Rialto is a map that we've been wanting to make for a long time. This is our first map in Italy and it's such a cool environment. This is something that I think players can get really excited about.

When we work on a map, we will play-test that map for months, constantly iterating it, making it as balanced as it can be and fun as it can be for every hero in the game.

My name is Aaron Keller. I'm the Assistant Game Director on Overwatch. I have done a lot of work on the maps in the game, as well as some of the game designs.

When we decided to make Rialto, it started with this idea of making this mission that the Blackwatch heroes would use to travel through the streets of Venice, where they had to escape from Talon, which is sort of Overwatch's archenemy. As we were working on the mission and talking about it, we realized that a space like that would work really well as a payload map. So we kind of decided to combine what we thought was going to be a really, really cool mission in our archives event with a brand new PvP map.

We always want to sell a fantasy for a particular location. For Rialto, we really wanted to show this version of old world Venice. When people think of Venice and traveling to Italy, one of the first things that they want to see are the canals that run through Venice. That can be a very difficult thing to accomplish on the game design front. Anytime in Overwatch that a player falls into the water, they die and so we really needed to balance how much water you would see, how close to it that you would get, and how fair it would feel on both sides.

When we're designing maps for the game, it will always start with the big ideation phase, where we're kind of figuring out where in the world we want this map to take place. We're also talking about the game mode that you'll have in the map. A level designer will start putting together what they think the flow through the map is going to be, what each of the design aspects are there going to be, what's the choke going to be like, what's a control point going to be like. We will put together a simple space out of blocks and then we will continually iterate on that. Through play-testing, we will get more and more detail and more and more refinement 'til we think it's playing as good as it possibly can and getting it to a place where we can launch it.

We do a lot of internal testing. It's centered on finding out whether the map is fun and to a certain point, figuring out how balanced the map is. It's our incredibly talented QA department playing the map for eight hours a day, just looking for bugs in it. Whether it's a map, a hero, a design feature, a game feature, we try to put things out as polished and as accessible to people as possible.

There are times where we were collecting a lot more data. We were looking at every place that players died. We could construct heat maps of different areas on the map. Like, this is a great Widowmaker spot or this is where everyone's attacking and defending from. We collect all of that data and then we use it as we tune the map.

And there's all sorts of little things that we'll do to a map in order to start swinging the balance one way or the other. When we're looking at a map after it's gone live, the data will be different than the community's perception of the particular area in a map.

A very specific example: the first point in Eichenwalde was actually very consistent with the percentage of time that the attackers would take it. But at the same time, the community felt that the point was too difficult to get through. The data pointed to it working right, but I don't think it felt right for players. In those instances, whenever we can, we'll go in, change the map, or we'll go in and change the hero in order to align the perception of something with the reality.

We want the game to run as fast as possible. The Overwatch hero roster has so many different crazy, over-the-top abilities and so as you're developing the map, you're just finding a whole host of things that can go wrong. There's a lot of challenges to making such a long map, where as Pharah, you can fly up in the air and see all of the way across the length and breadth of this map from certain areas. Something like that can be very difficult on a game engine. What you're doing is you're drawing much larger sections of a map than you are typically when you're on ground level. We have all sorts of tricks that we use. The environment artists will build specific architecture in order to cover up some of these long views.

Specifically, the last part of Rialto takes place inside this sort of like Talon bosses' palace. We were very considerate of the way that we oriented that building and also where we put some of the big archways and sort of like the roof line of the building, so that once you get into the courtyard, you can't really see outside. And if you look through just right, you can kinda see out to Devil's Corner, but you can't see beyond it.

Early on, we had a lot more water in the map than we have right now. And it was more dangerous and closer to players and so you knew you needed to push this payload across a bridge, but there's a Pharah and a Lucio and all these other heroes that are just gonna knock you off into the water as soon as you got there. So we actually did something different in Rialto that we haven't done in our other maps. In the water, we have boats moving around. When you're playing and you get knocked off a bridge, what would normally in other map result in certain death will now sometimes result in you getting saved by landing on one of these boats and it feels so great to land on it and jump off and rejoin the fight again.

To create a shooter level that works at high levels in a competitive game mode can be very difficult. We don't look at the difference between input methods on console and on PC. We feel like so much of what makes a map successful is some of the larger pieces in it. In Overwatch, typically most of our modes are asymmetric, which means the attackers and the defenders are trying to do two different things and they usually all focus around one common objective. So what we're always trying to do is to bring the teams together in unique and interesting ways. Our game is really fast-paced, so a lot of the heroes have either, like, really quick movement abilities or they have a lot of weapons that can do damage in a short amount of time. To get these quick, instant reads is a big deal for us.

We really try to limit the number of heights that we have in a map or the number of platforms that we have to two, possibly three. We always wanted you to be able to come around a corner, see all of the effects and things that where either gonna be threatening or helpful to you in battle, so you can see all the hero abilities and weapons happening, and then kind of get a read for what all the heroes were doing. And then underneath that, figure out what the environment, how it was laid out.

And then on the map design side, I think we followed a lot of our level design values. In the map, there's this main road that takes you from the start of the map all the way through to the end. And then there's all of these sort of branching intersections and different interiors that different teams can use to their own advantage. We try to have one main route as much as we can, so that players can one, when they first start playing a map know where to go, but later on down the line, as they get better and better at the map, you can always look at this main path and sort of re-orient the mental map that you make of a space.

Rialto has a lot of really cool, unique aspects to it. There is a very short introductory cut scene for the special units that is supposed to show them off in the coolest, best light. But players have always figured out how to inject themselves into those scenes and do kind of like almost funny little skits. My favorite detail is this robot gondolier that we have. He's kind of like pushing the gondolas through the water. He's just like this really cool, kind of funny detail. And I hope to see videos of that guy on the internet.

We do have some Easter eggs in the Rialto map. I can't really tell you a lot about them, 'cause they're supposed to be a surprise. But some piece of artwork in the map was actually made by one of our developer's six-year-old kids. I have always loved the way that the Overwatch art team has translated these different areas of the world into like really special, unique spaces. And so to just kind of get in and walk around the space and see what we've done with Venice, Italy is in and of itself really special.