Overwatch's director discusses why King's Row is so iconic, but admits that 'every single map in the game gets a vote'

What's the best map in Overwatch? And why is it King's Row?

After Team 4 added map voting to Overwatch one thing became crystal clear: everyone wants to say they're a free thinker who doesn't follow the crowd until King's Row turns up, and then it's a landslide.

King's Row is widely considered to be the best map in Overwatch, I certainly think so. It's one of the few maps that's fun to play on defense and attack, as it doesn't seem overly weighted to either side, at least not until the very end.

"There's high ground there, but there's not oppressive high ground," Aaron Keller, game director of Overwatch explained to me after I asked him what, in his mind, made this such an iconic map. "There's areas for a lot of different heroes to do their things. It's fairly tight and close, so you're not going to get out of the action for too long.

"Another thing that I think about a lot with King's Row — sorry this could go on for a really long time — I think that there's something about being able to play through most of the space in a map that I think is just more satisfying for both teams. It can feel really good to hold a team at spawn, but you don't want that every game. You want to feel like it's a close [game]."

As someone who mostly plays support heroes and has put a hell of a lot of time into Ana I can tell you that King's Row is my favourite map thanks to all of its clear sightlines and the fact that tanks never stray too far away from the payload, although the mid stretch can get a bit dicey at times. What I love the most, however, is how you're almost always coming face to face with the enemy providing "big team fight moments" the whole way through the map. But not everyone will agree with me.

"I do think sometimes there can be a sort of agreement that happens as more people vote for King's Row," Keller says. "It just starts to get some momentum there." There are a good deal of people who either vote with what the group wants or just don't vote at all, but every so often players go against the grain.

"Every single map in the game gets a vote," Keller says. "For some people Clash or 2CP is their favourite mode in Overwatch. Even though we think that there's some issues with them, but I think the playerbase is more varied than we think sometimes." I don't doubt that some people love 2CP. Even I wouldn't say I minded it much, although its second objective had some serious issues, which was one of the reasons as to why it ended up getting pulled from the map rotation.

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I'm not sure whether Team 4 has tried to recreate the magic that they captured with King's Row, although Neon Junction sort of feels like it but in reverse. But that's alright, because there's plenty of other good maps to be enjoyed, although I know where my voting allegiances lie.

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Elie is a news writer with an unhealthy love of horror games — even though their greatest fear is being chased. When they're not screaming or hiding, there's a good chance you'll find them testing their metal in metroidvanias or just admiring their Pokemon TCG collection. Elie has previously worked at TechRadar Gaming as a staff writer and studied at JOMEC in International Journalism and Documentaries — spending their free time filming short docs about Smash Bros. or any indie game that crossed their path.

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