Director Jeff Kaplan talks about the origins of the Dorado map during a half hour talk during the DICE summit. Kaplan explained says that Blizzard wanted a map built based on a city from Mexico. He said that the most familiar cities like Tijuana or Mexico City did not quite fit with what they were looking for which was an open, coastal city with a lot of color.

Kaplan recalled that they had typed the words colorful Mexican town into Google. He said that at that time, they were not even looking at the pictures and they were looking at the thumbnails pictures. Kaplan said that they had found a picture of a Mexican town that was perfect for them. It was exactly the version of Mexico that they wanted to build.

Kaplan said that they thought that the one picture they found was a really good fit for the greybox blockout of the map that they had which was a gorgeous seaside town. Two months after they had completed the map, someone came up to them and asked why the team used Manarola, Italy as their reference for the Mexico map. Kaplan cited this as an example of a point he made throughout the talk in that Overwatch is not about the reality of what the planet is. Kaplan went on to say that he promises the citizens of Mexico that when they make a map of Italy, they will only use reference of Mexico for that although he probably said it in jest, as reported by GameSpot.

Overwatch Dorado is probably the best payload map. When a round in Dorado starts, it is uncertain as to who will win and that makes it a great map. It has a lot of back alleys and buildings for players to run around in. There are some chokes and good defending spots in the Dorado map. It is just enough to the map flow but not too much to make attacks impossible, as published by Reddit.