What Year Does Overwatch 2 Take Place?

Combining the biggest fan theories and everything that was officially confirmed by Blizzard's developers . Here's everything we know about What Year Does Overwatch 2 Take Place?

If you've followed the futuristic plot of Overwatch for some time now, you'll know that Blizzard never reveals the years of some of its events. And that's understandable, given that timelines can get tangled up pretty quickly when you're working with an IP that's nearly a decade old.

Due to a recent reveal last year, we were given approximate timeframes based on the official ages of the Overwatch 2 heroes, but the exact year the events of Overwatch 2 are set in remain wholly unknown. That said, the community's got some pretty plausible guesses on the big number, and it mostly lines up with what's been confirmed since the launch of the original game.

Here we're looking into What Year Does Overwatch 2 Take Place, mainly basing our guesstimates on what Blizzard-Activision has put into the canon.

Overwatch 2 All Heroes Official Age and Birthday Revealed 🎂

The ages and birthdays of all #Overwatch2 heroes have been revealed.

Among the Overwatch heroes, the youngest human hero is Illari(18) and the youngest non-human is Orisa(1). and the oldest hero is Sigma(64). pic.twitter.com/k06L7wcNxV

— Naeri X 나에리 (@OverwatchNaeri) September 8, 2023

What Year Does Overwatch 2 Take Place?

To start, let's look at what's been confirmed.

In 2016, the first Overwatch game was released. And unlike its sequel, the devs were quick to confirm the original title's timeline, setting it 60 years into “the future of a fictionalized Earth..” that said, we can reasonably put the first game's events at 2076.

So far, Blizzard hasn't given us an exact year for OW2, but there are plenty of in-game easter eggs that point us in the right direction.

A “Club Sinestesia” poster spotted by a Reddit user u/ John_is_a_fool on the Paradiso map a year ago tacitly narrows down the year Overwatch 2 takes place. On it, you can see the date for a Friday event marked “May 14”.

The user was able to pin down the dates when 05/14 would fall on a Friday. These specific dates would only fall on 3 calendar years that far out into the future: 2066, 2077 and 2088. And considering that Overwatch began in 2076, a year's gap wouldn't be unbelievable, given that the remnants of Overwatch had to quickly band together to deal with the reemergence of Null Sector and Talon's increased activities.

Overwatch 2 very likely takes place around 2077 when you consider the timeframe of the original game and the various clues scattered around the game. This isn't an official date by any means, but it lines up with the lore and the details we've been given so far.

On the other hand, we don't know how long that Paradiso poster has been up on that wall, so the timeframes could be totally mixed up. But what are the odds that Blizzard, a game company renowned for its storytelling, could just drop a random date on a random poster on a sequel map set so far into the future that coincidentally shares a timeframe with the original game?

With all this in mind, the future's looking bright for Overwatch 2, sans some big issues with the matchmaking system. The big return of Blizzcon in 2023 revealed tons of new content for the team-based FPS, including competitive updates, seasonal changes and the next Overwatch hero.

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