@TNP
In oMage - 1st ed, volume 1, whatever you want to call it, the Ascension War was in the process of happening between all the factions.
In Revised things had sort of gone poorly for everyone. The Technocracy abused their 'SCIENCE!' card when they used an orbital platform to essentially laser-nuke an Antidiluvian from the sky, and Bob-The-Generic-Sleeper kind of went "..buh?" The backlash hit the Technocracy hard and seriously wrecked their joint. There was some kind of detonation of another explosion in the Shadowlands or whatever they called where Wraith was set and the whole thing blew up more or less.
This resulted in the Avatar Storms, which were basically fragments of souls and avatars getting swept up and cutting through the Gauntlet like a sandstorm full of sharp glass, cutting off the world from most of the outer realms where all the mage factions had been keeping their Too-Old-And-Powerful-To-Live-On-Earth people, essentially snipping the head off a number of hydras and cauterizing the wounds. The Technocracy and Traditions both lost a lot of the more powerful and stubbornly set in their ways leadership and it had various ramificatins for both factions.
In particular the Computer-dominated Iteration-X was suddenly left without said domination, or the leadership who had been so indoctrinated, and underwent a pretty radical change of focus from replacing the human body with technology to augmenting it. Fewer robot-limbs-just-because-stronger-better, more power suits and enhanced tools, with an eye towards designs Sleepers could accept, etc.
@Tempest
P.S. I did have to admit to finding it a little bit laugh worthy how there's been absolutely no balking at the idea of mages tearing a city out of the ground and floating it into space and maintaining everything needed to sustain it there, while also keeping the entire populations brainwashed. Very poignant glimpse into why so many people complain about the powerlevel of mage. 
I'm pretty sure if you were to take stock of shit NPCs have done in wod stories for the sake of creating/sustaining/whatever a particular plot device, that would hardly seem even the craziest thing to come out of oWoD.
As far as a lot of it goes, it's probably better to think about it less like giant overriding effects and more like tons and tons of little ones all being managed by the AI or whatever it is.
On a side note vaguely related to that last bit, there's two things I always balked at not getting more play on MU*:
- Werewolf essentially says that the Numina listed for spirits are just guidelines, and plenty more exist.
- Mage explicitely says that, and further goes on to elaborate that the best way to emulate this is assume that if a mage can cast an Instant version of a spell, somewhere there's probably a spirit with a Numen or Influence that does the same sort of thing.
Since MU* staff are basically paralyzed with fear at the idea of improvisation, it's not super surprising this never really comes up, but it is pretty sad. I got endless amounts of shit for having a Fetish that copied the effect of a Spell Cloak to hide my character's magic items from Unseen Senses, and that's not even strictly a spell, just a level 2 Prime ability.
It does make Spirits a lot more potentially dangerous and useful to werewolves. It also makes that stupid Spirit 5 spell that lets you just give a spirit any Numen you want it to have even stupider, but it was already broke as fuck even for Mage, so whatever.
