Starfield’s lead quest designer joins other ex-Bethesda devs - plus Obsidian and BioWare vets - to work on upcoming open-world RPG Wyrdsong
Will Shen was also a writer on Skyrim and multiple Fallout games
It sounds like quite the team of RPG talent is assembling behind upcoming open-world game Wyrdsong, the debut title from newfound studio Something Wicked Games. On top of its existing staff made up of former Bethesda, Obsidian, Respawn and BioWare devs, the lead quest designer for Starfield has joined the team.
Before heading up quest design on this year’s sprawling sci-fi adventure, Will Shen also worked as a quest designer and writer for other Bethesda games including Skyrim, Fallout 4 and Fallout 4’s pretty darn good DLC Far Harbor, on which he was lead designer.
Shen will now serve as lead content designer for Wyrdsong, Something Wicked’s open-world RPG set in a fictionalised middle-ages Portugal beset by cults and supernatural goings-on. We don’t really know much more about what it’ll be just yet, with the game getting a moody trailer last summer that offered little more than a snippet of overdramatic narration and some mostly static artwork of looming eclipses, big glowing portal things and horned beings.
That hasn’t stopped Something Wicked from talking a big game, promising “a high-quality, new AAA RPG experience” that will “redefine aspects of the RPG genre as a whole” and force players to “question both their reality and the choices they make”. Mmhmm.
Still, the studio has the experience to seemingly back that up, with Shen joining co-founder Jeff Gardiner - a 15-year Bethesda veteran who was previously project lead on Fallout 76 - and a team with credits across massive names including Fallout 3, Fallout: New Vegas, Skyrim and Dragon Age: Inquisition. Also among that number is fellow co-founder and design director Charles Staples, who was design director on The Outer Worlds and lead level designer on South Park: The Stick of Truth during a years-long tenure at Obsidian.
Something Wicked say they plan to staff up to more than 100 staff in order to make Wyrdsong (it’ll be an Unreal Engine 5 game). They’re currently at just shy of 40, so expect that list of familiar names to grow soon enough.