esports
Overwatch’s heroes are undeniably its focus – but it's the maps that truly let them run wild.
After a few minutes with Overwatch, anyone will tell you that the game’s heroes dominate the experience. With characters blinking across the battlefield, shooting massive dragons through walls, and firing off rocket barrages, it’s easy to get caught up in the crazy shenanigans that heroes are capable of.
Heroes don’t exist in a vacuum, though; it’s the environment that shapes hero interactions. Symmetra can’t set up a death trap without a small room, and Reaper can’t drop into a surprise Death Blossom without a ledge to fall from. Assistant game director Aaron Keller has spent more than a few hours putting together the maps of Overwatch, and as much as he loves them, Keller’s goal is not to make his creations stand out. It’s to give heroes ways to stand out within them.
Let’s bring it together
Overwatch’s heroes are an interesting bunch on their own, but they become even more engaging when they cooperate. This is by design – and as such, maps are designed to keep heroes interacting with each other. “From the start of Overwatch, we knew we wanted it to be a competitive multiplayer game, and we really wanted it to be team-based. So all of the maps are focused around bringing the team together,” said Keller. “We’re always trying to [have teams] work together as they try to overcome the boss fight that is the enemy team.”
There are lots of ways to get teams together, but Overwatch’s solution thus far has been to gather teams around one major goal – attacking or defending payloads and control points. “The first and most obvious way that we do it is that all of our maps are objective-based. We don’t have team deathmatch in the game, and the objectives we have are singular,” said Keller. This gives teams a set purpose whenever they head into a map. It doesn’t mean every team needs to roll around in a group of six, but it allows players to directly consider the one objective in front of them and what part they can play to help their team accomplish it.
I wish for your freedom
For Keller, maps are important – he plays a major part in designing them, after all. But that doesn’t mean he wants them to be the focus. “The most important thing in our maps is for the heroes to feel really cool. As a level designer, it’s my job [to allow] people to not have to worry about the map as much, and let people think about what they can possibly do.”
According to Keller, a map is successful when it allows players to find opportunities for their hero organically. “When we design the maps, we make them open and free enough for heroes to shine.” For instance, Lúcio is the only hero that can wall-ride, but there aren’t sections of levels designed to be ‘Lúcio-only’ tracks. Any place that a player finds to use this ability effectively is meant to come from that player’s creativity – not from a designer’s pre-laid plans. This ideal has allowed new heroes to fit into Overwatch easily, even when they bring new types of mobility to the table.
The only thing that Keller is actively attempting to limit is overbearing sight lines. Overwatch has heroes whose effective range varies greatly. Allowing range to objectively become a deciding factor in a character’s strength could limit the game’s design going forward. “Every once in a while there will be areas where heroes feel too powerful, and it almost always deals with long sight lines. We have the possibility of making Widowmaker very, very strong by making mistakes on the level design side."
A time to shine for every hero
As with any game, map variety is key. Some Overwatch maps provide plenty of open space, like Numbani, while others such as Temple of Anubis are more intimate affairs. Even within maps this can change at the drop of a hat – the newest map, Hollywood, is a heterogeneous affair that features several open and closed areas. The layout of a map at any given point can influence ideal team compositions to a degree. But like hero designer Geoff Goodman, Keller wants to give heroes spotlights to shine, whether it’s Reinhardt pushing his team through a choke point or Reaper popping out of corners to demolish his enemies.
“We actually love for there to be areas where heroes feel overpowered. If there’s an area where Lúcio is just knocking people off the edge of something to their death … it’s really cool for [him] to feel like he’s using his abilities in a creative way to get kills. I am excited when people feel like the hero they’re playing is powerful on a particular area of a map.”
Not until we get it right
In some circles, Overwatch’s focus on a single style of play has been criticized as limiting. But it’s not for lack of trying on Blizzard’s end: they’ve buried a surprising amount of their time into attempting to find ways to incorporate new modes into Overwatch. “We’ve tried completely new game modes, we’ve tried capture the flag, we’ve also tried what Team Fortress 2 calls the Control Point maps.”
But these new modes changed the dynamic of how heroes interacted in ways that the design team wasn’t comfortable with. “One of the primary values that we have is that we want every hero to feel viable in our maps. When you talk about a control point map where you have to both attack and defend a control point at the same time, it started to degrade into team compositions that were primarily mobility-based characters.” The Symmetras, Törbjorns, and Bastions of the world just couldn’t keep up, and it broke the team interactions that Overwatch currently prides itself on. Would a 12- Tracer game of Capture the Flag really feel like Overwatch at the end of the day, anyways?
Keller and his team might not have any new modes now, but it doesn’t mean there won’t be in the future. It’s just a matter of finding the right fit. “We have probably invested a year of development time into trying to get other game modes to work, and I think we have a lot of promising things that we can do. The message I would love to get across is I know it’s important for the community to have new game modes, and it’s equally as important for us to do it. But we won’t release one until it’s ready.”
More than clay and concrete
Even as a level designer, Aaron Keller’s goal is to have Overwatch’s maps be the backdrop for the game’s main focus: its heroes. But just as Blizzard has been iterating on heroes throughout its closed beta, there is a commitment to maintaining the maps as engaging, viable options at every level of competition. And if that means tweaking a map’s design to better fit its purpose, then that’s what will happen.
“We do want the maps to be living just like the heroes. I think we have a commitment to this game to be a competitive, team-based game. We have a commitment to it to play well at the eSports level. And I don’t think you can drop a map off in the public’s lap and expect it to play well until the end of time. I just want to get it out there that we’re dedicated to the maps as well as the heroes being viable for the duration of the game.”
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