Some Gamers Will Get to Play Overwatch Creator Jeff Kaplan's New Game Later This Month

Overwatch creator Jeff Kaplan recently revealed that The Legend of California, the first title from his new studio, Kintsugiyama, will be playable from March 26 to March 30. It’s the first time players will be able to get their hands on The Legend of California, which looks to be a pretty big departure from Overwatch.

The Legend of California is described as an open-world multiplayer action-survival game. It takes place on the fictional island of California, and will have players collecting resources, hunting, building vast settlements, and exploring an untamed frontier. The Legend of California is a first-person shooter that seems to share more similarities with Rust and Red Dead Redemption 2 than Overwatch. However, if the tight gunplay from Kaplan’s prior work is any indication, it looks like this game will follow in its footsteps. After a five-year hiatus, Kaplan announced The Legend of California in early March.

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Players Will Soon Be Able to Explore the Mythical Island of California

Developer Jeff Kaplan announced the first alpha test for The Legend of California via the official Kintsugiyama Twitter on March 18. The playtest will run from March 26 to 30 and will have a limited number of spots. Players who are interested can head to the title’s Steam page to sign up. Players who are selected to participate will get a Steam notification and will be able to access the alpha client download from their Steam library. The alpha test will begin at 10 a.m. PST and will end at 10 a.m. PST on March 30. For players who don’t make the cut, Kintsugiyama plans to host a larger beta test this summer prior to the game entering early access.

Rearrange the covers into the correct US release order.

Easy (5)Medium (7)Hard (10)

According to the announcement on Steam, play testers will likely be chosen on March 25. The developer notes that while the alpha test will include all the content available for public testing, the game is still a work in progress. It is safe to assume not every feature Kintsugiyama has revealed will be available for players during the first play test. It’s also worth pointing out that The Legend of California has some pretty significant minimum system requirements to run efficiently.

At minimum, players will need an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8GB or AMD Radeon RX 6600 8GB for a graphics card, 16 GB of RAM, and an Intel Core i7-10700K or AMD Ryzen 7 3700X processor. At a time when RAM prices have skyrocketed, it could limit the number of players who are able to run the game smoothly for the upcoming test.

The game presents an opportunity for long-time Kaplan fans to see what the former World of Warcraft and Overwatch developer has been working on. Kaplan departed Activision Blizzard in 2021, which left many players curious about what project he’d gravitate toward next. Now, with Kintsugiyama’s debut title, it’s clear Kaplan is leaning into a very different style of game than what we saw in Overwatch. Instead of tightly structured matches and hero-based abilities, The Legend of California appears to prioritize player-driven stories, emergent gameplay, and long-term progression in a shared world. Between the expansive world-building and first-person shooter gameplay, Kaplan looks to be blending the two styles he’s most known for on this latest project.

At the same time, The Legend of California enters a crowded and highly competitive space of open-world survival RPGs, and may not exactly be what fans expected from Kaplan’s next project. Survival games like Rust and ARK: Survival Ascended have had years to refine gameplay systems and build dedicated communities, and convincing former Overwatch players to give it a try could be a challenge.

For The Legend of California to stand out, it will need more than recognizable leadership. It’ll have to have a compelling loop that keeps players invested compared to its competitors. If the upcoming alpha play test can demonstrate strong technical performance and, at the very least, progression systems that look to have plenty of potential to grow into something engaging, The Legend of California could carve out its own space in the genre.