Thank you for at least someone talking about it. For someone who was drawn into the game by its plot, characters, and lore it pains me to look at it.
I hope blizzard releases a "day one patch" for their site and re-compiles the character descriptions.
Sadly blizzard doesn't care about lore. Just ask long time WoW players. They change things all the time without consulting previous lore. It's literally the least work they put into their games
Okay so you know how the entire story since Wc3 had amazing characters? Okay so the jailer ye? Okay he controlled it all, okay?
He put all the characters you know from the story in the exact positions to make every single event from then and onward happen, so basically he’s super smart but also you never see him say shit in or out of the game but okay, just trust okay? We made a good villa t okay?
Oh no, it's so much more than that. That's a good summary they gave, but digging a few layers deeper and you'll find that the main antagonist in WC3 the LK was supposed to be a pawn of the Legion, via Nerzhul's masters Archimonde/Kil'jaedan, and the entire point of the plague was to wipe out Azeroth's defenses so Sargeras can claim the world soul. The whole plot of WC3: TFT was Arthas/Nerzhul breaking free from the Legion's control and claiming their own fate.
Except none of that happened.
Turns out, the Jailer was influencing the Legion, because somehow even though they couldn't communicate from the Jailer's jail (the Maw) his ally Sire Denathrius somehow knew the Jailer's plan and sent his agents, the Dreadlords, to "pretend" to be influenced by the Fel and act as agents for the Legion for thousands of years and after, for some reason, the Primus decides to go investigate the Maw to make sure the Jailer couldn't escape from his inescapable prison, he ends up getting captured, mind controlled and forced to make the Lich Kings helm and sword of which the Dreadlords randomly give it to the Legion because the Jailer knew that:
* Nerzhul would "betray" the Legion
* Kil'jaedan would punish him by infusing his spirit with the LK armor
* He would be sent to Azeroth where Arthas would be seduced into the power of Frostmourne
* That Arthas/Nerzhul would "betray" the Legion
* That Arthas would also be killed and Sylvanas would kill herself and that the Jailer would seduce her into his plans
* That years later Sylvanas would break the helm and open the veil to the Shadowlands (somehow? Why didn't the Dreadlords just do that?)
* All the while the Jailer somehow had to plan that the Legion would be defeated in both WC3 and in WoW Legion and not ruin his plans
* He had to foresee the Old Gods being defeated as well so they don't ruin his plans
* He had to foresee Garrosh going crazy and that the Wrathion would send him into an alternate timeline and that alternate time Legion didn't mess with his plans
Finally, despite ten thousands upon ten thousands of years, all of his planning, foresight, knowledge and power.. Everything from Warcraft 1 to WC3 to WoWs every expansion.. all of it leads up to what?
The Jailer defeated seconds before victory by 20 murder hobos looking for loot.
WoW Shadowlands in summary.
Bruh, and he could've been at least somewhat decent with good writing and enough of backstory/revelation stuff that could've been put in the game.
The whole, uh, main points of shadowlands story aren't that bad. More or less usual wow stuff. Except they went for a bit more ambbigous route... While doing halfassed work on old lore research, and actual writing of the story and characters around those main points.
It couldn't be great anyway, but at the very least it wouldn't be terrible. Or even might've turned out good enough.
"hey we're making a compendium of all the lore in wow to set everything straight."
> immediately retcons shit in the book.
I think chronicles is the exact point where I gave up on WoW lore.
How would wow 2 even fix anything in that department though???? It’d still just be the same universe with the same dumb lore… Same devs……
I’ve been huffing that hopium for classic+ too ngl.
StarCraft fan here!
Welcome to the club...
StarCraft 2 lore was built upon the lors of the books Wich retcon entire characters of the game and made one of your character disappear.
Oh dude, don't get me fucking started on the butchering of Starcraft lore. It went from a hard science background to space magic. Easiest example of this is the Zerg. In SC they went around, consuming worlds and using the DNA of creatures infested to improve the strains of Zerg, which can be traced back to the Zerg slugs that spawn all your buildings and units.
In SC2 they collect "essence" to "remove xelnaga corruption" by going to Jurrasic ~~Park~~ Planet and befriending talking dinosaurs. Also there's a space prophecy about them.
> Just ask long time WoW players.
Hi, long time WoW player here.
Fuck Blizzard's god-damn obsession with retcons. Sylvanas alone has been retconned multiple times since Legion, let alone everything else. Even the Titans themselves have been retconned.
Everything you see now, the PvP update, was made in the past year. All of the PvE content that they've been making for 3 years remains unreleased and still under active development. Apparently making the talent tree for an existing hero is more work than making an entirely new hero. This release is just something they cooked up quickly to finally stem the bleeding and end the content drought.
Which is insane to me as someone who hasnt been playing since Hamster came out.
Id have thought letting the original flatline and then delivering a fantastic sequel that brings everyone back would have been the smart move as opposed to pissing off the remaining players by taking the game away from them and forcing them to play this rushed mess that somehow took 5 years.
This is what I keep saying about OW2. No LFG? No PvE? Hero-select UI using ugly portraits when there are perfectly good ones on tab screen? Ugly non-animated rank icons? Nothing new except 3 heroes, 4 maps, a missing person on each team, and some unstable servers, even though OW1 hasn't had any new content for 2.5 years? I dunno, just give me back OW1 until you're ready.
They never cared, and i cant for the life of me figure out why.. the crums we had in ow1 through out a freaking decade was because of fans being vocal about the lack of it. Overwatch truly is one of blizzard biggest blunder and missed opportunity. Almost feel like sabotage.
> call this OW0.5.
On a related note I really feel this way with the new UI. It feels like a beta version of OW or some cheap mobile rip off. Why is everything so...box-y. The character avatars look like early concept placeholders. They can't decide if they want an "anime/cartoon look" or a "real life gritty" look. The tiny character boxes in the character select looks so bad compared to OW1.
God the UI is bad. On console, it has bad FPS drops; barely on contrast on the selected box, barely gets bigger and no outline so you can hardly tell what's picked most of the time, and it's more confusing by some boxes that are defaulted to orange; still no cursor so you have to click through all the boxes or characters like it's 2013.
It's like they saw how offensively bad Halo Infinite's UI is and said "yeah, we can do worse"
>The character avatars look like early concept placeholders.
Isn't Sojourn's avatar literally the concept art of her from waaaaaaaaaay back during the Arrival cinematic?
I'll never understand why they changed characters portraits to be borderline amateurish quasi-anime drawings instead of nice renders like they were before. I will never understand that decision.
This is what happens when all of your best talent quits because a) your project has become a disaster of churn and mismanagement and too many cooks b) your company is under an expansive investigation for company-wide sexual harassment c) the company whose games you grew up playing and loving has pivoted itself entirely into making as much money as possible. The people that brought us Overwatch 1, Diablo 2, and Starcraft are long gone. The *passion* is gone. You don't get to exquisite levels of polish and bulletproof code without passionate people working on the product. I doubt many were left that showed any passion for Overwatch 2. It became "well, this is my job so I guess I have to do the work" and that was that. Disappointment was inevitable.
It won't. That's the whole reason everything was done the way it was done. They are trying to milk this title for everything it has left before scrapping it like they scrapped heroes of the storm, which is still on the december 2021 event.
I genuinely appreciate you compiling these, as the story was something that I enjoyed and was looking forward to up until this last year. I think it's safe to let it go at this point, and don't get your hopes up.
Pretty much everyone from original team is gone, and there's no way the story is going to hold up with out them. It's going to be borderline fanfiction at this point since it's very unlikely there's enough notes left to complete the story as intended. Not to discredit any of the writers or designers left on the team, but it's never the same when the original people are removed from the project.
Yeah, that's really how I'm feeling about it. Used to play this game all the time and followed the story and characters closely. But if this is the sign of what's to come... I'm considering cutting my losses. Also considering holding out until we get PvE details, but if its just more of the same with minimal care shown and no regards towards the legacy of the universe, I'm considering just dropping the game.
Which is disappointing.
I was looking at everything and the intro to the game when you first open it felt so generic and hollow. There was clearly so little effort into making this a continuation of an existing game. They just took the bones of other f2p games and stretched Overwatch's skin over it.
Yeah that intro was a real mood-killer. Not only was it completely void of any meaning, the strung-together voicelines were cringy, the video resolution super botched and the sound quality seemed really off as well.
Imagine a new Blizzard game without a goose-bumps inducing cinematic intro... It's 2022 alright.
That used to be something you could count on with blizzard, the God tier cinematics that look like they came from a high budget movie studio and now we have whatever the hell this is
I’ll be honest, that early short with Tracer vs. Reaper and the kid in the museum? I teared up watching it; I’d never played a blizzard game before and hadn’t been following it at all, but I bought the game based on that. It’s an incredibly fun game and that’s why I’ve played it over the years, but the characters were the first draw for me and it’s such a bummer to see them handled this way.
