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Fallout 3 remake in Fallout 4 hit with legal issues

Bethesda

The Road to Liberty Project, Capital Wasteland,  or the effort to bring Fallout 3 into the Fallout 4 creation engine, has been cancelled. In a statement on Twitter, the developers behind the mod announced that due to unforeseen issues with audio files and licensing, that they were cancelling any further work on the project.

The issue revolves around a legal snafu concerning voice acting work and other audio recordings from Fallout 3. Bethesda simply cannot provide permission to use those files to the modders. Bethesda’s license to use those recordings only extends so far, and there isn’t any easy way to negotiate a new licensing deal for this mod. So even if Bethesda wanted to grant permission, they wouldn’t be legally able to.

The modders originally contacted Bethesda in an attempt to find a way to use the recordings without legal issues, but they hadn’t considered the idea that Bethesda simply couldn’t grant them permission to use the files. The team had initially thought about re-recording the voice acting using new actors, but didn’t want to replace some of the more iconic actors within Fallout 3 like Liam Neeson, Ron Perlman and Malcolm McDowell.

Recently we have communicated with Bethesda regarding our planned method to implement the voice acting and other audio from Fallout 3 Into Capital Wasteland. During this conversation it became clear our planned approach would raise some serious red flags that we had unfortunately not foreseen, This contact resulted in us changing our methods to atttempt to continue working. After some thought it appears three is no fully legal way for us to continue developing Fallout 3 in Fallout 4 portion of The Capital Wasteland. Projects like this have always existed in a gray area of the law but we as a team value our connections with many members of the amazing dev team that is Bethesda Game Studios. If at any point in the future it becomes fully legal for us to continue working with the blessing of Bethesda and Zenimax we will.

Mods always risk running afoul of concerns like this, it’s really just a matter of time before a mod gets taken down or otherwise runs into legal trouble. Sad news for Fallout fans today.

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