Former Overwatch director Jeff Kaplan returns with a Western survival shooter
After spending many years as the public face of MonitoringJeff Kaplan stayed well out of the way after leaving Blizzard in 2021. Five years later, the former vice president and Monitoring The main director is back with his own studio and a new game that you might be able to play very soon.
The legend of California is billed as an open-world action-survival shooter. It looks like a mixture of Red Dead Redemption And Rust (Rust Dead Redemption, if you will). The story is set during the Gold Rush era, but Kaplan says he and his team at Kintsugiyama weren’t aiming for historical accuracy. On the one hand, this version of California is an island. Still, the developers wanted the game to feel authentic to the era.
There are cowboys and prospectors, and you can go hunting, build mines and stables, craft tools and weapons, build your farm, and attack hostile camps. There are “challenging” player versus environment encounters (Kaplan says there are four difficulty levels available to start with) and optional player versus player battles. You will 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 team of 34 shaped the world by hand, although there is some degree of randomization at play. A certain biome (for example, the game’s version of the Mojave Desert) might be the simplest, most beginner-friendly area of the game on one server, and the final level four section on another. Points of interest may also appear in unexpected places: an Alcatraz-inspired structure will appear in a Bay Area-style region in some world seeds and in snow-capped mountains in others.
The legend of California is published by Dreamhaven, the company of Blizzard co-founder and former CEO Mike Morhaime. Early access is planned for Steam and the Epic Games Store later this year, with closed alpha playtesting expected to begin soon.
Kaplan announced The legend of California in an unusual way. Not during a splashy showcase, but during a five-hour appearance on Lex Fridman’s podcast. Kaplan spoke about his life and career, including his work on World of Warcraftthe unfortunate Titan and of course, Monitoring.
In his first public appearance since his resignation Monitoring director, Kaplan revealed his reasons for leaving Blizzard, where he spent 19 years and previously had no intention of leaving. Commercial pressures related to the Overwatch League and Monitoring 2 played a role in his departure, but the final straw came in 2020 during a meeting with Blizzard’s CFO at the time. Kaplan says he was told that if Monitoring failed to meet certain revenue goals, the publisher would lay off 1,000 people and it would fall on Kaplan’s shoulders.