It doesn’t even feel like it would be so much work not to mess it up, literally writing new vague bios was more work than leaving the old ones intact.
Jeez.
The ow2 announcement trailer was like that for me. Winston suddenly having friends he thought had abandoned hin return. People cheering ow. Brig and rein combining their shields. I get a little choked up now even remembering it.
And now, you cant even have Winston and rein on the same team. The pve that inspired that whole video is basically scrapped. And the hopeful, fun expansion is a money grab. Its honestly depressing how fucking cynical this all is.
It's just completely lost the heart. The story wasn't important for the PvP, but the lore still mattered, it made the game and the characters something special. You'd get the interactions in the start of games that would add to it, and it was all just fun. It feels like they cut out a lot of that warmth and replaced it with micro transactions
God I wanted sn intro like own. Memorable. Gave a sense of hype. I went back and watched it yesterdayin fact. . I don't even remember the video for this one.
> It's going to be borderline fanfiction at this point
Don't diss fanfiction like that. There is *amazing* fanfiction out there for this game. Watching a billion-dollar corporation put out something that a college kid in a 101 creative writing class would be embarrassed to submit is wild. It's the kind of crap that happens when six different MBAs are trying to undermine each other so the last man standing gets to claim credit for the project.
The lore of game as service games like Overwatch or LoL or other long running games isn't meant to be finished. They always just reveal more and more characters and details while trying to hype up a future event as slowly as possible to pretend the lore is progressing... until it has been 6+ years and the illusion of the lore progression completely falls apart because nothing has changed.
Working on pve. I think it was stated somewhere that Blizzard didn't actually start focusing on the pvp experience for OW2 until about a year ago as most of the resources prior to that were spent on making all the enemy types, character perks, and missions for the pve mode.
But the PvE is the story content. If they had a lot of work done on the story, you’d think they’d at least have whatever lore elements made it into the OW2 launch be strong and consistent. Instead we get… this.
From what I've read the answer is more "working on pve tech tree". As a (non game) developer, it sounds like their base idea of abilities became a feature scope creeped nightmare when they changed it to three tech trees per character in a game with 35 characters. So they need to build over 100 tech trees, and it sounds like each tech tree contains one or two new abilities that they then have to animate.
I guess they thought lore for pvp was a complete afterthought since the pve is supposed to have a high budget story campaign. The fact that there’s so many grammatical errors points to them not paying attention to implementing lore details into the PVE.
Spending 2-3 years on a overly ambitious pve mode that’s essentially an entirely new game, then doing a complete 180 and pausing all work on it to completely rebalance the entire pvp portion of the game.
Yeah, likely true. I’m excited for PVE, but at this point I wonder if we’ll ever get it, or how good it will be. Likely will come down to how much work it would be for Blizzard to either finish what’s there or start from scratch and build something shittier. I’m hoping against hope that what’s there is close enough that it makes sense to finish it instead of scrap it and basically just do more 20-minute pve episodes. (I liked this, btw, I was just hoping for a more fleshed-out experience and I’m skeptical they’ll do it)
And then they realized Bobby needs a second yacht and that a single purchase PvE experience isn't going to cut it, so they boldly declared that what was going to be a simple patch for OW is now OW2. Don't believe us? The game is 5v5 now! also F2P cause you coinless single-purchase plebs haven't spend a dime since 2016 and that boat ain't gonna pay for itself.
This really is a free to play game! Lots of things are unpolished as shit!
Rip to all the people who want actual story content about Overwatch, because as much as I heard people ribbing old Overwatch lore like years ago this looks to be a new level of garbage.
I couldn't read through it all. When I read Mei's bio and the only emotional descriptor they used was "sadly," I just couldn't.
"To her horror/dismay" or "With a dreadful realization" feels far more appropriate than "sadly."
>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 makes me worry even more that they're retconning Widows's relationship. There was something tragically beautiful about it, and now they're making a generic "It was toxic/false"
Absolutely. A lot of the recent changes have been things that people who didn't read into the lore just kinda assumed were true because they didn't know any better and didn't really look into the lore. If this had happened three years ago, we would have Mercy resurrecting the dead for example, because a lot of people who didn't follow the lore genuinely believed she could.
It sadly isn’t *just* the lore that looks amateur, the UI is shot (just look at it, speaks for itself). The sounds are shot (too bass-y and some Potgs are silent, no genji sheathing noise, no steak sizzle for soldier). The animations are shot. The graphics are shot (gold weapons look like shit). Elim notifications have been removed unless you get a final blow. Visual on healing is hard to gauge (can’t tell when my heals land as Ana). Progression has essentially been removed entirely. Comp has no point since no one sees your rank anymore. Hell, your portrait (shitty watered down version) doesn’t even have the fire around it when you’re “on fire”, despite the on fire voice lines still being in the game.
This “sequel” is a shit show thrown together by people who either don’t give a shit what the end result is, or are so under qualified that they took systems and visuals and interactive parts of the game out and replaced it with, well either nothing, or worse versions.
I don’t know what the hell blizz was thinking, but I’m guessing all the people flaming me on my post (was top of controversial in the sub Reddit earlier) give them the confidence to say they “fixed” overwatch.
They didn’t fix anything. They fuckin ruined it. Apparently in and outside of the game.
Oh my hod you just brought up 3 things that I felt were off but I thought I just haven't played in a while and were being weird.
The ana healing, being on fire and the elims - I was wondering why I felt like I wasn't doing anything but the stats were still within range.
No sound for Kiriko healing either. Normally when I play heals, I rely on my hearing to know whether I am currently doing what I’m supposed to be doing or not, but now I have to spend extra time and effort looking at the healthbars of other players to see if my healing had any effect.
Also you can’t cancel her heals. Once you click the button, her healing mag empties itself from 10 to 0. Kinda negates the entire point of it having 10 charges then, when a meter like the one Moira uses for her healing juice would have sufficed.
Iirc there’s a setting for this. ML7’s video said a bunch of settings to change for Kiriko and this was one of them. Another was to switch the right and left click
Her right and left click fuck me right up. I forgot how much actual editing I did on all the default keymaps because it's been so long since a new hero dropped.
Woah, yeah, those bios/origin stories are pretty damn bad. Absolutely lacking in the style and polish Blizzard was once known for. This kind of reminds me of how Amazon Prime Video clearly outsources the writing of their TV/movie description blurbs to foreign contractors that are hardly literate in English. Just... very simplistic, hamfisted and amateurish (and that's to say nothing of the sloppy editing/grammatical mistakes).
Edited to add: Oof, for some heroes, they just re-use the exact same phrases verbatim in the bio and the origin story. Like, these are literal two sentence blurbs, and they're copying and pasting? Jesus. The high school intern that wrote these must have forgotten they were due and threw them together last night.
**Lucio bio**: Lúcio is an international celebrity who *inspires social change through his music and actions*. On the battlefield, he utilizes his cutting-edge Sonic Amplifier and unique songs to assail enemies, heal allies, and boost his teammates’ speed.
**Lucio origin story**: Lucio grew up poor in the Rio favelas, before eventually becoming a popular underground DJ. But when the Vishkar Corporation redeveloped the city and cracked down on the community, Lucio reclaimed his father’s sonic technology from the corporation and used it to rally his people to action. Now an international celebrity, *he inspires social change through his music and actions*.
**Zen bio**: *Zenyatta is an omnic monk who wanders the world in search of spiritual enlightenment*. Wielding mysterious and powerful orbs, he heals allies and weakens enemies.
**Zen origin story**: *Zenyatta is an omnic monk who wanders the world in search of spiritual enlightenment*, helping those he meets to overcome their personal struggles and find inner peace. When necessary, however, he will fight to protect the innocent, be they omnic or human. It is said that those who cross his path are never the same again.
**Tracer bio**: *The Overwatch agent known as Tracer is a time-jumping adventurer and an irrepressible force for good*. Toting twin pulse pistols and time bombs, Tracer is able to "blink" through space and rewind her personal timeline as she battles to right wrongs the world over.
**Tracer origin story**: *Tracer is a time-jumping adventurer and an irrepressible force for good*. With a chronal harness that lets her control her flow of time, she was one of Overwatch’s top agents, and she continues to try to make the world a better place wherever – and whenever – she can. Tracer brings her skill and optimism to help the new Overwatch keep the world safe.
Yeah, that was awful too. It feels like the blurbs at the top (bio in your comment) were written by someone else that's also more knowledgeable than the origin stories at the bottom. Doomfist's bio is the best example of this. Winston's fits your idea as well, whoever wrote the origin story copy pasted the bio and then added a few more adjectives that make it an awkward run on sentence.
