Something Wicked's Jeff Gardiner reveals Wyrdsong's inspirations and first gameplay details to Digital Trends.
Jeff Gardiner has a storied history of working on games like The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Skyrim, and Fallout 76, and he is now hard at work on his next grand RPG. After leaving Bethesda Game Studios last year, Gardiner formed a new studio with Obsidian Entertainment designer Charles Staples called Something Wicked Games. After securing $13.2 million in funding from NetEase in April, Gardiner revealed the studio’s first project at Gamescom Opening Night Live.
What is Wyrdsong? “No surprise, it’s a big open-world RPG!” Gardiner explained when asked to describe Wyrdsong. “It’s a preternatural, occult historical fantasy RPG set in Middle Ages Portugal because we want vast landscapes and unique architecture. As you saw in the trailer, we really want to get into the mythological history of the Knight’s Templar and the idea that they had all these weird rituals. They’re basically the basis for a lot of the secret societies that exist today.
“We want to explore not only a big open-world game set in this time period, but also the idea that the brain is not a passive receptor of information,” Gardiner explained. “Your subconscious has a huge role in the way the waking world appears to you. We want to explore that space of unreliable narrators and things that are not as they seem. Wyrd is an old English word for fate or karma, so we’re really going to dig into choice and consequence and see how far we can push that envelope in an RPG.
“The core team now is about a dozen people building the game, and I’m really focused on giving people that come in the autonomy to make these decisions,” Gardiner said. “While we’re making a big RPG, we want to keep the studio around 70 people total because we want people to come in and have creative autonomy. We’ll set the goals and let them figure it out, come in, and tell us what they think would be awesome.
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