I was really really looking forward to getting updated bios, learning more about the new heroes and maybe even a little bit of an extra refresher on the old ones.
Instead, what we got was a severe reduction in the amount of canon lore to 1 measly paragraph per hero. The removal of info such as ages and real names, no update on the base of operations for heroes whose base of operations has updated, and a bunch of errors that show nobody ever bothered to review or check these for errors make this look like an embarrassing last minute update. This is especially disappointing given all of the continuity errors and retcons that came about thanks to Junkerqueen and especially Kiriko’s debuts.
For a few of the most glaring faults:
Doomfist’s old bio told us his motivations. Doomfist’s gameplay description tells us his motivation. Doomfist’s new bio says “Now, he is determined to plunge the world into a new conflict for his own mysterious purposes.” Its not a mysterious purpose, we’ve known it for years, and if you can scroll up we can see what the purpose is in his gameplay description.
Bastion’s pronouns inexplicably changed from “it” to “he” and Bastion’s base of operations, despite being updated in the lore, is still listed as unknown.
Soldier 76’s page just has a really poor grammatical error that proves no one looked over and reviewed any of this. At the end it says “It is known whether he seeks justice… or revenge.”
Widowmaker’s origin story removes the entire part that makes it an origin story. It just says she disappeared, came back, killed her unnamed husband (Gerard) and then disappeared again.
This isn’t even mentioning how Pharah’s updated paragraph casually retcons everything we know about the crisis and the Anubis, about how Kiriko’s origin short still places her as a 7 year old hanging out with a 25 year old Genji, about how Junkrat in the Wastelander would have been a child chronologically even though Junkrat is supposed to be 25 and he was clearly an adult in the short. Or how magic, despite having been confirmed years ago as something that doesn’t exist in Overwatch, now exists in Overwatch and no one acknowledges anything weird about that. Its barely even touched on in the bio.
Overwatch 2 was supposed to be the massive story expansion of Overwatch. It was supposed to be what finally tells us more about the characters and expands the universe forward. So far what we are getting is careless errors, a severe cut in the already sparse lore, and universe-defining retcons that are just being casually thrown around and left undiscussed. I was incredibly excited for this, as someone who has been following the story since the start. I have been extremely critical but I am critical because I care and want to see Overwatch be the best that it can be.
This is leaving me very disappointed and worried about the future of Overwatch and its story, and is making me question if its even worth continuing to follow this universe and its story if the developers are proving that they don’t even care about what they are writing. It’s heartbreaking, embarassing, and making me fearful of the campaign. I was planning on supporting the game, but if the writing team would rather remove the lore that defined the universe and its characters rather than expand on and develop it… This is a knife in the heart for the lore community.
Yeah I wondered about magic. I mean spirit dragons were always vague, but maybe it was holographic hard light and monomolecular energy blade stuff. But seeing her talk about spirits made me think confirmed spiritual arts?
That means Zenyatta transcendence isn’t technology either.
that’s EXACTLY what I’m thinking too. and unless a REAL developer shows up in this abandoned forum and gives us a reasonable explanation I am quite inclined not to take the book that was supposed to give us more contextualization on the Ow lore. It almost seems that with the “cole cassidy” case they felt authorized to do a retcon of the lore, and this is starting to be particularly annoying.
Lúcio has the accent in his gameplay description but not his bio (and again, he’s missing his full name.)
Torbjörn Lindholm’s name was remembered on his own page… And then the accent was forgotten on Bastion’s.
The website itself says:
Overwatch features an international cast of powerful heroes with captivating personalities and backstories
We want to read these captivating backstories. Or even just backstories. We had backstories, please just roll back the bio pages and give us what we already had before, or communicate why we suddenly have these sloppily written Origin Story blurbs.
Yeah, I don’t what they were thinking. It’s actually unbelievable. Genji’s bio is less than half of what it was, more vague, and adds no new context. Why did they even bother?
I didn’t have high expectations because replacing writers often results in at least a bit of messiness, but this is shockingly bad.
It is very sloppy narration. Cole Cassidy was suppose be used as a neat plot device. It was suppose to be him revealing his true identity and casting away his fake name. However, all references to Jesse Mccree was removed in the game, especially in retribution. So it was really a retcon, which is fine…Just wish they just bluntly told us it was a retcon instead of lying about it.
Now we have to keep a very close eye on Kiriko’s age. It is honestly ok for her to be in her early thirties. She doesn’t have to be a teen or 20-something year old. She has to be in her thirties regardless if they wish to honor a simple continuity.
These sort of mistakes should not be made period. Make the writers take some Khan Academy math courses if you have to.
Force the writers to cram read like 100 different memoirs of interesting people with vastly different experiences. DO SOMETHING to get away from the lowest common denominator marvel writing.
Luckily there is the wayback machine of the old pages (Use the link “https://playoverwatch.com/” before writing the location and the name of the hero in website). I categorically refuse to take this current description as canonical. I was also okay with the fact that they had changed “something”, not changed, leaving behind all the chronological problems that ensue.
what bothers me most is that on Tracer’s page they link her biography … that horror of narrative rhythm that is London Calling. . it’s the worst of the fictional sagas we’ve ever had in all OW lore, we’ve always said that.
