Jeff Kaplan's cowboy survival game The Legend of California is 'cheap and poor' — and that's by design

Jeff Kaplan, the former director of Overwatch, has revealed new details about his upcoming game The Legend of California in a rapid-fire interview with MinnMax, answering 213 questions about the project. The game is an open-world survival multiplayer shooter set in California during the 1849 gold rush. Kaplan clarified that it is not an MMO and not a simulation — it is "definitely an FPS."

In The Legend of California, players can do everything a cowboy might do: trade with other players, fish, mine gold, ride horses, become an unofficial sheriff, or build and customize a ranch anywhere on the map. Kaplan confirmed that private servers will be available, and players can set them to PvE-only mode. Public servers, however, host up to 100 players with full PvP enabled — players can kill each other and even kill each other's horses. The only exception is buildings: "Players cannot destroy each others' stuff, unfortunately," Kaplan said, adding that as a Rust player, he personally would have liked to allow it.

When asked about expensive features, Kaplan was blunt: "I would love that but we're cheap and poor." He explained that his studio, Kintsugiyama, cannot afford complex physics or advanced animations. Water bodies in the game serve only basic purposes — you can fish in them or drown.

The Legend of California does not yet have a release date. Kaplan promised to share more details in the coming months.