I love lore, and I’d like to discuss a little info I noticed in the declassified book, comparing it to old Overwatch notions about hero ages. I’ll post the sources, of course.
Source 1 : Official Website
- Official age in OW1: 26
- Official age in OW2: 28
As always, we must consider the age gap defined by OW1 and OW2 when reading old and new biographical info;
Source 2 : Tracer and other characters are aging;
Twitter, 27 lug 2016;
https://x.com/westofhouse/status/758373334803292160
One more PSA for the day: Tracer does age. The characters some people assume are trapped in time (Tracer, Mercy, Widowmaker, Mei) all age.
Michael Chu, Lead Writer
Source 3 : Tracer disappeared for two years;
Overwatch Declassifed - An Official History (2023), page 170-171;
Oxton disappeared and was diagnosed with "chronal disassociation when she was finally recovered. She remained in this state for two years*, during which time Overwatch formally recruited her into their ranks and lent their best minds toward finding a cure.
*-Studies later showed that Oxton did not age during the two years she was chronally dissociated;
Hypothesis Time
This isn’t the first time we’ve seen a hero whose biographical timeline has been altered despite the lore description. We’ve already seen an example in the past with Mei:
About Mei's age
How old is Mei really?
(Old) Official Forum, 11 Nov 2016;
(+WayBack Machine - Page Source)
https://web.archive.org/web/20180221214937/https://us.battle.net/forums/en/overwatch/topic/20751985037?page=2#post-30
Mei’s age on the website (31) is her apparent/biological age, not chronological. It does not include the amount of time she spent in cryostasis.
Michael Chu, Lead Writer
This means that Mei’s biographical age is official + 9 (the years she was in cryostasis), although her biological age remained at 33 (OW2’s age). In reality, she would have been born 41 years earlier.
And what about Tracer?
With the new info from Declassified, we can still connect the fact that she only started aging again when she left her Chronal dissociation state. So here are two hypotheses:
Case A: the official biography is taking into account Tracer’s biological age. In this case, as for Mei, we must add another 2 years to the temporal age, thus considering Tracer’s birth “30 years ago”;
Case B: the biography is taking into account the temporal age (that is, for the entire world Tracer was actually born 28 years ago, including the years of disappearance;
personally, looking at how they handled Mei’s biography that continues to (silently) follow the logic of Mei’s biographical age with her actual “-9 years”, I find the Case A valid, the one that if we were to draw up an official timeline, we should add 2 years to tracer’s actual birth date despite her being biologically 28 years old.
what do you think? 