Jeff Kaplan, the renowned game designer and director, known for his work on various Blizzard titles, announced his first game after leaving the Overwatch team. The Legend of California, an online survival crafting project, was announced during Kaplan’s visit to Lex Fridman’s podcast.
Kaplan explains that the game will most likely be perceived as just another online survival crafting experience, as gamers like to compartmentalize and categorize everything. But he considers The Legend of California to be just an action game, with all the elements coming together to make a cohesive product.
The game itself is set on a fictional island of California during the height of the Gold Rush. The team decided to change something as familiar as California into a mythical place that can be rediscovered from scratch. It will try to be very authentic to the real time period while also taking creative liberties that make sense for the alternate history setting.
Kaplan says that the world is hand-crafted into the familiar shape of California, with all the known landmarks being exactly where they are in the real world. But at the same time, several points of interest, including a huge fortress that was based on Alcatraz, will move around depending on the map seed.
The Legend of California will not feature any levels, but it will have tiered difficulty zones that will differ, also depending on the game seed, so no two servers or play sessions are ever the same.
Visually, the game is heavily inspired by the art of the painter Albert Bierstadt, who painted incredible vistas of California back in the 19th century.
Kaplan says that this artful, thoughtful, deliberate approach is what he wants to be defined by with his new studio, Kintsugiyama. He loves creating worlds, and the main goal and aim of The Legend of California was to do just that: create a beautiful, working, interesting world that the players will want to come back to.
Release date and early access
The Legend of California does not have a definite release date for now, but Kaplan was very adamant in saying that the players will get their hands on it very soon. That’s because, unlike Blizzard, where everything had to be extremely polished before shipping, Kintsugiyama aims to incorporate the players and their feedback into the development process.
While we don’t have a release date for the full version, the early alpha version of The Legend of California will be coming later this month.
The platform availability is also unknown, but you can already wishlist the game on Steam.
