Fallout developer announces new RPG, Wyrdsong, at Gamescom 2022

By now you’ve probably seen the teaser trailer for Jeff Gardiner’s next game, announced Tuesday at Gamescom, and based on his resumé you’ve might have formed some word-association impressions of what the Fallout and Elder Scrolls veteran is up to with his new studio. Open-world, fantasy RPG and lore heavy are all terms.

You can stop right now. “The lore part, that’s very interesting, because I’m actually trying to avoid lore for the most part,” said Gardiner, whose closed his 16-year tenure with Bethesda Game Studios one year ago as of Friday. “So I’m setting it somewhat historical. […] I want to explore this idea of the player being an unreliable narrator, and there’s no better setting than this, sort of semi-mythological, [Knights] Templar sort of backdrop.”

That “unreliable narrator,” familiar to those who sunk hundreds of hours into The Elder Scrolls 3: Oblivion, Or Fallout 3The keystone is either one of the dozen RPGs that inspired them both or any other. WyrdsongGardiner, Charlie Staples and Obsidian Entertainment alumnus are working on a project called “Something Wicked Games”. Their project has no launch window — the studio itself has only 15 employees out of the 70 that Gardiner and Staples reckon they need.

However, they have the backing of NetEase. A $13.2 million seed round. And Something Wicked Games is visiting Gamescom this week for old-school, trade-convention purposes: Wave the flag, make a business deal or two, pass around some business cards and maybe get some names and phone numbers of developers who’d like to party up. That’s sort of how Gardiner himself landed at Bethesda Game Studios back in 2005, when he saw Oblivion At E3 I talked to Todd Howard about a job.

If all of this sounds like Gardiner had a plan when he left Bethesda Softworks last August, he’d say you’re mistaken. Gardiner was the most recent project leader for Fallout: 76He left Bethesda without any options; after more than one year of development post-launch during the COVID-19 pandemic, he stated that he had to leave. “I was lucky enough to be able to take some time off [thanks to] the Microsoft acquisition,” Gardiner said. So he didn’t really have an idea of what to do with his free time.

“COVID probably didn’t give me enough time to reflect,” Gardiner says. “I immediately started playing 100-hour RPGs; I replayed Baldur’s Gate 1, 2: Shadows Of AmnYou know, things like that. I realized that, while this sounds like a great idea to play 16 hours a day of RPGs, like I did when I was a kid, it’s not really that fulfilling.”

Gardiner soon found work. “I did kick some tires, I pursued some executive manager roles at various studios and publishers,” he said. “I thought about consulting.” But a nostalgia for the days when he was directly involved with a game’s creative staff — that Fallout 3 You can find more information here Skyrim sweet spot of 2007 to 2011 — always lingered.

Image from Something Wicked Games

Short version: Gardiner & Staples created a pitch deck and made phone calls. Nearly all were returned and agreed to meet. Only the second sitting down was necessary with NetEase. This is where NetEase’s huge Chinese internet and gaming conglomerate accepted their seed-funding amount before they could continue the discussion. This was in April.

“They believe in the game, they believe in the tItle, and they’re fully committed to supporting us,” Gardiner said. “You want to be sure you’re taking the best deal, and it was definitely NetEase. We had other offers, and we’re still going to be looking for future offers, to be honest with you, because the game is going to be a little bit bigger than the seed fund. But I think we’re well positioned for success to fund this game and get this out.”

When Gardiner describes Wyrdsong (it’s pronounced “weird-song”), it doesn’t sound like one of those auteur, statement-of-self works that a director has been busting to get out of his system for a long time — hence Gardiner’s deliberately lore-light approach. Truth be told, Gardiner’s inspiration for Wyrdsong This is the result of the vacation that he and his spouse took to Portugal before the pandemic. Wyrdsong It is set in the country of that name, in the 13th-14th centuries. However, it takes place in an unnatural world, with its own natural laws and magical powers.

Gardiner said after their visit to Portugal, he read Freddy Silva’s “First Templar Nation,” a 2017 thesis about the founding of the Knights Templar, a military order that has shown up in pop-culture adventures ranging from Indiana JonesThe Last Crusade to the Assassin’s Creed franchise. Silva’s book connected Gardiner’s imagination to several places he’d visited in person, and eventually his wife flat-out said he should set his next game in medieval Portugal, given how much he talked about it. Gardiner accepted the advice and — albeit after 30 revisions — created the pitch deck that would hang a shingle for Something Wicked Games.

Still, the fact Gardiner is chief executive of a new studio means he can’t completely revisit the purely creative roles he held on games more than a decade old. But he is experiencing and enjoying creative direction in a different way, through establishing a big-picture vision and then trusting colleagues to embellish the finer points and make them shine in ways he hadn’t considered.

“What I did on Skyrim, my primary focus, I was testing, tracking, following up, helping people get what they needed to be successful,” he says. “I managed people for a large part of my career, and the most important thing is just — hand it off. They have this thing called ‘Kill your darlings,’ like, just give them stuff. It’s okay for them to have some fun.

“Part of the fun of creativity is seeing where these brilliant minds can take you, not going, ‘Oh, we have to get to this place, or it’s going to be terrible,” Gardiner said. “No, it’s the opposite. They’re going to take you on this journey.”