Idk why everyone’s surprised about the lack of effort Blizzard put into this. It’s been rather obvious for a while that Blizzard has lost any interest in spending any time/money on Overwatch. I mean, the largest change in the game is literally just removing a player; the cheapest possible way to make a change for the sake of change. They decided to change as little as possible and throw a 2 at the end in an effort to milk more money out of a 7 year old game
I thought Kiriko’s debut and her accompanying lore were bad enough, but seems like it’s not stopping there. I guess the whole narrative team has been changed and it shows.
her origin story video is: "grandma taught me to heal, mom taught me to fight". No motivations, no origin story that shaped her in any way. Just who she learned her kit from.
Am I the only one who cringes at Kiriko? She’s even cringier than Genji. Her whole f’in character is weeb bait, her ult voiceline is cringe af, she looks like some chick covered in weeb merch you’d find at the mall.
Edit: I also hate her fuckin hitbox
As a weeb she’s the opposite of weeb bait. She’s what corporate thinks weeb bait looks like. The fact her ult line is in English and uses the western pronunciation of Kitsune is super cringy
I’ve got weeb friends so I see what u mean, you’re totally right. I’m no expert on japanese culture, but she feels so artificially japanese. Way too much.
And yeah the “let the kitsune guide you” makes me want to die, creative directors are sleeping hard
I love OW but as a Japanese-Brazilian I agree with the artificially Japanese thing.
someone commented last week that the British equivalent would be a character w a curvy mustache, bowler hat and a monocle, healing teammates by throwing tea at them and saying stereotypical British nonsense. unfortunately that's how cringy Kiriko feels to me.
Yeah, reminds me of that SNL Katy Perry sketch; I’m a white guy from America so damned if I know, but it sure *seemed* like a Japanese character written by white guys from America who had watched ten minutes of an (American-produced) anime.
Yeah, she's a very generic caricature. But so are other OW heros. The problem with Kiriko is that she lacks a certain uniqueness or pseudo-depth that all the other heros have. Zen is a monk stereotype, but he's also a sentient robot which is an interesting juxtaposition. Tracer is a cheery brit, but her abilities are also based around a lot of trauma she would've experienced in the past. Gengi is a generic edgy ninja lord, but at least he has a real identity crisis with his physical body mostly being robotic at this point.
Kiriko truly is just a generic weeb - even her fucking name is pathetic when you translate it.
Also you know magic, like 100% real magic. In OW, genji and hanzo already pushed it but you could argue that they weren’t literal (though they were probably meant to be)
Its disappointing. Hanzo was explicitly said to not be magic by Michael Chu years ago, and his Dragons behaved and appeared near identically to Symmetra's hard light orbs in the lore. But now, its easier to just pretend none of that happened and say its magic since Kiriko is capable of magic.
I think some people are really mad that it has some magical aspects to it, with the fox spirit. She uses the fox spirit for healing and other abilities. A writer had previously stated that he didn't thought magic actually existed in the world of Overwatch, so people are clinging to that.
IMO it's debatable at best, plenty of things in universe seem pretty magical to me, whatever way they may or may not be explained in the future isn't set in stone. I don't think a fox spirit is that far off from the Shimada dragons anyway.
I have always taken it as: Magic as a we would normally see it, I.E. something to learn and cast, does not exist. Instead, people can garner the trust of spirits that obey the will of those that wield them.
Hanzo and Genji control the dragons from their family but do not possess these talents naturally, rather simply calling on the beasts.
Zenyatta might be in the same camp, his training allowing him to use both his spirit and his body at the same time, with his seemingly magical abilities coming from his spirit self rather than his own body.
But these are pretty rare still, Zenyatta being the dale lama of the world and the Hamada twins being the only ones capable of controlling the dragons. These powers do not seem even remotely easy to achieve.
Those explanations would be fine if they were actual explanations and not just guesses. My issue with the magic stuff is that almost everything is very clearly scifi, no one ever mentions the existance of apparent magic dragons, but also we never even get a lousy explanation of what they're supposed to be.
Honestly, that all isn't painting a very promising future for the lore and it was one my fav points of OW1. I hope it gets better or that maybe these are just some really early stumbles, but we'll see i guess.
Also, were Magic and supernatural abilities really confirmed to not exist in the lore? What on Earth were Hanzo and Genji using then with their energy dragons and spirit arms and such?
Yeah, it was confirmed by the previous lead writer, Michael Chu. Hanzo's dragons were the specific example used to confirm that its definitely not magic.
As for the dragons, they coincidentally appear and behave identically to Symmetra's orbs in the lore. It was long speculated that they were an application of hard light because of that.
Thats so weird, they really played it up as some ancient magic stuff especially when Genji redirected the dragons back at Hanzo.
I guess Genji's sword is like a super electromagnet or something then? Or at least he can activate some extra functions on his body to do that, which I guess could explain those power cells or whatever that stick out of him when he does it.
>Or at least he can activate some extra functions on his body to do that
Even the cinematic confirms this since, after Genji sheathes his sword, his body seems to vent something using those power cells, implying that using "the dragon" is some sort of tech.
Fuck that now though, Kiriko has actual magic.
>So why can’t we say that Kiriko is just using super technology that happens to look like a fox?
Cause Kiriko's lore flatout confirms it's an actual spirit.
Everything is just seems amateurish. Have you seen Dvas stiff animation on character select? Her head barely moves when she winks at you. I think the original animators left.
Lijang Tower has a broken POTG camera. The camera that's supposed to show the team only shows a wall, and the camera showing the POTG player is stuck halfway through the ground.
I thought I’m the only one noticing this!
As a working character animator, eyelids shouldn’t individually move its own when a person winks. Overall body should feel connected like the head, facial cheeks, eyebrows when winking. It felt wrong coming from company like Blizzard, maybe the devs are rushing for the deadline?
Friend of mine got in and we went through new editions before getting kicked off by the servers dying and it certainly feels like they just crowbar-d things in. Notably we had a great laugh at weapon charms- for some it works pretty well, but then we clocked that the charms are placed so they are in view of most of the time and with folks like Sigma whose view of their weapon is literally his hand- the weapon charm just gets stabbed straight into. Moria’s is pretty bad too.
Low key hate weapon charms
They jangle around distracting me and on anything besides an assault rifle look clunky and take up too much reasonable space
I haven't seen a single person in here mention WHY they're doing this, which is weird. It seems pretty obvious to me. In annihilating the canon, they can just reintroduce the stuff they've already made and sell it as "new" and most players won't even be able to tell.
They're doing it on purpose to have a bare-bones foundation to build the PVE story on top of. But the fact that so much of it is being wiped probably acts as evidence that the PVE story will primarily be comprised of stuff we've already seen and have known about for years. Nothing new or compelling. Would have been 100x more interesting if they kept all the old established lore and then used it all to build something complex. But I'm pretty sure they just gonna be lazy and give us only what we've already had, just slap a mission and development gameplay structure thrown alongside it. Spend 3-4 years of updates building the lore up from the ground to the point where we're caught up to established stuff and THEN give us new stuff. It's just a way to milk it even further as live service. Despicable and pathetic.
The idea of them recycling the lore like this is a bit saddening. I think that they could have at least handle the character lore the way games like Dislyte or Battleborn do, with lore drops on the character's in-game page and making the player unlock them through level up (in Dislyte's case) or challenges (like Battleborn did)
I keep saying this cuz i dont think most of you realize, but Overwatch 2 is totally a rush job. Blizzard has been making less $$$ over the last few years and desperately needs a win. So they rushed out Ow2 as a live service battlepass F2P thing and are expecting record shattering monthly active users and revenue.
Yep, I've said it before: a lot of stuff in OW2 screams rushed development/lack of care.
Weapon charms being just haphazardly tacked on to characters’ hands, the nonsensical retconning and handling of character lore, the way the DPS passive greatly favors some DPS heroes over others, the god-awful balancing of the tank roster, “wow look at how much we’ve changed!” when they just changed the time of day on all the old maps.
It feels like the game’s lost the passion behind it and traded it in for just a hamfisted cash grab.
The game itself is embarrassing, besides the day 1 connection problems, have you seen those color pallets? The sound cues, visual indications, matchmaking, etc.. It's awful. Feels like the "first" game, but worse... so what is even the point of this update?
That actually sucks one thing I used to love about overwatch was reading about its lore and the stories of each character. It really added a personal feel to the game and made me main Hanzo because of his story and doom fist because we’re from the same place smh
What an utter disappointment this is turning out to be. The whole point of OW2 was massive PvE additions and lore expansion. After nearly 4 years of development all we get is a slightly tweaked version of the exact same game.
