Jeff Kaplan is best known as the original lead of Overwatch, but now that he's split from Blizzard, it seems he wants his new game to be a little less PvP-centric – at least for now. Kaplan's new studio, Kintsugiyama, is working on a Wild West survival game called The Legend of California, which is currently taking more cues from PvE-focused games than the brutal PvP of something like Rust.
"Someday, I would like to introduce – on servers that want it – Rust-like mechanics," Kaplan said in a recent Twitch stream, shared on Twitter by Jake Lucky. "But this building system is more built like, for those of you who have played games like Valheim and Subnautica, where the building is more focused on utility, progression, aesthetics, and customization, rather than defending your stuff. That's what our sort of ranch is set up for."
Jeff Kaplan says his survival game Legend of California will be more like Valheim or Subnautica as opposed to Rust pic.twitter.com/zKjh9hqBrmMarch 23, 2026
As somebody with a lot more love for Valheim and Subnautica than Rust, that's music to my ears. I love slowly gathering resources and having a chill time planning out a little homestead without the fear of enemy players running in and destroying everything I've put together.
But equally, constant vigilance for bandit raids is a big part of the frontier fantasy that The Legend of California is bringing us, so offering more Rust-style options makes plenty of sense. I'm just glad that PvP isn't the core of the game.
Kaplan has been talking pretty freely while showing off The Legend of California, noting that the game probably won't be free-to-play because "you need 8 billion players and 2 thousand devs cranking out fucking keychains like a sweatshop." His takes about other games have arguably been even more interesting, like in a recent podcast appearance where he asserted that The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is "the greatest game ever made."
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