Overwatch devs finally respond to official hero age drama breaking OW2 lore

The Overwatch 2 devs have finally responded to the recent lore-breaking controversy after every hero’s age was officially revealed.

On September 7, the Overwatch team revealed the birthdays and ages for every hero on the roster – and while this decision was applauded at first, players began to spot some inconsistencies soon after.

Certain ages just didn’t seem to line up with the official timeline of events in Overwatch. Sojourn, for example, is said to be 19 at the time of the Omnic crisis, but was in the military for four years previously, thus making her a child soldier.

Meanwhile, Kirko is supposed to be 19 years younger than Hanzo, but trained with him as a child in official artwork. Elsewhere, Junkrat further messes up the timeline, because he’s born on a leap year, which creates a whole mess surrounding when the game takes place.

With all this commotion, the devs responded to this snafu… sort of.

Overwatch 2 devs respond to lore-breaking hero age drama

On X, formerly known as Twitter, Overwatch 2 players began questioning the game’s lore and demanded answers from the game’s executive producer, Jared Neuss.

“Can we address the age thing?” a player asked, tagging Neuss. “In the game’s own lore, Kiriko grew up and trained with both Genji and Hanzo. Why is there like a 20 year age difference between them?”

Admitting that hero ages weren’t exactly his area of expertise, Neuss called upon Lead Narrative Designer and writer Gavin Jurgens-Fyhrie.

However, the dev didn’t respond to the thread or address the hero-age drama directly. Instead, on his own account, he chimed in about being “very careful about answering Overwatch lore questions.”

“A lot of the time, the answer is, ‘This is less mysterious than you think, and I absolutely cannot tell you why yet,’” he said.

So far, we still have no idea if the hero ages were a mistake or intentional and the devs have remained rather mum on the topic since.

Human error or part of some grand lore plot that will break space and time? Maybe we’ll find out as more OW2 PvE missions are added. Until then, keep it locked to Dexerto for all the latest on Blizzard’s hero shooter.