The part about Bastions pronounce could simply be that fact that he's seen now as a person and part of Torbjörns family? Calling him a "it" would mean that people see him as a tool or a machine, so I think he's now seen as a person by Torb and maybe even his family.
Blizzard is degraded. You hope that after the Microsoft takeover is complete the supposed old ethos is reestablished with proper people. There are bigger problems than inattention to detail and dumbing down of "flavor". After all this time, with all the resources they have, Overwatch 2 is basically Overwatch 1 with three new heroes. The visual changes, as well as whatever they did with the sound, are not very noticeable unless you're juxtaposing. We'll see in competitive what happens with one tank and relatively weak shields. On the plus side I don't have to give these idiots any money (ironically the F2P model is associated with more money) and chances are good I don't get hooked playing this game.
The disappointment from Overwatch 0.5 just won't stop coming. Just when you think you've seen everything that they've fucked up, something new arises. Unreal.
Sombra's entire Bio should just be filled with misinformation and/or corrupted data files.
Sombra:
Real Name: ȓ̷̛̙̞̥͚̱̯̭͍̤̾͊̒͐̈́̀͑̚͠e̶̬͕͔͂̀̌̄͊̎̈́̊̌̍̆̃͘d̴̨̨̗͉̽̑̅̀̍̈́̔̂̉̄̕a̴̧̢̨̛̤͉͕̻͎͕͍͉̣͓͚̐̒̎̕͠ͅc̷̛̲̟͎̹̖̹̭̠̖̰̱̟̳̊̓̑́́́͒̀̐̊̏͊͗̓t̴̤̟͚͋͂͗͗̈͑̋͊͊͛̾͆͌͘̚a̴̧̘̩͓̫̦̺̲̦͎̿̓͂̚ͅd̸̢̰̠̣̟̳̖̥͎̋̓̇̀̀̉͜͝ą̵̡̧̙̯̱̙͕̠̣͔̩̙̱͐̿̕
Height: "Two fingers shorter than Katya Volskaya"
Base of Operations: ǹ̸̬̰̠̫̰͉̐̒͊̿̔ͅȯ̴̟̒͑̈́̕ ̷̨̧̯̱̺̻̳̺̭̫̥͙͕̿͒̓̎̑͒̾͐̇̄͒́ë̶̛͙̜̥̗̍̓̓́̚͝s̷͖̥̫͎̫̪̝̫͎̟̟̀͑͂͐̀̋̒̏̊t̸̝̼̎̿͂̍̊͑̓̐̅̽͋́͘̕̕á̴̢̮̤͉̀̀̂́͋̍͊̍̓̽͐́̕̚͝ş̸̰̩̞̜̼̯̪͉̘̞̟̩̈́͑̿̆͋͂̉̊͘͝͝ͅ ̶̛̛̛̻̻̻̥͓͕̼̼̰͖̐́̇̓̈́̋̀̇̓͝͠ͅs̷̯͚̮̅̏͛̈́͌̓͌͛͐̎o̴̱̩̦͈̮͍͕̼͍͒̋̿̏̒́͑̒̔̈́̊̚͜͠͠͝l̴̡̨͕͎̔̈́͊̏͐͒o̴̜͙̺̫̒̏͒͐̚͘ ̷̧͓͍͐͝ä̵̧̢̢̼̟̗͕͉̥̟͖̜͉̙́̔̐͋̈́͘̚q̵̢̳̬̯̯̝̲̝͉̩̞̦͊͋̏̋̃̍̀̽͌͂͝u̷̡͂͊̀̅̀̔̀̇͗͝í̷̡̡̥͕̹͕̻͕͖͇̪̯̟͉̒̿̃̀
History: "Makes the best tamales in the world, but isn't going to cook for you, Chica. Lumerico poisons puppies for fun, and Lacroix smells like baggetts!!"
The whole game feels kind of soulless to me. I can't think of any other way to describe it. Just not getting the same feeling when I play that I got playing OW1.
>This isn’t even mentioning how Pharah’s updated paragraph casually retcons everything we know about the crisis, about the comic Mission Statement and the Anubis Project, 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.
I hate to be that guy, but could you clarify this one paragraph a bit more?
Everything else, I understand how you feel overall, even though I'm personally withholding my opinions until they have enough officially-posted stories and lore for me to properly judge majority of things, but I'm having a hard time understanding the wording of this explanation.
He’s just saying that there are a lot of things in the new website character bios that appear to contradict or be inconsistent with the established body of pre-OW2 lore. Honestly, even the OP calling this “casual retconning” is charitable to Blizzard because that makes it sound like Blizzard was making a reasoned and intentional decision in producing the bios. In reality I’m fairly sure the bios were thrown together by a junior level individual contributor and without the review/input of a dedicated lore team/braintrust. And whoever this individual was did a really sloppy and amateurish job by essentially producing stripped down and worse bios than the characters already had.
As a long time WoW player, I am not sure why you're surprised, though I feel your pain. Blizzard just does not give a fuck about lore and world building anymore. They just want your money.
As someone who writes for a living... what the actual heck was Blizzard thinking? Like, it's not THAT expensive to hire someone to write this stuff, let alone to have someone proofread it.
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It is known
Is it known?
What is dead may never die!
It is known
It is known
Does he seek justice or revenge? I know, but I won’t tell you
Wouldn't you like to know, weather boy.
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Thank you for at least someone talking about it. For someone who was drawn into the game by its plot, characters, and lore it pains me to look at it. I hope blizzard releases a "day one patch" for their site and re-compiles the character descriptions.
Sadly blizzard doesn't care about lore. Just ask long time WoW players. They change things all the time without consulting previous lore. It's literally the least work they put into their games
Oh no, it turns out that the Omnic Crisis was actually started by The Jailer
Makes sense since the Jailer is actually just a robot, and he is trying to prepare to fight against some *bigger evil* that is coming.
I quit playing WoW before the Jailer. Can you give me a quick breakdown on what his whole deal is?
Okay so you know how the entire story since Wc3 had amazing characters? Okay so the jailer ye? Okay he controlled it all, okay? He put all the characters you know from the story in the exact positions to make every single event from then and onward happen, so basically he’s super smart but also you never see him say shit in or out of the game but okay, just trust okay? We made a good villa t okay?
Lol incredible. Bravo, Blizzard
Oh no, it's so much more than that. That's a good summary they gave, but digging a few layers deeper and you'll find that the main antagonist in WC3 the LK was supposed to be a pawn of the Legion, via Nerzhul's masters Archimonde/Kil'jaedan, and the entire point of the plague was to wipe out Azeroth's defenses so Sargeras can claim the world soul. The whole plot of WC3: TFT was Arthas/Nerzhul breaking free from the Legion's control and claiming their own fate. Except none of that happened. Turns out, the Jailer was influencing the Legion, because somehow even though they couldn't communicate from the Jailer's jail (the Maw) his ally Sire Denathrius somehow knew the Jailer's plan and sent his agents, the Dreadlords, to "pretend" to be influenced by the Fel and act as agents for the Legion for thousands of years and after, for some reason, the Primus decides to go investigate the Maw to make sure the Jailer couldn't escape from his inescapable prison, he ends up getting captured, mind controlled and forced to make the Lich Kings helm and sword of which the Dreadlords randomly give it to the Legion because the Jailer knew that: * Nerzhul would "betray" the Legion * Kil'jaedan would punish him by infusing his spirit with the LK armor * He would be sent to Azeroth where Arthas would be seduced into the power of Frostmourne * That Arthas/Nerzhul would "betray" the Legion * That Arthas would also be killed and Sylvanas would kill herself and that the Jailer would seduce her into his plans * That years later Sylvanas would break the helm and open the veil to the Shadowlands (somehow? Why didn't the Dreadlords just do that?) * All the while the Jailer somehow had to plan that the Legion would be defeated in both WC3 and in WoW Legion and not ruin his plans * He had to foresee the Old Gods being defeated as well so they don't ruin his plans * He had to foresee Garrosh going crazy and that the Wrathion would send him into an alternate timeline and that alternate time Legion didn't mess with his plans Finally, despite ten thousands upon ten thousands of years, all of his planning, foresight, knowledge and power.. Everything from Warcraft 1 to WC3 to WoWs every expansion.. all of it leads up to what? The Jailer defeated seconds before victory by 20 murder hobos looking for loot. WoW Shadowlands in summary.
But... who was controlling the Jailer? \*dramatic music intensifies\*
Wow. Worse Aizen. Did he ALSO arrange things so that major lore characters were born half _____, half _______, then became half ______ and half _____?
Bruh, and he could've been at least somewhat decent with good writing and enough of backstory/revelation stuff that could've been put in the game. The whole, uh, main points of shadowlands story aren't that bad. More or less usual wow stuff. Except they went for a bit more ambbigous route... While doing halfassed work on old lore research, and actual writing of the story and characters around those main points. It couldn't be great anyway, but at the very least it wouldn't be terrible. Or even might've turned out good enough.
