The game takes place on planet Earth around the year 2070

The game takes place on planet Earth around the year 2070, but the background story goes back some thirty years before: around 2040, the technology has progressed a lot and, among the most advanced sectors, stands out in particular robotics with the development of truly sentient artificial intelligences, called Omnic and spread globally controlled by the information defined omnium centers that managed the construction, evolution and learning Omnic.

After the Omnica Corporation, a manufacturing company of Omnic and omnium was closed for fraud, the omnium were dismantled and left on their own, but were mysteriously awakened and infected by the "Program God": the so omnium began building new Omnic designed and programmed to fight humans and initiated a planetary civil war, the Crisis of Omnic. To combat them, the United Nations formed an elite corps called Overwatch, composed of the best soldiers in the world as well as by people with special and unique abilities that placed at the disposal of the peace. The Overwatch soon became an international task force growing, hailed by the population and with other tasks in addition to peacekeeping.

With the end of the crisis, however, tensions began to emerge between the Overwatch vertices and external allegations of corruption, neglect, abuse and other crimes, and the organization found itself discredited, divided and under investigation by the United Nations. The unexpected and suspicious explosion of the headquarters of Overwatch in Zurich gave the final blow to the organization, that after thirty years since the foundation was dissolved [1].

The disappearance of Overwatch, however, marked the return of an old enemy of the organization: the terrorist group paramilitary Talon, pointing again to upset the equilibrium of the world, manages through his agent, Widowmaker, killing Tekhartha Mondatta, guru and master of the group of Omnic dedicated to rebuilding peace called Shambali [2]. As a result, and perhaps even because of this incident, in Russia one of the omnium is reactivated, sparking the Second Crisis of Omnic. It also attacked by Talon Winston operations center, one of the ex-agents of Overwatch, from which are stolen sensitive data about other old Overwatch agents still operating in some way. After these events, Winston decided that it is high time that the old team back in action and contact the Overwatch agents: the world has once again need them.