Overwatch heads to Busan, South Korea in brand-new control map

Blizzard announced a brand-new control map for Overwatch called Busan during the first day of Korea’s Overwatch Fan Festival. This new map is set in Busan, South Korea, as its name suggests.

Blizzard took special care in representing the various contrasting aspects of Busan within the map, which includes three different locations in which players can fight.

The Sanctuary area allows players to fight in a traditional Korean temple that features a huge garden. The Downtown area gets to the heart of Busan’s bustling modern center and includes a PC bang, karaoke bar and a light rail station, complete with a train. The final location on the new map is the MEKA base, where D.Va and her squad prepare to help save the city from the Omnic threat.

The MEKA base is a central location in Blizzard’s new Overwatch animated short, which is all about D.Va.

Jeff Kaplan, Overwatch’s game director, also went into detail about the extra steps the development team took to help make sure that the map really felt like Busan. In particular, Kaplan highlighted the sound team who spent hours recording the various sounds of the city as well as their work finding musicians who could play traditional Korean instruments. The goal was to give the Busan map the mix of traditional and modern sounds that help make up the identity of the real city.

Kaplan also surprised the crowd by announcing that the map would be playable at the Korea Overwatch Fan Fest and would go live on the Public Test Realm later today. We can expect it to be added to the game sometime in the next several months.