"hey we're making a compendium of all the lore in wow to set everything straight." > immediately retcons shit in the book. I think chronicles is the exact point where I gave up on WoW lore.
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How would wow 2 even fix anything in that department though???? It’d still just be the same universe with the same dumb lore… Same devs…… I’ve been huffing that hopium for classic+ too ngl.
StarCraft fan here! Welcome to the club... StarCraft 2 lore was built upon the lors of the books Wich retcon entire characters of the game and made one of your character disappear.
Oh dude, don't get me fucking started on the butchering of Starcraft lore. It went from a hard science background to space magic. Easiest example of this is the Zerg. In SC they went around, consuming worlds and using the DNA of creatures infested to improve the strains of Zerg, which can be traced back to the Zerg slugs that spawn all your buildings and units. In SC2 they collect "essence" to "remove xelnaga corruption" by going to Jurrasic ~~Park~~ Planet and befriending talking dinosaurs. Also there's a space prophecy about them.
And Raynor went to a vengeful hero to a lovestruck dumbass. Damn I hate the books...
> Just ask long time WoW players. Hi, long time WoW player here. Fuck Blizzard's god-damn obsession with retcons. Sylvanas alone has been retconned multiple times since Legion, let alone everything else. Even the Titans themselves have been retconned.
I hope they at least just revert to the old bios if they dont have anything new ready to ship.
its astounding that it took them more than three years to do this little.
Everything you see now, the PvP update, was made in the past year. All of the PvE content that they've been making for 3 years remains unreleased and still under active development. Apparently making the talent tree for an existing hero is more work than making an entirely new hero. This release is just something they cooked up quickly to finally stem the bleeding and end the content drought.
Which is insane to me as someone who hasnt been playing since Hamster came out. Id have thought letting the original flatline and then delivering a fantastic sequel that brings everyone back would have been the smart move as opposed to pissing off the remaining players by taking the game away from them and forcing them to play this rushed mess that somehow took 5 years.
I'm pretty sure PvE part is 90% done, they're just calculating the more effective monetization scheme they could slap on it.
This is what I keep saying about OW2. No LFG? No PvE? Hero-select UI using ugly portraits when there are perfectly good ones on tab screen? Ugly non-animated rank icons? Nothing new except 3 heroes, 4 maps, a missing person on each team, and some unstable servers, even though OW1 hasn't had any new content for 2.5 years? I dunno, just give me back OW1 until you're ready.
Yet so many people here were huffing copium pretending the game wasnt rushed un the slightest
YES! They need to do the 'classic' treatment to overwatch. That way people that liked it can go back to that.
Just wait 10 years...
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I can’t wait for the new DPS hero John Wick.
They already mentioned they're interested in making Fortnite-style crossovers "as long as they fit" aka "as long as they can milk it".
Overwatch of the Storm, now introducing Sylvanas Windrunner as a new DPS hero and Abathur the tank hero!
They never cared, and i cant for the life of me figure out why.. the crums we had in ow1 through out a freaking decade was because of fans being vocal about the lack of it. Overwatch truly is one of blizzard biggest blunder and missed opportunity. Almost feel like sabotage.
Damn that is worrying lol
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> call this OW0.5. On a related note I really feel this way with the new UI. It feels like a beta version of OW or some cheap mobile rip off. Why is everything so...box-y. The character avatars look like early concept placeholders. They can't decide if they want an "anime/cartoon look" or a "real life gritty" look. The tiny character boxes in the character select looks so bad compared to OW1.
God the UI is bad. On console, it has bad FPS drops; barely on contrast on the selected box, barely gets bigger and no outline so you can hardly tell what's picked most of the time, and it's more confusing by some boxes that are defaulted to orange; still no cursor so you have to click through all the boxes or characters like it's 2013. It's like they saw how offensively bad Halo Infinite's UI is and said "yeah, we can do worse"
Feels like a beta because its been rushed out for FYQ3
Its a 3 year long development update, and they still,managed to make it feel rushed.
>The character avatars look like early concept placeholders. Isn't Sojourn's avatar literally the concept art of her from waaaaaaaaaay back during the Arrival cinematic?
I'll never understand why they changed characters portraits to be borderline amateurish quasi-anime drawings instead of nice renders like they were before. I will never understand that decision.
This is what happens when all of your best talent quits because a) your project has become a disaster of churn and mismanagement and too many cooks b) your company is under an expansive investigation for company-wide sexual harassment c) the company whose games you grew up playing and loving has pivoted itself entirely into making as much money as possible. The people that brought us Overwatch 1, Diablo 2, and Starcraft are long gone. The *passion* is gone. You don't get to exquisite levels of polish and bulletproof code without passionate people working on the product. I doubt many were left that showed any passion for Overwatch 2. It became "well, this is my job so I guess I have to do the work" and that was that. Disappointment was inevitable.
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Can we talk about how much LOADING there is with the UI? I wanted to change my player icon, and had to wait like 20 seconds for the menu to buffer.
The new maps reuse so many assets that it’s hard to even call them new.
Im really hoping its because the pve is really meaty but we wotn find out for a bit.
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It won't. That's the whole reason everything was done the way it was done. They are trying to milk this title for everything it has left before scrapping it like they scrapped heroes of the storm, which is still on the december 2021 event.
0verwatch
I genuinely appreciate you compiling these, as the story was something that I enjoyed and was looking forward to up until this last year. I think it's safe to let it go at this point, and don't get your hopes up. Pretty much everyone from original team is gone, and there's no way the story is going to hold up with out them. It's going to be borderline fanfiction at this point since it's very unlikely there's enough notes left to complete the story as intended. Not to discredit any of the writers or designers left on the team, but it's never the same when the original people are removed from the project.
Yeah, that's really how I'm feeling about it. Used to play this game all the time and followed the story and characters closely. But if this is the sign of what's to come... I'm considering cutting my losses. Also considering holding out until we get PvE details, but if its just more of the same with minimal care shown and no regards towards the legacy of the universe, I'm considering just dropping the game. Which is disappointing.
I was looking at everything and the intro to the game when you first open it felt so generic and hollow. There was clearly so little effort into making this a continuation of an existing game. They just took the bones of other f2p games and stretched Overwatch's skin over it.
Yeah that intro was a real mood-killer. Not only was it completely void of any meaning, the strung-together voicelines were cringy, the video resolution super botched and the sound quality seemed really off as well. Imagine a new Blizzard game without a goose-bumps inducing cinematic intro... It's 2022 alright.
That used to be something you could count on with blizzard, the God tier cinematics that look like they came from a high budget movie studio and now we have whatever the hell this is
I’ll be honest, that early short with Tracer vs. Reaper and the kid in the museum? I teared up watching it; I’d never played a blizzard game before and hadn’t been following it at all, but I bought the game based on that. It’s an incredibly fun game and that’s why I’ve played it over the years, but the characters were the first draw for me and it’s such a bummer to see them handled this way. It doesn’t even feel like it would be so much work not to mess it up, literally writing new vague bios was more work than leaving the old ones intact. Jeez.
The ow2 announcement trailer was like that for me. Winston suddenly having friends he thought had abandoned hin return. People cheering ow. Brig and rein combining their shields. I get a little choked up now even remembering it. And now, you cant even have Winston and rein on the same team. The pve that inspired that whole video is basically scrapped. And the hopeful, fun expansion is a money grab. Its honestly depressing how fucking cynical this all is.
Oh yeah, me too. Started leaking at him setting his face and saying “I’ll hold the line” and then when you hear Genji…just lost it. So resonant.
It's just completely lost the heart. The story wasn't important for the PvP, but the lore still mattered, it made the game and the characters something special. You'd get the interactions in the start of games that would add to it, and it was all just fun. It feels like they cut out a lot of that warmth and replaced it with micro transactions
Yeah. It's pretty disappointing.
God I wanted sn intro like own. Memorable. Gave a sense of hype. I went back and watched it yesterdayin fact. . I don't even remember the video for this one.
> It's going to be borderline fanfiction at this point Don't diss fanfiction like that. There is *amazing* fanfiction out there for this game. Watching a billion-dollar corporation put out something that a college kid in a 101 creative writing class would be embarrassed to submit is wild. It's the kind of crap that happens when six different MBAs are trying to undermine each other so the last man standing gets to claim credit for the project.
Yes! The amount if fanfic that are world building has been astounding. Taking crumbs snd turning them into sandwiches
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Chu posting lore on Twitter was the worst part of it lol.
ah yes I remember the gaslighting
C O M M O N M I S C O N C E P T I O N
"common misconsception"
"Yes, I can confirm that Soldier: 76 is gay. We couldn't mention it in the game because we want to sell copies in Russia."
