After spending many years as the public face of Overwatch, Jeff Kaplan stayed well out of the limelight after leaving Blizzard in 2021. Five years later, the former Blizzard vice president and Overwatch lead director is back with his own studio and a new game, which you might be able to play pretty soon.
The Legend of California is billed as an open-world, action-survival shooter. It looks like a mix of Red Dead Redemption and Rust (Rust Dead Redemption, if you will). It’s set during the gold rush era, but Kaplan says he and his team at Kintsugiyama were not aiming for historical accuracy. For one thing, this version of California is an island. Still, the developers wanted to make the game feel authentic to the time period.
There are cowboys and prospectors, and you’ll be able to go hunting, build mines and stables, craft tools and weapons, build out your homestead and raid hostile camps. There are “challenging” player vs. environment encounters (Kaplan says there are four difficulty tiers available to start with) and optional player vs. player battles. You’ll be able to form a company with up to three other players and share progress, resources, buildings and other things with them.
Kaplan says his 34-strong team hand-crafted the world, though there’s a degree of randomization at play. A certain biome (say, the game’s version of the Mojave Desert) might be the easiest, most beginner-friendly area of the game on one server, and the endgame, tier four section on another. The points of interest might pop up in unexpected spots too — an Alcatraz-inspired structure will appear in a Bay Area-style region in some world seeds, and in snowy mountains in others.
The Legend of California is being published by Blizzard co-founder and former CEO Mike Morhaime’s company Dreamhaven. It’s slated to enter early access on Steam and the Epic Games Store later this year, with closed alpha playtests expected to start soon.
Kaplan announced The Legend of California in unusual fashion. Not during a splashy showcase, but in a five-hour appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Kaplan discussed his life and career, including his work on World of Warcraft, the ill-fated Titan and, of course, Overwatch.
In his first public appearance since stepping down as Overwatch director, Kaplan revealed his reasons for leaving Blizzard, where he spent 19 years and previously had no intention of leaving. Business pressures related to the Overwatch League and Overwatch 2 played a part in his departure, but the final straw came in 2020 during a meeting with Blizzard’s then-chief financial officer. Kaplan says he was told that if Overwatch didn’t reach certain revenue targets, the publisher would lay off 1,000 people and that would be on Kaplan’s shoulders.
