Fallout 3 Mod Remake Capital Wasteland Canceled Amid Fear of Legal Action

A small team of Fallout and Skyrim modders have been hard at work for over a year on a Fallout 3 remake using the Fallout 4 engine, titled Capital Wasteland, but all of their work is now null. The team, collectively known as Road to Victory, announced on Monday that the project has been canceled following meetings with Fallout developer Bethesda and private legal counsel.

With a heavy heart, I must announce that at this moment the Capital Wasteland project is no longer in development, there are more details on our discord, but I wanted to let everybody who’s been so gracious to follow and support us know.

— Road To Liberty (@RoadToLibertyFO) March 12, 2018

While Bethesda has been lenient with unofficial fan projects in the past, issues arose for Capital Wasteland when Road to Victory made the decision to import the original audio and voice acting from Fallout 3 in lieu of re-recording every line of dialogue. The team spoke with officials at Bethesda, who informed them that their “planned approach would raise some serious red flags that we had unfortunately not foreseen.”

The game featured voice acting from famed actors such as Malcolm McDowell, Liam Neeson and Ron Perlman, which Bethesda only licensed, further graying the gray area in which Capital Wasteland’s development existed. Due to the legal issues surrounding that content and the determination that re-recording the dialogue without the well-known voice actors would cause the game to lose “its charm,” the team halted all work on the project.

Lead programmer NafNaf_95, whose first name is Nathan, issued a statement regarding the end of the project: “It pains many people on my team including myself to have to halt development of the Fallout 3 story. I personally would like to apologise to the many members of the community that love Fallout 3 as much as I do. I’m sorry we couldn’t accomplish our dream.”

Nathan did promise that the team would pick up where they left off if the project no longer incurred any threat of legal action in the future. “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,” he said. See his full statement below.

If you guys haven’t already heard the unfortunate news The Capital Wasteland Project (Fallout 3 in Fallout 4) is stopping development, here is their official statement. (Video on the topic coming shortly) pic.twitter.com/OMN1ZvKhbZ

— JuiceHead (@JuiceHead3311) March 12, 2018