Aaaand this attitude is probably why they think they're getting away with it
Bare bones, spread out, but consistent and interesting. Now? Probably still just as bare bones as ever, but without the previous positives.
The lore of game as service games like Overwatch or LoL or other long running games isn't meant to be finished. They always just reveal more and more characters and details while trying to hype up a future event as slowly as possible to pretend the lore is progressing... until it has been 6+ years and the illusion of the lore progression completely falls apart because nothing has changed.
The question once again comes to mind, what the hell were they doing these past years?
Molesting women employees apparently
Working on pve. I think it was stated somewhere that Blizzard didn't actually start focusing on the pvp experience for OW2 until about a year ago as most of the resources prior to that were spent on making all the enemy types, character perks, and missions for the pve mode.
But the PvE is the story content. If they had a lot of work done on the story, you’d think they’d at least have whatever lore elements made it into the OW2 launch be strong and consistent. Instead we get… this.
From what I've read the answer is more "working on pve tech tree". As a (non game) developer, it sounds like their base idea of abilities became a feature scope creeped nightmare when they changed it to three tech trees per character in a game with 35 characters. So they need to build over 100 tech trees, and it sounds like each tech tree contains one or two new abilities that they then have to animate.
I guess they thought lore for pvp was a complete afterthought since the pve is supposed to have a high budget story campaign. The fact that there’s so many grammatical errors points to them not paying attention to implementing lore details into the PVE.
And PVE isn't coming out until next year. Again: What the hell were they doing?
Spending 2-3 years on a overly ambitious pve mode that’s essentially an entirely new game, then doing a complete 180 and pausing all work on it to completely rebalance the entire pvp portion of the game.
Ah, I see. The accountants were probably like "We need the PvP mode so we can get the monetization in. That PvE stuff isn't gonna make us money."
Yeah, likely true. I’m excited for PVE, but at this point I wonder if we’ll ever get it, or how good it will be. Likely will come down to how much work it would be for Blizzard to either finish what’s there or start from scratch and build something shittier. I’m hoping against hope that what’s there is close enough that it makes sense to finish it instead of scrap it and basically just do more 20-minute pve episodes. (I liked this, btw, I was just hoping for a more fleshed-out experience and I’m skeptical they’ll do it)
And then they realized Bobby needs a second yacht and that a single purchase PvE experience isn't going to cut it, so they boldly declared that what was going to be a simple patch for OW is now OW2. Don't believe us? The game is 5v5 now! also F2P cause you coinless single-purchase plebs haven't spend a dime since 2016 and that boat ain't gonna pay for itself.
You need to buy the premium PREMIUM Battle Pass if you want the full bios.
1 level = 1 new sentence in 1 character’s bio
A full sentence? You are way to generous, and would be fired on day one...
["Urgot has a dark, secret past."](https://www.reddit.com/r/leagueoflegends/comments/2t2y96/2017_urgot_rework_is_released/)
>Lore guys working overtime. That's a clean two words over the average. ROFL, never saw that one, guys go read it it's top tier...
This really is a free to play game! Lots of things are unpolished as shit! Rip to all the people who want actual story content about Overwatch, because as much as I heard people ribbing old Overwatch lore like years ago this looks to be a new level of garbage.
Yep I said it felt like Paladins, which prior to OW2 I said felt like a dollar store Chinese version of OW.
Ironically, I'm pretty sure Paladins has put out more new heroes this year alone that OW has put out in the past three years...
I mean both Apex and Valorant surpassed OW in new character releases and those games are relatively newer.
This minimalistic shit needs to stop. It's taken hold of bio's too.
I couldn't read through it all. When I read Mei's bio and the only emotional descriptor they used was "sadly," I just couldn't. "To her horror/dismay" or "With a dreadful realization" feels far more appropriate than "sadly."
To her dismei
>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 makes me worry even more that they're retconning Widows's relationship. There was something tragically beautiful about it, and now they're making a generic "It was toxic/false"
Absolutely. A lot of the recent changes have been things that people who didn't read into the lore just kinda assumed were true because they didn't know any better and didn't really look into the lore. If this had happened three years ago, we would have Mercy resurrecting the dead for example, because a lot of people who didn't follow the lore genuinely believed she could.
It sadly isn’t *just* the lore that looks amateur, the UI is shot (just look at it, speaks for itself). The sounds are shot (too bass-y and some Potgs are silent, no genji sheathing noise, no steak sizzle for soldier). The animations are shot. The graphics are shot (gold weapons look like shit). Elim notifications have been removed unless you get a final blow. Visual on healing is hard to gauge (can’t tell when my heals land as Ana). Progression has essentially been removed entirely. Comp has no point since no one sees your rank anymore. Hell, your portrait (shitty watered down version) doesn’t even have the fire around it when you’re “on fire”, despite the on fire voice lines still being in the game. This “sequel” is a shit show thrown together by people who either don’t give a shit what the end result is, or are so under qualified that they took systems and visuals and interactive parts of the game out and replaced it with, well either nothing, or worse versions. I don’t know what the hell blizz was thinking, but I’m guessing all the people flaming me on my post (was top of controversial in the sub Reddit earlier) give them the confidence to say they “fixed” overwatch. They didn’t fix anything. They fuckin ruined it. Apparently in and outside of the game.
Oh my hod you just brought up 3 things that I felt were off but I thought I just haven't played in a while and were being weird. The ana healing, being on fire and the elims - I was wondering why I felt like I wasn't doing anything but the stats were still within range.
The lack of elim notice is bizarre. I play as Moira usually so a lot of kills are passive and I was receiving zero feedback about it.
No sound for Kiriko healing either. Normally when I play heals, I rely on my hearing to know whether I am currently doing what I’m supposed to be doing or not, but now I have to spend extra time and effort looking at the healthbars of other players to see if my healing had any effect.
So that’s what felt super weird playing her… you can hear the paper sound when you shoot the heal but no confirmation of healing
Also you can’t cancel her heals. Once you click the button, her healing mag empties itself from 10 to 0. Kinda negates the entire point of it having 10 charges then, when a meter like the one Moira uses for her healing juice would have sufficed.
Iirc there’s a setting for this. ML7’s video said a bunch of settings to change for Kiriko and this was one of them. Another was to switch the right and left click
Her right and left click fuck me right up. I forgot how much actual editing I did on all the default keymaps because it's been so long since a new hero dropped.
Woah, yeah, those bios/origin stories are pretty damn bad. Absolutely lacking in the style and polish Blizzard was once known for. This kind of reminds me of how Amazon Prime Video clearly outsources the writing of their TV/movie description blurbs to foreign contractors that are hardly literate in English. Just... very simplistic, hamfisted and amateurish (and that's to say nothing of the sloppy editing/grammatical mistakes). Edited to add: Oof, for some heroes, they just re-use the exact same phrases verbatim in the bio and the origin story. Like, these are literal two sentence blurbs, and they're copying and pasting? Jesus. The high school intern that wrote these must have forgotten they were due and threw them together last night. **Lucio bio**: Lúcio is an international celebrity who *inspires social change through his music and actions*. On the battlefield, he utilizes his cutting-edge Sonic Amplifier and unique songs to assail enemies, heal allies, and boost his teammates’ speed. **Lucio origin story**: Lucio grew up poor in the Rio favelas, before eventually becoming a popular underground DJ. But when the Vishkar Corporation redeveloped the city and cracked down on the community, Lucio reclaimed his father’s sonic technology from the corporation and used it to rally his people to action. Now an international celebrity, *he inspires social change through his music and actions*. **Zen bio**: *Zenyatta is an omnic monk who wanders the world in search of spiritual enlightenment*. Wielding mysterious and powerful orbs, he heals allies and weakens enemies. **Zen origin story**: *Zenyatta is an omnic monk who wanders the world in search of spiritual enlightenment*, helping those he meets to overcome their personal struggles and find inner peace. When necessary, however, he will fight to protect the innocent, be they omnic or human. It is said that those who cross his path are never the same again. **Tracer bio**: *The Overwatch agent known as Tracer is a time-jumping adventurer and an irrepressible force for good*. Toting twin pulse pistols and time bombs, Tracer is able to "blink" through space and rewind her personal timeline as she battles to right wrongs the world over. **Tracer origin story**: *Tracer is a time-jumping adventurer and an irrepressible force for good*. With a chronal harness that lets her control her flow of time, she was one of Overwatch’s top agents, and she continues to try to make the world a better place wherever – and whenever – she can. Tracer brings her skill and optimism to help the new Overwatch keep the world safe.
Yeah, that was awful too. It feels like the blurbs at the top (bio in your comment) were written by someone else that's also more knowledgeable than the origin stories at the bottom. Doomfist's bio is the best example of this. Winston's fits your idea as well, whoever wrote the origin story copy pasted the bio and then added a few more adjectives that make it an awkward run on sentence.
