Wyrdsong, the RPG from ex-Bethesda talent, isn't dead—but it's no longer an open world: 'We're down to a skeleton crew'

You may remember Wyrdsong from Gamescom Opening Night Live, where it was announced three years ago as a trippy new open-world RPG from veterans of Skyrim, Fallout and The Outer Worlds. Set against the backdrop of a warped medieval Portugal, it was intended to explore the mythological origins of the Knights Templar, letting players create their own character and set out across a 12th century landscape of castles, coastline and mountains.

Unfortunately, its developer, Something Wicked Games, has not had access to the infamously deep coffers of the Templars. Back in 2022, the studio was funded by a $13.2 million seed investment from NetEase. That might sound like a lot, but is really only a twinkle in an old wizard’s eye when it comes to grand RPGs in the mode of Bethesda and Obsidian. The plan was to woo further talent and investors with the trailer, and build Wyrdsong—pronounced "weird-song"—with the help of an eventual team totalling around 70 people.

Clearly, something went wrong. In March last year, reports emerged that Something Wicked had laid off much of its staff. "Which was very difficult," co-founder Jeff Gardiner says now. "I believe most of the staff has found other employment, but I know not 100% of them. So it's been a terrible time in this industry."

The layoffs were an attempt to extend the runway for Wyrdsong's development—giving the studio more time to find the funding it needed. At the same time, the remaining team scaled back its vision for what Wyrdsong would be. "We were making a big open-world RPG," Gardiner says. "The way I have learned to do them requires a lot of people to do that, which means a lot of money that was not forthcoming in the industry."

Something Wicked therefore made a second prototype of Wyrdsong—this time for a zone-based RPG that wouldn't require the sheer scale of an open world. Gardiner namechecks Avowed, a sensibly-scoped example of the genre which PC Gamer has recently celebrated despite its limited reactivity.

"And we decided to add a rogue-lite element to it," Gardiner says. "Because the whole game was dealing with themes of the nature of life and death and what happens when you die, we decided that naturally lent itself to this type of gameplay. So we took everything we made and repurposed it."

Something Wicked had already built a lot of tech and art assets for Wyrdsong, and didn't want to start from scratch. "That would just set us too far back," Gardiner says. "And we knew the clock was ticking." The process of reconfiguration has taken him back to his early career at Bethesda, working on more than a dozen DLC packs for Oblivion and Fallout 3. "What you had to do on those projects was basically use the tools you had, because you couldn't just rebuild whole things. That was for the next big game," Gardiner says. "So I find it a fun creative puzzle to take what you have and recombine it into something new."

It was bittersweet to chop up the concept Something Wicked had invested in and glue it back together, but it felt like a positive step. "Layoffs are very difficult to a company, not just the people obviously who have to go, but the people who stay behind," Gardiner says. "And I was really happy to see the people that stayed really dug in and pushed for something that I could then go out and pitch, that was not looking for this massive amount of money."

Even with these reduced ambitions, however, Wyrdsong has so far failed to attract the funding it needs. In the meantime, the developer has scaled back even more. Gardiner's co-founder Charles Staples, who had been design director on The Outer Worlds and lead level designer on Fallout: New Vegas, recently took a job at Disney. Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen, who quit Bethesda to work on Wyrdsong, is now a lead designer at the studio behind Subnautica instead.

"We're down to a skeleton crew, and I am continuing to work hard to try to find further investment or publishing offers for the game," Gardiner says. "I'm hoping to sometime this year, but we're just trying to hang on to ride out the storm, which a lot of people thought was going to be over in 2025 and I do not see that reality at all currently. Right now, it's very tough."

For today's game developers, the year of Wyrdsong's announcement is already a wistfully-remembered era of prosperity before the fall. Since then, the post-pandemic highs of unprecedented player numbers have curdled, as countless deserving games jostle for dwindling funding and attention. Throughout the industry, many studios took up the mantra of "survive til '25", hoping that more opportunities would soon emerge beyond the financial squeeze—but sunnier days have yet to arrive.

"My wishlist on Steam, over the years, evolved from maybe 20-30 titles I was literally waiting to come out and I'd immediately buy, to 250-300 games in there," Gardiner says. "And they go on sale, and I sort of have to stack-rank them, because I know I can't play them all. And it's also trained me to wait for discounts, right? Because there's [only] so many games in a day I can play. So a lot of people, I think, very rarely buy them the day they launch. It's not like the olden days where you were dying to play a cool game—now there's so many cool games."

It sounds like a good situation for gamers, in the short term. But if the industry remains unstable, and studios continue to break apart more often than they stay together, then we won't feel the benefit of tight, well-honed teams who build on their past work as a unit. That's how Larian reached the heights of Baldur's Gate 3, and why MachineGames' Indiana Jones and the Great Circle punches as hard as it does. Without stability, we don't get the best PC games ever made.

In some ways, developers like Gardiner have helped create their own problem—contributing to forever-games which eat up much of the time players might have once dedicated to new purchases. "Skyrim still is the most-played Bethesda game," he says. "It's crazy to me. But once people spend all this time in a game, they're more likely to continue to spend all this time in the game." The Something Wicked founder was project lead on Fallout 76, both for its disastrous launch and the Wastelanders update that turned its fortunes around. It's grimly ironic to think that the long-term success he fought so hard for is now to the detriment of his new project, and others like it.

Gardiner refers to the World of Warcraft conundrum, echoing his former colleague, Shen. "A new MMO would come out, and it would look better," he says. "There'd be a lot of things about it that were very appealing. And a lot of people would turn their attention to it, and they'd play it for a month, and then they'd just go back to WoW. And still, to this day, 15 or 17 years later, these new ones come out, they get really high numbers, and then they just drop right off to almost nothing. Because people go back to what they're used to, because their communities are there. They've invested so much time in the other one."

Frankly, it's a little frightening to see Something Wicked struggle, given the pedigree and experience behind the studio. Gardiner is not only a designer but a longtime producer—responsible for managing the schedule and budgets of mega-hits like Fallout 4. If a level head like his hasn't yet found a safe route through the squall, that doesn't bode well for younger teams with ambitions.

For now, Gardiner and his skeleton crew are continuing to shop Wyrdsong around, looking for the deal that will allow all of their art, lore and design to amount to something. To ensure that Something Wicked doesn't go the way of the Templars. "I've been fortunate to work on a bunch of games, but this is the first game that was really my baby from whole cloth," Gardiner says. "So the risk of it never seeing the light of day, it makes me sad. That's why I'm working really hard to make sure that doesn't happen."