Fallout series veteran Jeff Gardiner has announced a new studio called Something Wicked Games, alongside a brief glimpse at the developer's first game: an open-world RPG called Wyrdsong.
Wyrdsong (pronounced 'weird-song', coming from an Old English word for fate or karma) is set in a semi-historical world inspired by the Portugal of the Middle Ages. As you explore the game, you'll gradually uncover evidence of something more fantastic, as Lovecraftian horror elements start to overcome the setting.
Your character will become something of an unreliable narrator, leaving you questioning what's really happening as more and more unusual thingsbegin occurring. Still, players will be able to determine their role in the world for themselves, choosing to align themselves with one of a handful of factions, including a fictionalized version of the Templars. Early press materials promise that "every decision has a consequence."
Gardiner spent 15 years at Bethesda, serving as lead producer expansions for Oblivion and Fallout 3 as well as Fallout 4, senior producer for Skyrim, and project lead on Fallout 76. Something Wicked's co-founder and design director is Charles Staples, formerly of Obsidian, where he served as design director on The Outer Worlds and lead level designer for Fallout: New Vegas.
Wyrdsong is currently very early in development, and the studio is reluctant to reveal too many gameplay details right now as much of the game is still in flux (when we spoke with Gardiner, he wasn't even willing to commit on whether or not Wyrdsong would have multiplayer features.) But Something Wicked is stacked with developers who've worked on the likes of Skyrim and Fallout, and it's safe to expect that experience to inform the eventual shape of Wyrdsong.
There's no release window or announced platforms for Wyrdsong yet. It's in development on Unreal Engine 5.
If you're looking for something you can play in the near term, check out our list of the biggest new games for 2022.
