After a devastating war against a combat-ready team of intelligent machines known as Omnics, the former agents of the heroic team known as Overwatch must join forces once more to fight a new threat.
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There's a running thread in Overwatch lore about a conspiracy that isn't Overwatch or Talon — something bigger tying nearly every character together. Sombra's the only one actively digging into it, and her research suggests basically the entire cast has some kind of connection to it, even if most players never notice.
Most heroes are two or three steps removed from Sombra's mystery conspiracy, but Reinhardt is unusually close to it — directly linked to someone who's directly linked to it. Nobody's said out loud who that connection actually is yet, which makes it one of the more intriguing loose threads in the whole story.
Long before she suited up as Pharah, Fareeha Amari was a kid who was completely obsessed with Overwatch and everything it stood for. It makes her eventual path into the organization feel less like a coincidence and more like something she was working toward her whole life.
Blizzard couldn't resist bringing their favorite little WoW menace along for the ride. There's a giant murloc slurping a bowl of ramen in Hanamura, murloc plushies up for grabs in the arcade, and murloc graffiti tucked away at Temple of Anubis. None of it means anything, it's just Blizzard being Blizzard.
Next to the defenders' second spawn on Eichenwalde, you'll find a sword jammed into a bonfire — a straight-up nod to the resting spots in Dark Souls. They even put a big health pack right beside it, which is a nice touch if you know what you're looking at.
On Route 66, the attacking team is technically pushing stolen cargo for the Deadlock Gang — except the 'cargo' was meant to be Echo before Cassidy stepped in and rescued her. So functionally, you spend the whole match pushing an empty crate while the actual point of the heist already got resolved off-screen.
Numbani's payload didn't always go to a museum for mystery cargo — it used to be the Doomfist gauntlet itself, headed to an exhibit dedicated to the three men who'd worn it over the years. The cargo got swapped out later, likely because the gauntlet ended up back in the hands of the third Doomfist, Akande Ogundimu.
The 'cargo' on Hollywood isn't cargo at all — it's an Omnic named HAL-Fred Glitchbot who's being escorted through the studio lot while an anti-Omnic group tries to take him out. The name's a little wink at classic sci-fi that's easy to miss if you're too busy fighting over the payload.
Look closely at the crates in the Route 66 warehouse and you'll spot they're addressed to businesses from completely different maps — Lumérico in Dorado, Rikimaru in Hanamura, Kofi Aromo's café in Numbani. It's a small detail that makes the world feel a lot more connected than any single match lets on.
Take a close look at the barcode on Soldier: 76's Biotic Field when he's wearing the Grillmaster skin and you'll find the number 0118 999 881 999 119 7253 — the fake 'easy to remember' emergency number from The IT Crowd. Cheeky pick given the item's whole job is healing people.
