Starfield lead quest designer leaves Bethesda to work on the open-world RPG Wyrdsong

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Will Shen was at Bethesda for nearly 15 years, serving as a designer on games including Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Starfield.

Will Shen headshot
(Image credit: Something Wicked Games)

After a long career at Bethesda, Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen has left the studio and joined Something Wicked Games, where he'll serve as lead content designer on its first game, the open-world RPG Wyrdsong.

Shen spent nearly 15 years at Bethesda, during which time he earned writing and design credits on Skyrim, Fallout 4, and Fallout 76. He was the lead designer on the Fallout 4 DLC Far Harbor, which we said had "a great setting, a good story, and more dialogue-based solutions than the base game provides," and moved up to lead quest designer on the sci-fi RPG epic Starfield.

After a long tenure at Bethesda, the move to Something Wicked seems like a natural fit: The studio was co-founded in 2022 by Jeff Gardiner, a producer on Bethesda games including Skyrim, Fallout 3, and Fallout 4, along with Fallout: New Vegas designer Charles Staples and The Elder Scrolls: Blades technical director Ekram Rashid. We still don't know much about the Wyrdsong itself, but Gardiner told us last year that it's a "dark, preternatural, semi-historical open world RPG set in Middle Ages Portugal" being built in Unreal Engine 5.

Part of the reason for that vagueness is that Wyrdsong is still fairly early in the process: Something Wicked said it currently has 38 employees and hopes to grow to more than 100 by the time development is in full swing. Speaking to Game Developer, Shen suggested that the game will be appropriately weird (that's how "wyrd" is pronounced) but maybe not always overtly so.

"Sometimes we have this disconnect between 'hey, I perceive the world as this, but it feels like it's something else'," he said. "That's part of what makes that story so fascinating—the idea of a supernatural world that mirrors and is sort of beneath the surface of our own. It's not necessarily controlling everything but you feel it everywhere."

(Image credit: Will Shen (Twitter))

Wyrdsong doesn't yet have a release date (or even a target year), but you can dive in a little deeper with what's going on at somethingwickedgames.com.

Andy Chalk
Andy Chalk
US News Lead

Andy has been gaming on PCs from the very beginning, starting as a youngster with text adventures and primitive action games on a cassette-based TRS80. From there he graduated to the glory days of Sierra Online adventures and Microprose sims, ran a local BBS, learned how to build PCs, and developed a longstanding love of RPGs, immersive sims, and shooters. He began writing videogame news in 2007 for The Escapist and somehow managed to avoid getting fired until 2014, when he joined the storied ranks of PC Gamer. He covers all aspects of the industry, from new game announcements and patch notes to legal disputes, Twitch beefs, esports, and Henry Cavill. Lots of Henry Cavill.