Over the weekend, former Blizzard VP and Overwatch game director Jeff Kaplan decided to show off his new game, The Legend of California, via a 10-hour livestream on Twitch. During the lengthy stream–which Kaplan admits was his first–he demonstrated various aspects of his upcoming game and shared some opinions on the gaming industry at large.
Specifically, he had some choice words for people who complain about video games without ever playing them.
“I understand being upset, and I understand voicing your opinion,” Kaplan said. “But if a game comes out and you don’t want to play it, and you never played it–shut the f*** up!
“What is with this, ‘Oh my god, I’m so upset they decided to make this game that I have no interest in’ [mindset]?” Kaplan asked. “Who cares about my opinion if I’m not gonna play it? And if I’ve never played it, why does my opinion matter on that? I’ll tell you what it does, as a game developer who’s been in charge of teams, who has the ability to do something about it: I just f***ing ignore you. That’s all you’ve accomplished. You’re so off the deep end, it’s not even worth listening to you at that point.”
“The internet likes to just instantly judge, ‘Is the game any good or not?'” he added. “I don’t know how you can tell that from a two-minute video. Like, play it for a while.”
As for his currently in-development project, The Legend of California’s Steam page describes it as “an open world, action-survival shooter set on the mythical Island of California during the gold rush era.” The game can be played solo or with friends, and Kaplan–who had only installed OBS the night before–said the livestream was definitely a new experience for him as far as game-promotion goes.
“We’d show a cinematic that was the most amazing cinematic ever, and we just don’t have the budget for that here,” Kaplan said of the difference between working on big-budget Blizzard titles versus his current indie project. “So this [livestream] is the ultimate keeping-it-real version of how games are actually made.”
“We’re just kind of winging it and we’re just having fun and we want to show you the game in progress,” Kaplan said while showing off the game’s mining mechanic. “All this is, is us getting ready for alpha at this stage, and even alpha’s going to be rough. It’s not going to be a perfect, smooth ride for our alpha testers.”
As for the game’s monetization scheme, Kaplan says he’s going old-school.
“It’s like this crazy idea that hasn’t been seen in the past ten years: ‘Maybe I could play the game to get shit,'” Kaplan explained. “To be free-to-play you need eight billion players and two thousand devs cranking out fucking keychains like a sweatshop. That’s not us.”
The Legend of California does not yet have a release date, but is listed as “coming soon” on Steam, where it is currently available to wishlist.