Personally, I am all for fans showing their prowess and love for old games by doing fan-based remakes. I am also for these fans putting that effort to work on something original whenever possible. My feelings towards Capital Wasteland, basically Fallout 3 remade using the Fallout 4 engine, are kind of mixed but fans do what fans do. Unfortunately, Capital Wasteland is dead in the water due to several reasons.
First, it is apparent that the team working on Capital Wasteland did not think things through completely prior to spending, what was obviously, a lot of time on what they did complete. Basically, they did not plan and investigate the legal rights as far as using voice acting from Fallout 3 in their remake – a big no-no that Bethesda simply could not greenlight.
Considering that Bethesda cannot give the mod team permission to do anything as that could open a legal loophole for fans to cause more damage than good, Capital Wasteland is effectively dead. The team has chosen to not spend the time and effort to recreate the voice acting portions due to the game “[losing] its charm and personality” if the original audio files are not used.
Also, apparently some team members have caused a few setbacks of their own by requesting their work be removed from the Capital Wasteland build. This has caused the remaining team members to decide to take time off from development of Capital Wasteland.
While this does seem that Capital Wasteland is currently dead, it is something that was probably to be expected by most fans that understood the legal standing of mods and creations like this. The projects are simply not the property of the mod creators so eventually they end up at the mercy of the legal owners, or lack of ability by the legal owners to give permission to one team but not another.
What do you think of projects like Capital Wasteland that recreate something like Fallout 3 in the Fallout 4 engine?
Source: PCGamer.com