Starfield’s lead quest designer has departed Bethesda to work on another RPG

Starfield lead quest designer Will Shen has left Bethesda to join Something Wicked Games and work on upcoming RPG Wyrdsong.

Much like Pete Hines, whose retirement from the company was announced yesterday afternoon, Shen was a Bethesda veteran, having amassed close to 15 years at the studio. During that time, in addition to Starfield, he worked on quests featured in Skyrim, Fallout 76 and Fallout 4, having singled out his time as lead designer on the latter’s Far Harbor DLC as a career highlight.

“Excited to announce that I’ve joined Something Wicked Games,” Shen wrote in a LinkedIn post about the move, which sees him take on the new role of Lead Content Designer at SWG, “I’ll be working alongside an incredible group of roleplaying game developers, and it’s amazing to think we have veterans from Bethesda, Obsidian, and Bioware all on one team.”

He went on to thank “everyone who has supported me and my career at Bethesda Game Studios” and added: “I’ve been so lucky to have been a part of titles like Fallout 3, Skyrim, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, and Starfield. We accomplished the impossible together, and I will miss everyone.”

On Twitter, Something Wicked Games founder and former Bethesda project lead Jeff Gardiner expressed his excitement at adding Shen to the team working on Wyrdsong, which was announced during last year’s Gamescom.

While not much has been revealed about the game thus far, Gardiner told IGN back in 2022 that it’s an open world RPG set in Portugal during the middle ages and will have “preternatural, occult (and) historical fantasy” elements.

As you might expect given that the studio was only founded last year, Gardiner and the folks already at Something Wicked Games have mainly been focusing on gradually attracting more developer talent to build up the group working on Wyrdsong, with programmer Sopheaseth Pheng and producer Matthew Stokes being cited among its recent additions.

If you’re keen to read more about Starfield, be sure to check out our coverage of its latest patches and must-have mods.