Bethesda and Obsidian veterans forced to scale down their new project to survive. „There are few of us left,” say Wyrdsong devs
The developers of Wyrdsong have financial troubles. This forced a big change in the game's concept and the dismissal of most of the employees.
In 2022, during the gamescom Opening Night Live show, Wyrdsong was revealed, an RPG developed by Something Wicked Games, a company founded by veterans from Bethesda, Obsidian Entertainment, and BioWare studios. Since then, it has been quite quiet about the project. Now it turns out that the devs have gotten into big trouble.
- It's about financial troubles. The project began with a $13.2 million investment from NetEase, which is not enough to create a AAA-class RPG. They were counting on attracting more investors, but it didn't work out. The devs shouldn't expect another payment from NetEase either, as the company has been heavily cutting costs recently.
- As a result, Something Wicked Games was forced to lay off most of its staff last year.
Nonetheless, this action didn't result in the project being abandoned. It greatly changed it. With a much smaller team and budget, Something Wicked Games was forced to thoroughly overhaul Wyrdsong.
- Originally, the game was supposed to have a large open world. This idea was abandoned in favor of a series of smaller locations. The developers underline that Avowed, released this year, has gone through a similar path.
- Furthermore, Wyrdsong has been improved with rogue-lite elements.
As explained by Jeff Gardiner, co-founder of Something Wicked Games:
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.
Before changing the scale of the project, Something Wicked Games studio managed to develop many mechanics, technologies, and graphic elements. As a result, they didn't have to start from scratch and were able to implement all of these into the new game concept.
Jeff Gardiner mentioned that this kind of "recycling" brought about a sense of nostalgia for him. He worked in the Bethesda studio on many expansions to the team's big RPGs. With these DLCs, the developers had to closely monitor the budget, making it crucial to find effective ways to reuse elements from the base game.
Unfortunately, even such a significantly more economical version of Wyrdsong didn't arouse the interest of investors, so Something Wicked Games shrank even more.
- Charles Staples, a founder of the studio and former designer of gameplay for The Outer Worlds and levels for Fallout: New Vegas, has joined Disney.
- In turn, Will Shen (formerly the lead quest designer at Starfield) has been hired by the team at Unknown Worlds, responsible for the Subnautica series.
Right now, Something Wicked Games has been reduced to a few employees. The company is still looking for an investor or publisher for Wyrdsong.
Jeff Gardiner admits that the situation in the industry is currently very tough. Market saturation is a big factor in this. As he explains, his Steam wishlist used to contain about 20-30 titles, and now there are ten times more. All these games are fighting for his attention, so he got used to waiting for sales.
Besides, many players stick to several constantly developing games, to which Gardiner himself contributed, working on Skyrim and Fallout 76.
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