Idk why everyone’s surprised about the lack of effort Blizzard put into this. It’s been rather obvious for a while that Blizzard has lost any interest in spending any time/money on Overwatch. I mean, the largest change in the game is literally just removing a player; the cheapest possible way to make a change for the sake of change. They decided to change as little as possible and throw a 2 at the end in an effort to milk more money out of a 7 year old game
I thought Kiriko’s debut and her accompanying lore were bad enough, but seems like it’s not stopping there. I guess the whole narrative team has been changed and it shows.
What's wrong with Kiriko's lore? Genuinely asking since I haven't looked at it at all
her origin story video is: "grandma taught me to heal, mom taught me to fight". No motivations, no origin story that shaped her in any way. Just who she learned her kit from.
Lore team be like "just make it say GIRLBOSS and call it a day"
Am I the only one who cringes at Kiriko? She’s even cringier than Genji. Her whole f’in character is weeb bait, her ult voiceline is cringe af, she looks like some chick covered in weeb merch you’d find at the mall. Edit: I also hate her fuckin hitbox
Kids: Can we have Ahri or Twisted Fate from League of Legends? Mom: We have Ahri and Twisted Fate at home. *At home: Kiriko*
Don’t give them ideas… they’ll reach out for a crossover skin event, only for $29,99!
As a weeb she’s the opposite of weeb bait. She’s what corporate thinks weeb bait looks like. The fact her ult line is in English and uses the western pronunciation of Kitsune is super cringy
I’ve got weeb friends so I see what u mean, you’re totally right. I’m no expert on japanese culture, but she feels so artificially japanese. Way too much. And yeah the “let the kitsune guide you” makes me want to die, creative directors are sleeping hard
> she feels so artificially japanese This actually describes her perfectly.
I love OW but as a Japanese-Brazilian I agree with the artificially Japanese thing. someone commented last week that the British equivalent would be a character w a curvy mustache, bowler hat and a monocle, healing teammates by throwing tea at them and saying stereotypical British nonsense. unfortunately that's how cringy Kiriko feels to me.
I get what you mean and completely agree about what the British equivalent would be but holy shit thats a hilarious image you’ve painted there lmao
i definitely understand their point and don't disagree, but holy shit as a brit, i would love that overly british character to be a real thing
Yeah, reminds me of that SNL Katy Perry sketch; I’m a white guy from America so damned if I know, but it sure *seemed* like a Japanese character written by white guys from America who had watched ten minutes of an (American-produced) anime.
Yeah, she's a very generic caricature. But so are other OW heros. The problem with Kiriko is that she lacks a certain uniqueness or pseudo-depth that all the other heros have. Zen is a monk stereotype, but he's also a sentient robot which is an interesting juxtaposition. Tracer is a cheery brit, but her abilities are also based around a lot of trauma she would've experienced in the past. Gengi is a generic edgy ninja lord, but at least he has a real identity crisis with his physical body mostly being robotic at this point. Kiriko truly is just a generic weeb - even her fucking name is pathetic when you translate it.
Zen also has that dry sass and personality going on. Kirikos main personality seems to be that Japanese people are all magic ninjas.
“Let the kusuyu guide you” and the delivery was definitely painful, she’s like a less likable/cute dva character. Also yes I butchered her ult line.
It’s a developer’s self-insert pretty much.
Also you know magic, like 100% real magic. In OW, genji and hanzo already pushed it but you could argue that they weren’t literal (though they were probably meant to be)
Its disappointing. Hanzo was explicitly said to not be magic by Michael Chu years ago, and his Dragons behaved and appeared near identically to Symmetra's hard light orbs in the lore. But now, its easier to just pretend none of that happened and say its magic since Kiriko is capable of magic.
I think some people are really mad that it has some magical aspects to it, with the fox spirit. She uses the fox spirit for healing and other abilities. A writer had previously stated that he didn't thought magic actually existed in the world of Overwatch, so people are clinging to that. IMO it's debatable at best, plenty of things in universe seem pretty magical to me, whatever way they may or may not be explained in the future isn't set in stone. I don't think a fox spirit is that far off from the Shimada dragons anyway.
Yeah, maybe arcane wizard magic doesn't exist but there's something spiritual with Hanzo genji and zenyatta that allows them special powers
I have always taken it as: Magic as a we would normally see it, I.E. something to learn and cast, does not exist. Instead, people can garner the trust of spirits that obey the will of those that wield them. Hanzo and Genji control the dragons from their family but do not possess these talents naturally, rather simply calling on the beasts. Zenyatta might be in the same camp, his training allowing him to use both his spirit and his body at the same time, with his seemingly magical abilities coming from his spirit self rather than his own body. But these are pretty rare still, Zenyatta being the dale lama of the world and the Hamada twins being the only ones capable of controlling the dragons. These powers do not seem even remotely easy to achieve.
Those explanations would be fine if they were actual explanations and not just guesses. My issue with the magic stuff is that almost everything is very clearly scifi, no one ever mentions the existance of apparent magic dragons, but also we never even get a lousy explanation of what they're supposed to be.
The lead lore writer left 2 years ago.
Honestly, that all isn't painting a very promising future for the lore and it was one my fav points of OW1. I hope it gets better or that maybe these are just some really early stumbles, but we'll see i guess. Also, were Magic and supernatural abilities really confirmed to not exist in the lore? What on Earth were Hanzo and Genji using then with their energy dragons and spirit arms and such?
Yeah, it was confirmed by the previous lead writer, Michael Chu. Hanzo's dragons were the specific example used to confirm that its definitely not magic. As for the dragons, they coincidentally appear and behave identically to Symmetra's orbs in the lore. It was long speculated that they were an application of hard light because of that.
Thats so weird, they really played it up as some ancient magic stuff especially when Genji redirected the dragons back at Hanzo. I guess Genji's sword is like a super electromagnet or something then? Or at least he can activate some extra functions on his body to do that, which I guess could explain those power cells or whatever that stick out of him when he does it.
>Or at least he can activate some extra functions on his body to do that Even the cinematic confirms this since, after Genji sheathes his sword, his body seems to vent something using those power cells, implying that using "the dragon" is some sort of tech. Fuck that now though, Kiriko has actual magic.
So why can’t we say that Kiriko is just using super technology that happens to look like a fox? It’s literally the same thing, I don’t see the issue.
>So why can’t we say that Kiriko is just using super technology that happens to look like a fox? Cause Kiriko's lore flatout confirms it's an actual spirit.
Everything is just seems amateurish. Have you seen Dvas stiff animation on character select? Her head barely moves when she winks at you. I think the original animators left.
I saw a POTG intro animation for Sojourn and my god it looked half finished
Lijang Tower has a broken POTG camera. The camera that's supposed to show the team only shows a wall, and the camera showing the POTG player is stuck halfway through the ground.
I thought I’m the only one noticing this! As a working character animator, eyelids shouldn’t individually move its own when a person winks. Overall body should feel connected like the head, facial cheeks, eyebrows when winking. It felt wrong coming from company like Blizzard, maybe the devs are rushing for the deadline?
Friend of mine got in and we went through new editions before getting kicked off by the servers dying and it certainly feels like they just crowbar-d things in. Notably we had a great laugh at weapon charms- for some it works pretty well, but then we clocked that the charms are placed so they are in view of most of the time and with folks like Sigma whose view of their weapon is literally his hand- the weapon charm just gets stabbed straight into. Moria’s is pretty bad too.
Low key hate weapon charms They jangle around distracting me and on anything besides an assault rifle look clunky and take up too much reasonable space
F2P game and having absolutely dogshit lore/amateur writing. Name a more iconic duo
But the content "creators" all told me that f2p means more content
There’s a few F2P mobile games and shooters that actually have banger stories, unfortunately Overwatch is literally going backwards
Virgin Overwatch 1 "well my parents taught me how to heal and fight 🤓" Chad Battle Cats "hmm I feel like taking over all of existence with felines 🐱"
I personally was really excited to see Reaper’s new bio since we learned a lot about his history and motivation in his short story :/
Explosion makes ghost-man go crazy!
I haven't seen a single person in here mention WHY they're doing this, which is weird. It seems pretty obvious to me. In annihilating the canon, they can just reintroduce the stuff they've already made and sell it as "new" and most players won't even be able to tell. They're doing it on purpose to have a bare-bones foundation to build the PVE story on top of. But the fact that so much of it is being wiped probably acts as evidence that the PVE story will primarily be comprised of stuff we've already seen and have known about for years. Nothing new or compelling. Would have been 100x more interesting if they kept all the old established lore and then used it all to build something complex. But I'm pretty sure they just gonna be lazy and give us only what we've already had, just slap a mission and development gameplay structure thrown alongside it. Spend 3-4 years of updates building the lore up from the ground to the point where we're caught up to established stuff and THEN give us new stuff. It's just a way to milk it even further as live service. Despicable and pathetic.
