Overwatch 2 takes place on an Earth sixty years into the future, but a player made a discovery about its moon that may hold some interesting implications about where the story might go. The lore of Overwatch has always taken place outside the game itself, through animated shorts, comics, and other tie-in media. This aspect has made players excited to one day experience the story firsthand and interact with its characters beyond gameplay.
Initially, Overwatch 2 was supposed to fill their demand by introducing a co-op campaign at launch, but this story mode for Overwatch 2 got delayed in favor of getting the player-versus-player experience right as the game transitioned into its now-infamous Battle Pass system. Though players have been extremely outspoken about Blizzard's monetization practices bogging down an otherwise insanely fun game, the current plans for Overwatch 2's campaign are that it will release in episodes across 2023 as part of the Battle Pass.
The Moon has played a part in Overwatch lore since the beginning, and Winston, the first hero of Overwatch to ever be unveiled, grew up on the Horizon Lunar Colony before he made his way to Earth. Initially a map in Overwatch that has yet to return in the sequel, fans could never get an accurate estimate of how large this colony was up until some players such as Diverii made a startling realization about Earth's satellite in the skybox of many Overwatch 2 maps.
As Diverii pointed out in their Reddit thread, the surface of the Moon seems dotted with light pollution, implying that the colony once considered to be little more than a research facility is a full-fledged metropolis of staggering size. Unknown to some players who may not engage with lore in Overwatch 2, the reason why Winston, a genetically modified ape, left his lunar home for Earth was due to the gorilla uprising that took place on Horizon One.
This uprising in Overwatch came about in response to the experiments that scientists were performing on the gorillas, and the ensuing massacre left the vast majority of human personnel dead as Winston's fellow apes rose up to claim the Horizon Lunar Colony for themselves. Winston expressed a belief that returning to the Moon was inevitable at some point, and players think the moral complexity of its situation would make it ideal for the story campaign of Overwatch 2. Whether that ends up the case remains to be seen, but the shadow of the "Moon of the Apes" looms in the night sky nonetheless.
Overwatch 2 is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Switch, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
