Natural Disasters in Overwatch

Story Discussion
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(Copied and Pasted from the General Forums as I do not know how to actually move it to here)

So one thing I think hasn’t been asked at all on these forums is something regarding Natural Disasters, like do these even occur in the world of Overwatch as so far there hasn’t been a single one at all (I’m not sure if Storm Rising counts).

Like, has humanity advanced so much that they single handedly managed to prevent natural disasters altogether?
What I wanted to know is how does the World of Overwatch overcome these disasters? i.e Plague, Earthquake, Volcanic Eruptions etc.

And also, this is in regards to Overwatch 2, but I’m hoping we get to see missions related to these disasters as having a (Get from Point A to B and kill some enemies) is going to get boring and repetitive very quickly, why not have some different types of missions like a Hostage Situation or Crisis Mission.

I even thought up of a mission idea to do with a natural disaster.

Lets say a volcano is about to erupt soon and the first half of the mission is evacuating everyone within a time limit, if the volcano erupts before you successfully evacuate everyone than its game over.
In the second half, the volcano erupts and your team has to find another route to reach the rendezvous point whilst evading and avoiding rivers of lava, fire, burning buildings, etc. Lets say this part was also on a time-limit and failing to reach it in time which cause the volcano to emit a pyroclastic flow resulting in a game over.

I honestly would love to see natural disasters in Overwatch and see how they are taken care of, if there are any in Overwatch.

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Well technically we’ve already seen at least two in the lore, the tropical storm in Storm Rising and the polar storm that took down everything in the Ecopoint Mei was stationed at.

I’m assuming that the world of Overwatch deals with natural disasters in a similar way that ours’ currently does - preparedness, evacuations, rescue units, etc. It would be interesting to see how omnics are involved though, and if current trends (I have no interest in debating if climate change is real with people, cause it is) have resulted in any major changes. Personally I don’t think the game will explore that, partly because Blizzard have a clear pattern of trying (and failing) to not to stir up much political controversy, but it definitely would be cool. Omnics are viewed as humanity’s greatest threat by several characters and people of the world of OW in general, having a major natural disaster as one of the “villains” could be interesting.

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Basically this. The natural disasters that we have seen in Overwatch are arguably worse than the ones we have in reality (especially the polar storm that presumably lasted years.) Mei’s initial backstory is that she was exploring the Ecopoints around the world trying to figure out what was going on with the weather, and why it was so messed up. I do not know if she still has time for that in Overwatch 2, now that she is an agent helping fight back against Null Sector, so we may not see further development of this.

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