Fallout 4 Capital Wasteland Mod Returns After Near-Death Brush With Bethesda's Lawyers

Many fanmade mod projects go quietly into the night when the lawyers get involved. But Capital Wasteland, a mod meant to recreate Fallout 3 in the Fallout 4 engine, has risen from the legal ashes.

Last year Capital Wasteland's mod team announced that after speaking with Bethesda Softworks' lawyers, the project would be put on hold. There wasn't a legal battle per se, but Capital Wasteland's plan to use the original Fallout 3 recorded dialogue raised "serious red flags" with Bethesda's lawyers. And while Bethesda tried to work out some alternatives with the modders, the result was a seemingly indefinite hiatus.

But in a surprise announcement Capital Wasteland's co-lead HcGxGrill announced in a new blog post that the team has decided to continue the project, and they'll get around the legal quagmire by re-recording the voice lines in Fallout 3. "This is a very big undertaking as there are approximately 45,000 voice lines in Fallout 3," HcGxGrill writes in the blog post announcing the project's revival.

Capital Wasteland has also been on ice for about 10 months so any progress that would have been made in that time obviously didn't go forward. As a result, the Capital Wasteland team is looking for help in a variety of positions. Voice actors obviously for the re-recordings, but also level designers, 3D artists, 2D artists, animators, environment artists, and VFX artists as well.

Not a lot of fan projects survive a brush with a game company's legal team. An online Halo 3 fan project was canceled after it was flagged by 343 Industries. A similar mod project focused on recreating Obsidian's Fallout: New Vegas in Fallout 4 was also staggered after the news that Capital Wasteland was going on hiatus.

Last we checked Capital Wasteland recreated about 40 percent of the Fallout 3 map in Fallout 4's engine and there's no telling how much is left to do on such a massive project, even without a nearly yearlong break. Capital Wasteland did share a few new screenshots of work the mod team finished since the project went on hold so it looks like the team is diving headfirst into the project once more.