The gaming industry faithful flocked to the DICE Summit to hobnob and hear developers and publishers talk about their favorite games. Overwatch fans have not been left behind, and they were rewarded with an interesting story detailed by its game director Jeff Kaplan last Feb. 22.
Mistake By Lazy Overwatch Developers
In Kaplan's two-hour talk, he admitted that Blizzard made a mistake when it began developing a map based on Mexico, which is now identified as the Dorado map. The team purportedly sifted through images of Mexican cities such as Tijuana and Mexico City. Unfortunately, the appearance of these places did not fit what the developers envisioned the Dorado map to be.
According to Kaplan, Blizzard wanted a town near the sea, one that features a riot of colors and evokes an open vibe. Finding no such photo for big Mexican cities, the developer team turned to Google Image and looked for a town using "colorful Mexican town" as search phrase. The top results included a coastal town with colorful houses built on a cliff.
Not A Mexican Town
The team found it perfect and proceeded on designing Dorado with the image as inspiration. Kaplan noted that the developers were lazy enough not to learn more about the image, which turned out to be a photo of an Italian town.
Indeed, if you search for the same key words today, Google Images will still show you the same photo that Blizzard used. It will show up in its top five results. But if you click its source page, the image is actually identified as Riomaggiore, Italy. However, the town is adjacent to Manarola, and they share some topographical features.
Kaplan revealed that they only became aware of the mistake two months after the map was released. He cited an unidentified individual who came up to the team and asked why they used Manarola, Italy as reference to the Mexico map.
To make up for the mismatch, Kaplan joked that if the Overwatch team decides to create an Italy map, they will base it on a Mexican town.
More Overwatch Insights
Aside from the Dorado map oversight, Kaplan also detailed some interesting insights about game development for Overwatch. For example, he indicated that the game's inception has been partly hastened by the cancellation of Project Titan.
"We spent two weeks on an MMO that was in another Blizzard universe that we haven't made an MMO in — lot of choices for you to figure out which it was," Kaplan was quoted in a GameSpot report. "Then we spent another two weeks on a brand-new MMO set in another, completely new intellectual property."
