Former Blizzard veteran Jeff Kaplan now runs a new studio called Kintsugiyama, which just announced its first game, The Legend of California. Kaplan has now shared more details about the project, saying one of the main ambitions of the game is to get players to the action quickly.
In a video from the developer, Kaplan said The Legend of California won’t be “starving” the player and will instead help them get “all the cool stuff” earlier in the experience.
“What makes this game really unique and special in my opinion is that we sort of fast-forward you to the cool stuff as quickly as possible,” he said. “There is a bit of a start to the game where you are doing simpler things. But what excites us is the guns. The guns, the mining, the exploration, having a horse. Not starving the player out and forcing them to wait for all the cool content. We’d rather have you have access to these cool things. Go out, make a bunch of guns; make the guns that feel good for you.”
He added: “We want to get you to that stuff as quickly as possible and not feel like you’re banging rocks together.”
Kintsugiyama’s Tim Ford said The Legend of California is a first-person shooter action multiplayer game, so he wants to let players do those things right off the bat. “We want to get you into the first-person shooty action as fast as we can,” he said.
Also in the video, Kaplan said people might have assumed The Legend of California was some kind of survival game–after all, the reveal trailer certainly gave off Rust vibes. However, Ford said, “We don’t know how to make survival games,” and it’s better to think of The Legend of California as a game that allows players to do a whole bunch of different things, including nothing at all.
If players just want to ride their horse through the world and take in the scenery, they can do that. The game does have survival and crafting elements, but it’s a lot more than that, too, the developer said.
The Legend of California is “early” in development, Kaplan said, so no one should expect to play it soon, unless you’re linked to the developer. Kaplan said there will be a “small alpha” coming up, but to manage expectations, he said it’s being aimed at the significant others of developers, and not necessarily the public. There will be a beta test for more people later on, Kaplan said.
Also in the video, Kaplan said he understands some people not like the way in which the studio is releasing The Legend of California as an early-access game. Those people can wait for the 1.0 release, he said. The idea behind launching the game in an unfinished state is so the community can help the team hone the experience to help ensure it’s “fun, that it works well, and that it’s solid and stable” before the public release.
What’s more, the developers touched on how The Legend of California is not going for historical accuracy. The game takes place during the Gold Rush era, but the ambition was not to try to “recreate the history of California,” the developers said.
“We didn’t want to make a historical sim. We don’t really care about historical accuracy or geographical accuracy,” Kaplan explained.
Speaking of geography, the developers said California itself has “every biome under the sun” that players will be able to explore, including sun-drenched deserts to snowy mountains. You can check out the announcement trailer to get a closer look at some of the places you’ll be able to go.
Kaplan was not just in the news recently for announcing The Legend of California. He also finally revealed why he left Blizzard, saying an executive told him Overwatch needed to meet certain financial targets or else he would be to blame for 1,000 layoffs.
