Capital Wasteland, a fan project intended to use Fallout 4 as a basis for porting Fallout 3's story, characters, and environments into the newer game, has ended after the team couldn't find a legal way to do it.

The project head "NafNaf 95", who announced the termination on Twitter, said that recent communications with Bethesda have made it clear that there was not going to be a legal path forward for the fan project.

"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," the post reads.

The major stumbling block appeared to be the voice acting. Capital Wasteland was originally planning to simply import the voice files from Fallout 3 for Fallout 4, but it quickly became clear this would raise a host of legal issues regarding Bethesda-owned voice acting. Some members of the team thought it best to re-record the dialogue, instead, but that was also a non-starter.

"At first we were very reluctant to halt work and decided to start looking into Re recording all the Voice acting," the project head wrote. "We quickly realised we would have to replace iconic voices like Liam Neeson, Malcom McDowell,Ron Perlman and of course the phenomenal Eric Todd Dellums. Without some of these voices fallout 3 looses its charm and personally I cant bring my self to replace Them."

NafNaf suggests in the letter they might resume the project if they get the blessing of Zenimax and Bethesda.

Our Take

I am a little surprised it took until now to realize the voice acting would be a problem, but it's better that they realized it and ended the project before putting themselves in legal jeopardy.