King's Row - A Deep Dive Analysis

Introduction

In 2016, the first-person hero shooter Overwatch was released to universal critical acclaim, lauded for its diverse cast, accessibility in gameplay, and beautiful, immersive environments. However, amongst its wide selection of maps, lies one that is undoubtedly the most popular amongst the playerbase.

A map made for the Hybrid mode in the game, King's Row is universally liked by the community, having won a user poll by a landslide in 2018, with its votes almost on par with the next four maps in the rankings combined [1].

Why is the level so popular? This analysis will attempt to break down the map in terms of level design and figure out why.

A location split by a history of violence and bloodshed between humans and omnics, the map features a cold futuristic city lined with cobblestone streets on its exterior, contrasted by a bustling, hidden omnic city underground powered by a pulsing reactor.

Playing through the map sees a team of players escort an EMP bomb past the statue of Mondatta erected in the heart of the city, and into the omnic city's reactor.

Analysis

This analysis will attempt to break down why King's Row is so beloved by the player base. In particular, it will attempt to tie the design of the level to some common level design principles and examine their usage in many cases.

Navigation

As a competitive multiplayer game, easing a player into the environment is rarely a luxury that the game can provide due to the impending threat of the enemy team. Therefore, reaching a flow state quickly is crucial by having the map be easily navigable from the very beginning of the game to provide a clear set of goals. This is accomplished in King's Row by a variety of techniques, which will be discussed below:

The map properly uses leading techniques to pull the player forward at all times.

The primary reason why King's Row is easy to traverse is how it properly leads the player forward at all times. The complexity of this consideration is increased twofold when we consider that there are essentially two perspectives within the map: one from the attacking side, and the other from the defenders.

The level design understands what each player can see at all times, and uses that knowledge to frame shots that lead the player forward. This can be the most clearly seen in the map's respawn point. Players tend to feel the most disoriented when put through a sudden change of location. However, King's Row's spawn points are designed such that the player's viewpoint upon a respawn will includes several leading elements which allows a player to grasp the way towards the objective as quickly as possible.

The defender spawn uses contrasting lighting colors and shows a clearly visible path forward.

Outside the attacker spawn, the city skyline in the back is tinted turquoise, which contrasts the warmer colors of the foreground elements. Players can also clearly see buildings and the bus pointing towards the city skyline in the backdrop. While the path forward is not immediately visible due to the bus blocking it, players can surmise that the way forward due to the strong vanishing point effect provided by the geometric forms of the buildings and the bus.

Discrete locations often have a strong identity through the use of landmarks and lighting changes.

A fixation on maintaining a level's central identity in the name of aesthetic consistency might lead to areas looking too similar and repetitive. This also has the unfortunate side effect of players getting lost when areas just cannot be told apart.

To avoid this, King's Row strategically places its landmarks to provide distinct physical objects which serve to solidify the identities of locations within the game.

The chokepoint from the attacker's perspective also treats us to this gem: a memorable shot of the statue of Mondatta, neatly flanked by the gates at the side, backed by the clock tower and the city skyline in the far back. The combination of a striking landmark together with an impressionably framed shot create recognisable and memorable spaces for players to fall back on to help them regain their bearings.

Additionally, the map also features very clear lighting changes when the gameplay progresses through the three different points in the game. On top of this, when a player moves from area to area, the lighting changes drastically as well. This is most apparent when the player moves from an indoor area to an outdoor area, with the level often opting to use near-complimentary colors to represent the change in space.

The main route for the first payload point is mainly lit with a greenish hue while the interior of the bookstore is orange.

Conversely, the side routes in the second payload point are lit by blue hues while the main route is mainly orange.

Assets are tiled in creative ways to prevent repetition.

Creating wholly new assets for individual props is often wasteful. However, improper asset reuse can lead to repetitive and boring backgrounds, which leads to the breaking of immersion and players getting lost in areas that look the same. King’s Row avoids this by eschewing directly tiling building elements immediately adjacent to each other, or even parallel to each other. Additionally, the tops and bottoms of building assets can be separated, allowing the more commonly traversed ground area to have more variety without requiring an entire unique top section to be created. All of these serve to break the repetition of the environment without imposing too much of a burden on the asset team.

The upper half in both buildings are the same, but they are not tiled in parallel.

Similarly, the upper half of both buildings are the same, but one building protrudes out slightly. The bottom half of both buildings are also different.

Engagements and Pacing

Another key aspect of flow is to ensure that players feel that there are opportunities to succeed. While Overwatch has a multitude of hero choices, which, in turn, result in a plethora of team compositions, maps are designed to give both sides a fighting chance together with sufficient time to regroup after team fights.

As the entire cast of Overwatch (with the exception of Tracer and Genji) moves at the same speed (5.5m/s), there is an easily accessible baseline metric to assess time taken to reach engagements. Therefore, the points below will only take into account traversal time by foot, without any mobility abilities.

The time to reach engagements is tuned to favor neither side.

From studying the various times it takes for players to reach key locations, it is clear that King's Row is designed to scale time to engagement based on how much progress has been made into the match. In the beginning of the match, attackers have a significantly shorter time to get to an engagement. However, as the match goes past point A and through the payload route and point B, the defenders slowly reclaim the advantage in returning to engagements due to the payload approaching their spawn point. Thus, this allows moments in which both sides are allowed to shine, as the game goes on.

