Skyrim and Fallout veterans’ new open-world RPG is now a roguelike that’s not open-world, after funding issues brought the team “down to a skeleton crew”

Unfortunately, not even a star-studded roster can guarantee funding for video games these days. Wyrdsong, originally planned as an open-world RPG from former Bethesda developers who’d worked on Skyrim, Fallout, and The Outer Worlds, has had to scrap a lot of its original plans and drop down to a “skeleton crew” so the remaining devs can keep working while they try to secure funding.

In an interview with our friends at PC Gamer, Wyrdsong developer Something Wicked Games co-founder Jeff Gardiner explains what’s happened to the game since its announcement at Gamescom Opening Night Live in 2022.

Wyrdsong was supposed to be an open-world RPG set in medieval Portugal, exploring the origins of the Knights Templar. But now, after failing to secure more funding after an initial $13.2 million investment from NetEase, a lot of people have been laid off and the game has been rejigged to have roguelite elements in it.

“We’re down to a skeleton crew, and I am continuing to work hard to try to find further investment or publishing offers for the game,” Gardiner says. “I believe most of the staff has found other employment, but I know not 100% of them. So it’s been a terrible time in this industry.”

Layoffs have helped stretch the money Something Wicked has, but it still needed to reduce the scope of the Wyrdsong to make it something that could be shown to investors with fewer devs working on it.

“We decided to add a rogue-lite element to it,” Gardiner explains. “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.”

Scrapping the game entirely and starting over “would just set us too far back,” Gardiner says. “And we knew the clock was ticking.” Fortunately, working on DLC for Oblivion and Fallout helped to prepare the team for this. “What you had to do on those projects was basically use the tools you had, because you couldn’t just rebuild whole things. That was for the next big game,” Gardiner says. “So I find it a fun creative puzzle to take what you have and recombine it into something new.”

The original trailer for Wyrdsong looked cool, and with all the talent that’s worked on the game, I’m sure the foundation is solid, so I hope the team gets the funding it needs to actually get it on the shelves. If a team made up of industry veterans can’t get funding, it paints a pretty dire picture of the whole industry.

In the meantime, check out our list of the best RPGs you can play right now.