Overwatch is in the second season of its reboot era, and alongside new characters every season, the big swing Blizzard promised was that it would finally start moving the series’ story forward in a meaningful way. Now that we’re two seasons in, we’re still in the early stages of Overwatch‘s new story rollout, but Blizzard is already cooking at a frequency fans have been waiting a decade for.
To catch you up, Blizzard kicked off Overwatch’s 2-less reboot with Vendetta dethroning Doomfist and taking over the Talon terrorist organization. Though it remains to be seen if the gauntlet-sporting villain is truly dead, Vendetta sure started operating as if he was and immediately making moves. She attacked Overwatch’s base of operations (which is now reflected in the game itself if you’re playing a match there), formed alliances with several factions in the series’ universe, and has the titular group on the run and facing several threats around the world. This is more momentum than Overwatch has had in over a decade, and it’s all happened in just two months.
These lore drops are appearing in the game itself, whether they be motion comics, audio dramas, or cinematics. Meanwhile, the company has also partnered with Webtoons to release Overwatch: Undivided, a comic series following the members of Overwatch as they deal with the fallout of Talon’s attack. Though it’s primarily told from the perspective of Juno, the Martian support hero who is still learning the ropes, it’s covering dozens of characters, and its latest issues have brought some long-absent heroes like Ana back into the fold.
It feels like just about every other week we’re getting something meaningful from Overwatch rather than the simple character-setting, anthology-like stories we’d been getting since before the game launched in 2016. Overwatch has struggled to get its story off the ground for years, whether that be in the canceled campaign that was meant to headline Overwatch 2, or in wheel-spinning short stories that established vibes and little else. The downside of all this turnover is that it does seem like Overwatch’s original story of a synthetic civil rights allegory is, at the very least, taking a backseat to a new arc, but Blizzard says it’s open to returning to that in the future.
There are several characters who haven’t shown up in the current arc, and given that they’re not all in close proximity to the Overwatch and Talon conflict, we might not see them heavily featured for the first year, but it is nice to finally feel like Overwatch lore is no longer an underwhelming, directionless letdown, and is instead a major pillar of what the hero shooter is doing. As someone who gravitates to the hero shooter because of its world and characters, I’m happy to finally see Blizzard doing something meaningful with them on a regular basis.