The pacing of the map allows for sufficient breathing room for both sides.

Due to it's nature as an competitive multiplayer game, the pacing and intensity of each game tends to vary wildly and unpredictably, and hard to properly grasp at a single glance. However, by laying out the game's fixed metrics, some insights can be obtained on how matches on King's Row are designed to play out.

What particularly stands out is the consistency of the attacking momentum in terms of 30 second increments: defenders take a minimum of 30s to return to both point A and the end of the payload route in point B. Similarly, point A takes 15-32s to capture, and each key defensible position along the payload route also takes a minimum of 22-30s to reach, based on the amount of attackers actively on the objective.

Therefore, from these timings alone, we can assume that the defending team, can rush and attempt to reclaim objectives immediately after losing a team fight most of the time. However, the option to instead use these 30 seconds to reassess the situation and fall back to a better defensive position is open to them as well.

These 30 seconds not only provide room for strategic consideration and regrouping, but also respite for what would otherwise be a prolonged 10 minute-long team fight.

Spaces and Layouts

King’s Row is a map with a variety of different combat spaces to provide varying intensities within a match, some of which are not unique to itself when looking at the other maps within the game. However, a lot of these spaces inherently come with a large advantage to certain strategies or affiliations. King's Row softens these advantages with some design decisions discussed below:

The map avoids having large swaths of no man's land.

King's Row eschews having to much open areas which allow for characters that play at long ranges (Widowmaker, Pharah, Soldier) to have free reign over. The map has a zigzagging payload route which is flanked by tall buildings, and overly long sight lines are blocked off by aptly placed props to serve as cover. As a result, the map does not feature any lines of sight above 75m, and the viable lines of sight which afford a decent view of the payload route only go up to 55m.

This location looks to be an example of great high ground for sniping, but it does not show the point, and any ground locations on the defending side are blocked by the gates or the statue.

The map also attempts to neutralize parts of the high ground advantage.

Most high ground in the game are balanced by having trade-offs that prevent them from being overly oppressive. These occur in the form of flanking routes that give safe access to these areas by means of spending some traversal time, competing high ground, or locations which are too open for the sniping player to have eyes on all angles.

Attacking players looking to claim this location close to point A from a holding defending player can take some time to wind around and access it safely.

This location close to the start of the payload route in point B has a competing location far opposite it.

This location on the defending side has two competing high ground locations: one on the far left easily accessible by attackers, and one to the right, which is equally accessible by both sides.

This looks to be an excellent spot for sniping. However, there are areas on the left and right of the defending player that are out of view, and attacking players can weave through the left side from cover to cover to get a clear shot on the location.

These design choices lead to there being increased options for hero choices within the game, increasing potential for more varied forms of counterplay.

The map's main choke point is not overly oppressive.

Choke points are a near-ubiquitous element of Overwatch maps, mostly being a staple of assault and hybrid maps. Valuable as they can be in funneling players into opportunities for engagement, some choke points can be particularly oppressive if the area around it is designed to give the defenders too much of an advantage (see: initial release Eichenwalde point A, Paris point A, Hanamura point A). To counteract this, King’s Row implements its main choke in ways that provide both options to approach engagements and is balanced not to provide too much of an advantage to either side.

Firstly, the main choke has a shorter wall to allow for long ranged fire and limited visibility from higher ground, together with grenade-weight projectiles to pass easier. This softens the strength of the defending position by making the main defensive structure more porous.

Hanamura's main choke walls on point A vs King's Row's main choke walls on point A

Additionally, the key areas that lend to a choke's strength are often the areas around it, rather than the choke itself. The main choke in King's Row features an alternative route that leads to the back of the objective, allowing flankers to safely penetrate a defending team's back line. Notably, while this route allows for ambushes from the back, it is also narrower than the main route, making it less feasible for a main push than the main choke point.

As discussed before, a side route exists to the side of the choke which allows attackers to infiltrate the point better.

Finally, areas close to the choke have reasonably safe cover that players can move towards. Both the bus and Mondatta's statue mentioned before block fire from defending line of sight, providing attacking players with clear goals forward, and also areas to retreat back to when situations turn sour.

Providing full coverage over this area requires the defending team to thin their manpower, making them susceptible to strong pushes by the attacking team. This puts focus on not only when to push through, but the angle at which the push is done, allowing for more tactical complexity.

The multitude of options that arise from these design decisions allow for the back and forth gameplay that Overwatch is known for, and gives players agency over the outcome of any match.

Conclusion

From all of these findings, it is clear that King's Row took into account the field of view of players from both attacking and defending perspectives. Understanding what a player can see at any time and using that to create shots that lead the player forward are key to provide players with a clear goal.

Additionally, while it is expected that sections within any map vary in difficulty for different players to provide a proper intensity curve, these moments cannot be too oppressive, leading to player breaking their state of flow. Therefore, each section must have multiple solutions which test different aspects of a player's skill, with proper respite such that the players can consider the options open to them.

All in all, King's Row is, and will continue to be an example of a masterclass in level design, and an extremely enjoyable map for players of all skill levels.

References and Observations

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1uscXkzyZQgdtycsryqXaRnKzvXX952tOftv0vk6njc0/edit?usp=sharing

Special Thanks to Nur Aini Md Amin, Tan Tian Shou, and Dan Kang for proofreading this post!