Then they came for our lore, and there was no one left to speak up for it
Huh. So that's what total numbness feels like. To be so roundly deadened to the outside world so much that formerly shattering news hardly pings off the dull rock atop your shoulders. As if the spirit has left this crusted golem and left behind a vacant, reaction-stripped monolith, teetering mirthlessly amidst waves of astonished and bewildered groans. Others find themselves reaching new peaks of disappointment, slipping into unexplored depths of frustration, crossing into untold lands of exhaustion. Whereas I am spent. Potless. Broke. I couldn't spend a care if I wanted to. I am utterly and bitterly an ex- carer. In some ways it's freeing. In others it's frustrating. And all around I'm mostly non-plussed. Because is there any other way to feel about the modern state of Activision Blizzard? Knowing not who they were, but better who they are?
Blizzard used to stand for something of a 'Player first' vision, emboldened and bolstered by a near peerless dedication to the wants of a player base they themselves were deeply engrained with. That level of ingrained discourse still exists today, although in a bitter and perverted form of it's once wholesome self. You see the Blizzard staff of today interacting with their 'fans' and it almost feels like antagonistic negotiations with the game itself being the fulcrum betwixt the two. Blizzard don't want to put in the effort, the fans don't want to give them anymore slack. What remains in the refuse of once great and amazingly passionate franchises and properties bled for their love and left to dry by teams who have no connection to them either as creators or fans- and then things start to fall apart.
A Blizzard team that still cared might have had a greater temperature on the greater gaming public as well as the game of Overwatch 2, and realised that if the hero mode dreams truly were an impossibility then the game needed to do something equally as distinct in order to justify the very point of Overwatch 2 beyond just "It's the exact same game as Overwatch 1 just with one less player in teams and much more jarring monetisation." Heck, a Blizzard team that cared would have announced the cancellation of the single player campaign back when the decision was made, before the release of 2, so as to not try and get eager players hopes up for a feature they knew was never going to come. And a Blizzard team like the one that used to exist- hell, they would have found a way to make the single player content work because they weren't talentless hacks. (Is that too strong? It sounded too strong.)
Maybe that Blizzard of the past would have a strong enough grasp of their franchises and the fans around them that they would have realised that one of the biggest aspects of their game fandoms is built around the intricate and typically peerless quality of the expansive colourful worlds that they create. Novels, spin-off games, animatics are all borne out of the endless cohesion and talented creativity that filled worlds like Warcraft, Diablo and, yes, Overwatch. Though I always did complain about how little the actual game of Overwatch served the proposed narrative around the game- in that there was practically no relation between the story of Overwatch and the competitive action- in a vacuum that story was still rich and intelligently developed. Was being the operative word there.
I haven't kept up with Overwatch since the year they announced 2 was coming out because I was waiting for them to win me over with a genuine good idea. The hero mode sounded like exactly that special sauce, but I held back to see how it turned out and we all saw what happened there. But if the recent little drop from Blizzard on the world and lore for Overwatch is anything to go by, I dodged an absolute ballistic missile sized bullet when I chose to stop caring. Whew, I can only imagine active fans are feeling the egg shell sliding off their deadpan faces wondering why in the hell they continue to give emotion to a company that thinks they're mindless seals, clapping with abandon. And yes, I do think this is emblematic of that 'hatred between creator and fans' thing I was mentioning earlier, and more than just a series of painfully obvious goods.
So what did Blizzard do? They officially aged the cast. Kind of strange to think that's never been done before, but here we are. That's simply though, right? Simply go through the ranks of lore and appropriately tie the ages of characters with the many deeds they are supposed to have done- wait, they didn't do that? What do you mean they just eye-balled the cast and guessed at the number they kind of looked like? You mean they made Mercy 39 despite having already written into her lore that her healing powers make her look much younger than she actually is? Which simultaneously rubs up against one of the lore photo's depicting a young adult Mercy hanging out with the old Overwatch gang and a young child version of Pharah. Pharah, who is said to currently be 34. That's... that's not how ages work, last I checked.
Sojourn is said to be 47, which means that during the Omnic Crisis, through which she served as a commander, she was 19? What kind of monkey farm were the human forces running back then, promoting a 19 year old to commander? Of course, perhaps they raised her so fast because of her four years beforehand serving the Canadian Military... for which she enlisted at 15... Coming back to Mercy, according to her age she first joined Overwatch at... 14? And Cassidy was a founding member of his gang some years before his own birth. And Kiriko grew up alongside Genji and Hanzo despite being 15 years younger than them. And the Hamster is about 10 times older than the average hamster lifespan. And Orisa is only 1 year old- despite the Overwatch franchise being about five years old at this point. (Has literally no in-universe time passed since these games started?)
Fans have been picking this apart with an upsetting ease which underlines a key point- no one in Blizzard cares enough to quality control the media for this franchise anymore. There was a time when this was taken seriously and treated with the kind of care emblematic of a team passionate about the universe they all had a hand in creating. I wonder how many of those original creators are still even on board over at Overwatch, and how many of them even cared about the product to begin with. Apologise though they might, 'try to move on' though they attempt, Blizzard just don't have what it takes to restore this franchise to the cultural zeitgeist position it once sat at. Yet another Blizzard property degraded before our eyes. I hope Microsoft got a discount for the dishonour of having to buy Blizzard alongside Activision...
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