not the worst damage they’ve done to the lore. I mean, they even did these birthdate retcons in Cassidy and Brigitte’s early years after noticing the distraction. These are very easy dates to change to get back on track. On kiriko I’m sorry that there hasn’t been the age retouch operation now, they should seriously abandon the “rebel girl” concept, but considering that the website is still buggy with the torbjorn and junkrat page not being displayed, I think that is in progress.
Let’s think instead of the never resolved temporal inconsistencies of Research (total inconsistency on Orisa’s development periods to be in that comic), if we really want to “expose the epic nature of the attention to detail” of ow1.
the problem in my opinion is another: they wasted TOO much time belittling the lore as a central part of OW2, to the point of making it the last wheel of the wagon. OW2 was NOT 5v5, but they gave it to us exclusively with that and for their stupid e-sports tournament that was way too expensive to deserve that kind of NBA business. And by limiting the lore they have decimated its essentially compromised functions to the point of giving us “archives”. But frankly? I am of the opinion that even with the long-awaited talent tree we would not have had the same justice as OW2: so much time has passed that sojourn was described too late in a passionate way, the season seems more dedicated to Ramattra rather than to Illari ( completely off topic with everything else) and you can see that many contents of season 1 made explicit reference to what we saw in season 6. Bad timing, people tired of being in a waiting room: this is the truth, independent from rewriting parts of the lore or not being specific enough about a lot of things.
However, I confirm one thing: Kiriko is a j-pop waifu treated very badly by Blizzard marketing. Random dating to forcibly connect her with the shimadas, character inconsistencies between the voicelines in game and what we read/see of her in cinematic/short story, the character with the highest number of spam expensive skins (remember the first standard skins EXCLUSIVELY IN COIN ? or Kiriko watch?). They ruined a lot of the intrigue around Kanezaka for a j-pop girl to spam online as a trend.
another specification that is missing from what you say:
London Calling and Ramattra have long indicated that there is only one “omnic generation”, that all those born after Aurora’s awakening do not have the same kind of knowledge principle. we can see a little of it in Orisa and Echo, whose personalities are processed in behavioral modules.
the Genesis saga It includes this concept of “omnic people” very well: all those who were born from the omnica corporation had been infected by Anubis (even Zenyatta, according to some of his new voicelines) and found their conscience thanks to Aurora (END of the omnic crisis, 26 years ago. the ingame codex confirms it);
Another interesting detail is that Ramattra is an omnic developed by the omniums corrupted by Anubis, and not by mankind like the omnica corp. in fact his age is 28, which is the beginning of the omnic crisis. this detail is told in Sojourn’s book, where she sees the production of the R-7000 Ravager and later shown in Geneis saga.
small easter egg in Ana’s Null Secotr skin: killing ONLY echo or Orisa she calls them “creations”, but she never does when she kills Zenyatta, Ramattra or Bastion, all of them being born as Omnics.
therefore Zenyatta’s rewriting is correct: to define itself as omnic it necessarily had to be born in the period of the omnica corp, approximately before the omnic crisis (as mentioned before, which began 28 years ago).
Ehm, @harmicist and @FateofSouls: let it be clear that it was not my intention to diminish the feelings you are having about the disorder for the lore . I try them too and have also given my feedback on them as a reader. For now (from what I know at least) it seems to me that the issue of age has already been better resolved for Sojourn. Hopefully the same will happen for Kiriko, as I’ve said before and elsewhere. but what I want to say is that in any case something that can be fixed over the time, this and other details, has also happened in the past. It’s not the end of the world (at least THESE detalis fixable).
the most serious flaw… is that there is no longer the same participation of devs that we were used to in 2016, with them actively participating in discussions instead of doing shadow fixes when they wake up and for case they see the complaints on Twitter.
No worries; I totally get the strength of the feelings. To clarify, I wasn’t getting my information from Metzen or from Chu’s previous tweets on the subjects. Back when I played OW (I stopped season 2 of OW2’s lifetime and I’m pretty done unless and until they fix the predatory monetization + the sexual harassment suit that was brought by the state of California is done) I played on console. Until Overwatch 2, whenever you turned on the game it played the “Recall” part of the recall short. So since 2016, I’ve had Winston tell me that “30 years ago, the omnics declared war.” It is a retcon, and a glaring one at that, to have it be that 2 years since the advent of the original game, it is now 28 years ago. Making Winston’s number even more off.
I had also not seen this number until getting back on the forums, as I have no access to the in-game codex and I don’t plan on hopping on to see that they’ve retconned the work I did back in the day piecing the lore they had drip-fed.
The issue of ages are not the end of the world, you’re correct, it is something easily enough corrected with going in and changing the age. They did it all the way back before launch of the original game. Originally, Mercy was 34, but given the photos we’d seen of her with the original squad of the team that was just too young, and so they pinned her age to Cassidy’s age at the time— 37. It’s more emblematic of the fact they did not do an effective job writing a story, and they really didn’t even try / they’ve had so much upheaval in the narrative department that they don’t know what they’re really doing with the narrative.
As for Orisa; her age actually does make sense. The comics lore progressed a year in Reflections, which showed christmas, and then the next year was when Doomfist broke from prison + Orisa was constructed. So it’s been 2 years since Winston announced recall, but only 1 year since Orisa was constructed.
As for “10 years”, as far as I can tell what they’re referring to, it’s the age difference between Sojourn and Ana, and it was before they changed it to the current age the age gap between Sojourn and S:76 (47 and 57). Sojourn is currently 51, Ana is 62. It’s another good reason why I still feel 51 is too low. Ana also has a young daughter during the Crisis that’s around Bonnie’s age, at the new date Pharah would have been 6, and before the retcon she was 2 at the outset of the crisis. There’s no reason for Sojourn to be so much younger than the OG squad of Overwatch (Jack, Ana, Reinhardt, Torbjorn, Reaper all having official ages, and Mina presumtively also being around their age) given that she was invited to their ranks during the crisis, and turned it down to focus on Canada— there’s really not.
. but yes you are right, it should also be specified that he has 4 years of experience in the army. I guess it’s even more relevant to correct Sojourn’s age by adding another 4-5 years to her.
. I try them too and have also given my feedback on them as a reader. For now (from what I know at least) it seems to me that the issue of age has already been better resolved for Sojourn. Hopefully the same will happen for Kiriko, as I’ve said before and elsewhere. but what I want to say is that in any case something that can be fixed over the time, this and other details, has also happened in the past. It’s not the end of the world (at least THESE detalis fixable).