Voyage to Esperança: A Portuguese city built on tradition, brilliance, and hope
Overwatch’s latest Push map takes us on a journey to the beautiful city of Esperança, Portugal.
Esperança is a sunny, coastal city that highlights the rich culture found across Portugal and the bright, hopeful future of Overwatch. Today, we’re joined by Sound Designer Felipe de Mello Pereira and Principal Environmental Artist, Helder Pinto to talk about how sights and sounds came together to bring the spirit of Portugal to Overwatch 2!
Our goal was to create another Push map for Overwatch 2’s launch alongside New Queen Street and Colosseo, so we started to uncover inspiration and map out the creative direction for a new map. That’s when Pinto stepped up to set our next destination in Portugal. “We felt confident we could understand the cultural and architectural languages of the country with me being Portuguese and growing up there,” Pinto explains.“By playing to our team’s strengths, we began putting something together quickly while also maintaining the highest possible quality that our players have come to associate with Overwatch.”
“I was born in Portugal, which made it both easy and hard at the same time,” Pinto says, elaborating on the early challenges his team faced. “I had to ask myself: what would someone think about Portugal if they have never been? This question helped me create the mood board and early concept art for Esperança.”
The game has traditional cities that exist in the world like Hollywood, New Queen’s Street, and Busan. We also have maps like Oasis, Ilios, and Numbani that look as if they exist in the best possible future of our world—lending to the “golden age” premise of Overwatch lore.
“Esperança means ‘hope’ in Portuguese, and this word became a very intentional name for this map,” explains
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