Something Wicked Games announced Wyrdsong at Gamescom 2022, with an early trailer revealing a creepy, compelling RPG adventure centred on strange otherworldly beings. With much of the game’s development crew having experience working on titles like Fallout 3, New Vegas, Skyrim, Dragon Age: Inquisition, Fallout 4 and The Outer Worlds, there was plenty of anticipation attached.
But in subsequent years, Something Wicked Games faced trouble in difficulties securing funding, and the need for layoffs. Now, in a new interview with PC Gamer, studio founder Jeff Gardiner has spoken about further troubles facing the game, and why it might not see the light of day.
Per Gardiner, Wyrdsong is still making progress, but with a very small “skeleton crew” of staff and a chopped up version of the original idea for the game. While the team started with big, ambitious ideas, buoyed by a USD $13.2 million seed investment from NetEase, the money soon ran out. At the same time, publishers and investors began cutting back on spending, so it was difficult to secure additional money to continue building the project at the scope demanded by the early vision.
With the runway for the game coming up fast, layoffs were initiated. Then, the remaining folks at Something Wicked Games had to restart work on a new, smaller-scoped prototype that wouldn’t require an open world. As Gardiner told PC Gamer, you need ample resources and developers to create an open world game – and Something Wicked no longer had that.
Read: Wyrdsong developer Something Wicked Games reportedly gutted by layoffs
Instead, the team started experimenting with rouge-lite elements, leaning into the original idea to have a game exploring the nature of life and death. “We took everything we made and repurposed it,” Gardiner said. The team didn’t want to throw everything away with its smaller-scoped prototype, so it reused plenty of tech and art assets for the new version of Wyrdsong.
Gardiner believes it was the lessons learned working on DLC at Bethesda, where you “basically use the tools you had, because you couldn’t rebuild whole things,” that helped this creative pivot.
Despite these changes, it does appear Wyrdsong is still travelling through trouble waters, and it hasn’t found the funding it needs to continue development. Only a handful of staff remain, and while they’re working hard to “try to find further investment or publishing offers,” Gardiner has admitted it’s very tough. The team hopes to weather the storm of 2025, but the future for the game remains unclear.
“I’ve been fortunate to work on a bunch of games, but this is the first game that was really my baby from whole cloth,” Gardiner told PC Gamer. “So the risk of it never seeing the light of day, it makes me sad. That’s why I’m working really hard to make sure that doesn’t happen.”
We’ll have to wait to see what’s next for Wyrdsong, but any hope should be tempered by the unfortunate reality facing the game and its developers.
