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Comment by cypher543 | Hacker News Reader

Could they not have required the user to own a copy of Fallout 3 and then extract the needed sound files from the original installation on first launch? Then the copyrighted works wouldn't need to be distributed with the mod itself.

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Apparently that was their original idea, which was rejected by Bethesda's legal team.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Fallout/comments/844t22/some_of_the...

At this point I'm fairly convinced that Bethesda is going to announce a 10th anniversary release of Fallout 3 at E3 and don't want the competition.

They did a 5th anniversary release of Oblivion, so we know anniversary editions are something on their radar. I would not be surprised if this was indeed the case.

"idea was rejected by (offended partys') legal team" should never be the conclusion of something like this; but I can understand not wanting the trouble for a work of passion.

In fact, working on a mod for a game -- and then getting legally threatened by the owning company of that mod platform -- would entirely drain my enthusiasm or passion for the game/company/platform.

I hope the mod-makers feel similarly.

If you read the mod maker's actual note, you'll see that they were not "threatened" but rather they entered into a dialogue with a team they respect and want to maintain good relations with (video game mods are often a path to employment in the industry), so they chose to halt development when Bethesda said they couldn't allow it.

These conversations can be civil and respectful, even if the outcome is not ideal.

I could be wrong but it sounds like Bethesda don't own rights to the voice acting. They only licensed it for the purpose of FO3. Outside of that they can't grant or deny anyone permission to use it. Presumably there is either another corporation who owns the VA rights or the individual artists own the rights. There were some big names involved so I'm not sure if that makes a difference.

Yeah, I suspect this is the case as well. As an example, Skullgirls had Japanese audio recorded for its Japanese physical release, but then had to reach some sort of agreement (and probably pay money?) to relicense the voice acting so they could distribute it in the US and through Steam.

If they can't make a better outcome than the mod, why should anyone buy their update in the first place?

I really wish they provided details on why they had to go to the legal team in the first place and on what grounds they were rejected. Among other things, I would imagine the developers would not be liable for end-users violating the EULA, so it's kind of head scratching why they would interact with bethesda at all.

I think the mod developers don't want to spend their time,energy and money in a legal battle, Bethesda could drag this in courts and who knows with the current copyright laws may even win, would you risk it if you were living in US or such a country? I would give up and work on an open source game instead or a game more friendly to this kind of modding.

Possibly because they are huge fans of the studio and the games (why else would they put so much time into this project??) and they don't want to be at odds with the people who make the games they love so much?

This is usually how it's done. See, for example, OpenMW. It extracts the resources from your already-installed copy of Morrowind during the installation.

E: Also, some total conversion mods will make a copy of your game installation, then install itself into that copy. I think (it's been a while since I've played them) that Nehrim (Oblivion) and Enderal (Skyrim), both from SureAI, do this.

(Though OpenMW isn't a mod. It's a reimplementation of the engine.)

Bathesda also had some very strange requirements for the OpenMW folks when they were in contact[1]. Namely they didn't want them to show OpenMW working on Android (because Bathesda wanted to port it themselves?) nor did they want them to support the XBox version of the game. I doubt that Bathesda actually had the right to add those requirements to a project that is a from-scratch reimplementation of their game engine, but that's the current status.

[1]: https://wiki.openmw.org/index.php?title=Bethesda_Emails

Supposedly some file formats have changed between Fallout 3 and 4 so you'd need to convert said files as well. Not exactly an insurmountable technical hurdle. There is at least one other similar project that isn't shutting down.

The rule with these things is typically "If you make us give you an answer about if you can do it, it will be no."

I don't know if Skyoblivion ever managed to write a robust solution for translating the codebase from the old scripting language to Papyrus, and I can see why it might be a huge hurdle for modding teams.

To clarify, I was only talking about audio formats. Not automagically converting everything to run on the new engine. Doing that would kind of be missing the point.

There is a similar project redoing New Vegas in Fallout 4 (F4NV - I'm not affiliated with the project, just a fan snooping on their progress from time to time) and one of the really important things is that they're making their vision of what NV could be. This means all new meshes, textures, and code - not the old content updated to run on the new engine.

I've written some code for fiddling around with the plugins the engine uses (.esp/.esm/.esl files). The basic structure hasn't changed, but a lot of the records and fields have. Automatically converting them well enough to not need manual tidying up would be a pretty arduous task.

Converting the old code into papyrus would be as well.

Or what about removing the restricted sound files entirely and allowing the user to provide their own, which could presumably come from some fan version.

Then again, I guess releasing your "redo" of some voice actor's soundtrack violates copyright too?

(Like, I couldn't release a set of files of me doing Darth Vader's lines from A New Hope?)

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