There is no such moment, let’s not pretend it is. Nowhere in the lore can you fit “actually called Cassidy” or “from now on he will be called Cassidy”, the absence of a replacement on digital media was simply laziness to edit and repost old information. No one has claimed a replacement for the name in the books (it would be impossible) but they have not even deigned to exploit the aforementioned Joel. The French edition of Deadlock Rebels (the most antecedent document in the OW lore after Echo oriign and Honor and Glory) has definitely sculpted: it was called Cassidy and they would have called it that also in the US edition.
Simple: they feel authorized to do everything above this “2”, maybe even check that Tracer is married rather than engaged to Emily.
But do you know what’s even more annoying? that for example the books of deadlock rebels and Hero of Numbani have an excellent reading of the information between what was always said in the game and on social media and what they invented. it is quite absurd that the official website starts to retract the most complex information instead of correcting what we have not found canonical over the years. like those described in Reinhardt’s lore about the beginning of the war (“over 30 years”) and how Mei was saved (no one found her, she saved herself).
Yeah, agreed 100%. They could have done something interesting with renaming Jesse McCree. Instead, they dropped the ball and half told us that his name was now Cole Cassidy because he renounced a fake alias and half told us his name has always been Cole Cassidy let’s pretend Jesse McCree never happened. Its in line with all the other inconsistencies that have been cropping up in the past year, some of which are outlined in the OP.
I only noticed now that in the beta we had the descriptions of the skin based lore … but in OW2 all and the descriptions have disappeared completely.
I’d like to think they removed the bios to give us the good thing for the PVE… but now I have a lot of doubts… They obviously don’t have a lore historian with them to keep up with the timeline or inconsistencies - and I fear they removed the ages & those skin blurbs so they can tweak the characters ages/lore to fit with the new lore they’ve written and just roll whith those inconsistencies…
They really should. DoctorSix would be the perfect girl to consult, but if they are steamrolling over canon material then she would be useless to them.
Omg, what is wrong with Kiriko being over 30? They screwed up hard with the Junkrat easter egg so much that even casual randoms picked it up and not just us lore geeks.
I’m going to make this post and I know it’s going to sound like I’m defending the writing, but I’m not. If anyting I’ve always criticized the writing of the game from the beginning of ow1. I just want to show a different point of view from my understanding of decisions that need to be made during projects.
The decision to reduce the biographies makes a lot of sense. Game sequels usually sell less than the first one, ow2 has the advantage of being free to play, so selling copies isn’t the problem. The problem is to get new people invested in these characters so they can sell stuff about them, like cosmetics and PVE missions. Smaller bios, with more impactful info in them and fun interactions between the heroes ingame is the most effective way to do so.
The second point is that in all these years one thing is clear: the OW audience is casual, both in gameplay and lore. They’ll say how much they love the “universe” and “lore” of the game and know nothing about the omnic crisis. You can put locations, ages, timelines and real names as much as you want in the hero biographies, people still believe that Mercy is way older than she looks, and together with Winston and Cassidy they were part of OW’s original team. Also, it wasn’t like the original bios were that good. Some had things that were with subsequent changed in lore, like Mei’s, but was never fixed, and some never had much to it, like Reaper’s.
About retcons: sometime it needs to be done. It can be good or bad for the development of the plot. I’m disapointed with the way Anubis’ role was revealed, but they haven’t given us enough information for us to discover it ourselves. Which they could’ve done from the start. With the previous writing holding back so much info, at some point the writers are forced explain stuff in one way or the other so the plot can happen. Existing in a way that new fans can understand and old fans follow.
People thinking ow’s writing is bad, it doesn’t surprise me, because I always felt it lacked in multiple aspects. I’ve always came here to try to make sense why people felt it was very good.
Sorry, for the wall of text. I always start my posts wanting to make a small point and end up writing several
Even if you can make points in favour of smaller bios that deleted and replaced the older, detailed ones, or in favour of universe-bending retcons… You cannot defend the inconsistency and pure writing errors that are riddled throughout the hero pages, as outlined in the OP for characters like Doomfist, Bastion, or and Soldier 76 for the most glaring examples.
I’m sorry for not commenting on the errors and inconsistencies and I’m not going to defend them. Like others, I’ve tried to give constructive criticism for the story and characters for years. But I never felt like the writers/devs surpassed my expectations by presenting some original storytelling.
If I’m being 100% honest, the only writing I’m exited about comming out of blizzard is from the author of my favourite book series that has been hired to write something for the Diablo series. Which I know little about, because my only experience with it is from playing Diablo 2 when my English vocabulary was limited.
Also : why are not all the medium linked to the hero page on the website?
Take Soldier:76 : his “bio” only list the animated short Hero. But he as an Origin Story, and is featured in a lot of comics/stories (Retribution, Uprising, Old Soldiers, Bastet, and so on…)
I don’t even know if new players know there is alternative media and where to look to find it because it on a collapse menu on the main page…
New biographies are up on the website, and it’s much better than it was on Overwatch, and obviously mush better than the one that were there for the first season.
New heroes have their own bios, and older one have theirs updated!
(Also, they retcon Kiriko’s age they gave us in the Youtube Short : it stated that she was 7 when Sojiro was killed, now her bio says she was 12. She is at least 24 years old now (±, depends on when Asa’s letter was written, the Recall and so on)
I mean spirit dragons were always vague, but maybe it was holographic hard light and monomolecular energy blade stuff. 
But seeing her talk about spirits made me think 
confirmed spiritual arts?
. it’s the worst of the fictional sagas we’ve ever had in all OW lore, we’ve always said that.
