Overwatch Director Reveals Next Game Is Red Dead Meets Rust

Jeff Kaplan has a brand new studio and a brand new sport. It may not be what you anticipate from the Blizzard veteran who led design for years on World of Warcraft and directed Overwatch. It’s known as The Legend of California and it appears like should you turned Purple Useless Redemption 2 right into a survival crafting sim.

It’s the debut sport from Kaplan’s new studio, Kintsugiyama, and it’s being revealed by Dreamhaven, the corporate shaped by ex-Blizzard president Michael Morhaime. Revealed out of the blue late yesterday, it’s a multiplayer, action-survival FPS “set on the Island of California throughout the gold rush period,” in keeping with the brand new Steam page listing.

Right here’s the trailer:

The Legend of California options an open world that takes place on a legendary landmass impressed by the sport’s namesake, solely it’s the nineteenth century and gamers might be working collectively in teams or going solo off into the wilderness to assemble sources and construct up your ranch with stables, mines, and different buildings.

The best way Kaplan described it on a recent episode of the Lex Fridman podcast, every server will host a special configuration of the world map. Totally different areas could have completely different problem tiers, and factors of curiosity will transfer around the globe as you play. The music and lighting play large roles in defining the texture of the sport, with Kaplan saying the heightened aesthetic is impressed by the work of Albert Bierstadt.

A web-based survival crafting sim with hyper-realistic graphics set throughout a earlier historic period isn’t what most followers might need anticipated Kaplan, who labored on fantasy and sci-fi video games at Blizzard, to create. He defined that Kintsugiyama has 34 builders, together with fellow Blizzard veteran Tim Ford, and desires to outline its personal sport model fairly than borrow from the previous. “I don’t wish to crib Blizzard and make a pseudo-Blizzard sport,” Kaplan mentioned.

There’s no launch date for the sport but however a public alpha is deliberate for a while this month with an eventual Early Entry launch on Steam down the highway. It doesn’t sound just like the staff is in any rush, a reprieve from the corporate pressure that drove Overwatch 2 off the rails. You possibly can at the moment request entry to the upcoming alpha check on Steam.