Jeff Kaplan has a new studio and a new game. It might not be what you expect from the Blizzard veteran who led design for years on World of Warcraft and directed Overwatch. It’s called The Legend of California and it looks like if you turned Red Dead Redemption 2 into a survival crafting sim.
It’s the debut game from Kaplan’s new studio, Kintsugiyama, and it’s being published by Dreamhaven, the company formed by ex-Blizzard president Michael Morhaime. Revealed out of the blue late yesterday, it’s a multiplayer, action-survival FPS “set on the Island of California during the gold rush era,” according to the new Steam page listing.
Here’s the trailer:
The Legend of California features an open world that takes place on a mythical landmass inspired by the game’s namesake, only it’s the 19th century and players will be working together in groups or going solo off into the wilderness to gather resources and build up your ranch with stables, mines, and other structures.
The way Kaplan described it on a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, each server will host a different configuration of the world map. Different regions will have different difficulty tiers, and points of interest will move around the world as you play. The music and lighting play big roles in defining the feel of the game, with Kaplan saying the heightened aesthetic is inspired by the paintings of Albert Bierstadt.
An online survival crafting sim with hyper-realistic graphics set during a previous historical era isn’t what most fans might have expected Kaplan, who worked on fantasy and sci-fi games at Blizzard, to create. He explained that Kintsugiyama has 34 developers, including fellow Blizzard veteran Tim Ford, and wants to define its own game style rather than borrow from the past. “I don’t want to crib Blizzard and make a pseudo-Blizzard game,” Kaplan said.
There’s no release date for the game yet but a public alpha is planned for some time this month with an eventual Early Access launch on Steam down the road. It doesn’t sound like the team is in any rush, a reprieve from the corporate pressure that drove Overwatch 2 off the rails. You can currently request access to the upcoming alpha test on Steam.