Fallout veteran returns with new RPG, and a new studio making it

polygon.com:

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. Terms like open-world, fantasy RPG, or lore-heavy.

Stop right there. “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 Scrolls3: Oblivion, or Fallout 3, or any of a dozen RPGs that inspired both, is the keystone to Wyrdsong, which Gardiner is developing with Charlie Staples, a longtime friend and Obsidian Entertainment alumnus, under a new studio 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.

But they do have backing from NetEase, a $13.2 million seed round to be precise. 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 and talked Todd Howard into a job offer.

If all of this