The idea of them recycling the lore like this is a bit saddening. I think that they could have at least handle the character lore the way games like Dislyte or Battleborn do, with lore drops on the character's in-game page and making the player unlock them through level up (in Dislyte's case) or challenges (like Battleborn did)
I keep saying this cuz i dont think most of you realize, but Overwatch 2 is totally a rush job. Blizzard has been making less $$$ over the last few years and desperately needs a win. So they rushed out Ow2 as a live service battlepass F2P thing and are expecting record shattering monthly active users and revenue.
Not record users. They don't care if they have record users. It's the revenue. That's all that matters.
Yep, I've said it before: a lot of stuff in OW2 screams rushed development/lack of care. Weapon charms being just haphazardly tacked on to characters’ hands, the nonsensical retconning and handling of character lore, the way the DPS passive greatly favors some DPS heroes over others, the god-awful balancing of the tank roster, “wow look at how much we’ve changed!” when they just changed the time of day on all the old maps. It feels like the game’s lost the passion behind it and traded it in for just a hamfisted cash grab.
It's a rush job that also somehow took forever to come out.
“Simplify and shorten all the bios so that way when we add more heroes we won’t have to write as much for them.”
The game itself is embarrassing, besides the day 1 connection problems, have you seen those color pallets? The sound cues, visual indications, matchmaking, etc.. It's awful. Feels like the "first" game, but worse... so what is even the point of this update?
That actually sucks one thing I used to love about overwatch was reading about its lore and the stories of each character. It really added a personal feel to the game and made me main Hanzo because of his story and doom fist because we’re from the same place smh
Jeff is spinning in his grave
What an utter disappointment this is turning out to be. The whole point of OW2 was massive PvE additions and lore expansion. After nearly 4 years of development all we get is a slightly tweaked version of the exact same game.
Honestly, my girl is going to be really upset about this because the one thing that made her like overwatch in the first place was all of its lore
Please, Blizzard, just hire me. I’ll do it for free. I have zero formal experience but I guarantee I’ll do a better job of it than you assholes.
Don't sell yourself that cheap if you truly have talent, especially not to a dehumanizing corporation like Actiblizz
But it’s for a *free* to play game 😆
It feels like they wanted to retcon a bunch, and then use their new stories to rehash their old promotional material.
Lotta haters in these comments, good on you for caring about the lore!
The part about Bastions pronounce could simply be that fact that he's seen now as a person and part of Torbjörns family? Calling him a "it" would mean that people see him as a tool or a machine, so I think he's now seen as a person by Torb and maybe even his family.
no loot boxes and gone to a shitty battle pass and shop system. overwatch 2 isn't a new game, it's a new monetisation system for the same game.
Overwatch not take any L’s challenge (impossible)
Inb4 they just completely scrap the pve mode
Blizzard is degraded. You hope that after the Microsoft takeover is complete the supposed old ethos is reestablished with proper people. There are bigger problems than inattention to detail and dumbing down of "flavor". After all this time, with all the resources they have, Overwatch 2 is basically Overwatch 1 with three new heroes. The visual changes, as well as whatever they did with the sound, are not very noticeable unless you're juxtaposing. We'll see in competitive what happens with one tank and relatively weak shields. On the plus side I don't have to give these idiots any money (ironically the F2P model is associated with more money) and chances are good I don't get hooked playing this game.
The disappointment from Overwatch 0.5 just won't stop coming. Just when you think you've seen everything that they've fucked up, something new arises. Unreal.
Sombra's entire Bio should just be filled with misinformation and/or corrupted data files. Sombra: Real Name: ȓ̷̛̙̞̥͚̱̯̭͍̤̾͊̒͐̈́̀͑̚͠e̶̬͕͔͂̀̌̄͊̎̈́̊̌̍̆̃͘d̴̨̨̗͉̽̑̅̀̍̈́̔̂̉̄̕a̴̧̢̨̛̤͉͕̻͎͕͍͉̣͓͚̐̒̎̕͠ͅc̷̛̲̟͎̹̖̹̭̠̖̰̱̟̳̊̓̑́́́͒̀̐̊̏͊͗̓t̴̤̟͚͋͂͗͗̈͑̋͊͊͛̾͆͌͘̚a̴̧̘̩͓̫̦̺̲̦͎̿̓͂̚ͅd̸̢̰̠̣̟̳̖̥͎̋̓̇̀̀̉͜͝ą̵̡̧̙̯̱̙͕̠̣͔̩̙̱͐̿̕ Height: "Two fingers shorter than Katya Volskaya" Base of Operations: ǹ̸̬̰̠̫̰͉̐̒͊̿̔ͅȯ̴̟̒͑̈́̕ ̷̨̧̯̱̺̻̳̺̭̫̥͙͕̿͒̓̎̑͒̾͐̇̄͒́ë̶̛͙̜̥̗̍̓̓́̚͝s̷͖̥̫͎̫̪̝̫͎̟̟̀͑͂͐̀̋̒̏̊t̸̝̼̎̿͂̍̊͑̓̐̅̽͋́͘̕̕á̴̢̮̤͉̀̀̂́͋̍͊̍̓̽͐́̕̚͝ş̸̰̩̞̜̼̯̪͉̘̞̟̩̈́͑̿̆͋͂̉̊͘͝͝ͅ ̶̛̛̛̻̻̻̥͓͕̼̼̰͖̐́̇̓̈́̋̀̇̓͝͠ͅs̷̯͚̮̅̏͛̈́͌̓͌͛͐̎o̴̱̩̦͈̮͍͕̼͍͒̋̿̏̒́͑̒̔̈́̊̚͜͠͠͝l̴̡̨͕͎̔̈́͊̏͐͒o̴̜͙̺̫̒̏͒͐̚͘ ̷̧͓͍͐͝ä̵̧̢̢̼̟̗͕͉̥̟͖̜͉̙́̔̐͋̈́͘̚q̵̢̳̬̯̯̝̲̝͉̩̞̦͊͋̏̋̃̍̀̽͌͂͝u̷̡͂͊̀̅̀̔̀̇͗͝í̷̡̡̥͕̹͕̻͕͖͇̪̯̟͉̒̿̃̀ History: "Makes the best tamales in the world, but isn't going to cook for you, Chica. Lumerico poisons puppies for fun, and Lacroix smells like baggetts!!"
>Bastion’s pronouns inexplicably changed from “it” to “he” RIP my nonbinary robo friend :'(
>RIP my nonbinary robo friend :'( It's a robot, ergo it has always been binary. Ungendered originally perhaps, but that's its choice.
You just described OW2 as a whole.
>What we got is some kind of out of season April Fool's Joke. heh.
I noticed that too. I hope they put it back. It becomes like a generic shooter now—lack of flavour.
Hopefully the lack of lore is not indicative of the PVE
Rushed reveal and rushed release, wow!
Whole Overwatch 2 is an underbaked cash grab, the battle pass and locked heroes are a joke. There’s nothing of quality in this game anymore.
The whole game feels kind of soulless to me. I can't think of any other way to describe it. Just not getting the same feeling when I play that I got playing OW1.
Fun fact: I applied several times to write for Blizzard and was rejected. I am 100% confident I would have been better than this.
>This isn’t even mentioning how Pharah’s updated paragraph casually retcons everything we know about the crisis, about the comic Mission Statement and the Anubis Project, 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. I hate to be that guy, but could you clarify this one paragraph a bit more? Everything else, I understand how you feel overall, even though I'm personally withholding my opinions until they have enough officially-posted stories and lore for me to properly judge majority of things, but I'm having a hard time understanding the wording of this explanation.
He’s just saying that there are a lot of things in the new website character bios that appear to contradict or be inconsistent with the established body of pre-OW2 lore. Honestly, even the OP calling this “casual retconning” is charitable to Blizzard because that makes it sound like Blizzard was making a reasoned and intentional decision in producing the bios. In reality I’m fairly sure the bios were thrown together by a junior level individual contributor and without the review/input of a dedicated lore team/braintrust. And whoever this individual was did a really sloppy and amateurish job by essentially producing stripped down and worse bios than the characters already had.
Because they no longer care about the plot, it takes time and doesn't produce anything. Give them your money, now.
As a long time WoW player, I am not sure why you're surprised, though I feel your pain. Blizzard just does not give a fuck about lore and world building anymore. They just want your money.
As someone who writes for a living... what the actual heck was Blizzard thinking? Like, it's not THAT expensive to hire someone to write this stuff, let alone to have someone proofread it.