The companies quickly backtracked on the project, but the effect it had on the modding community lasted much longer than the failed effort.

Not only do modders routinely build upon the work of their colleagues, but many of the first paid mods offered turned out to be infringing upon free ones. While the reasons modders were upset were many, one of the bigger problems was copyright issues. The move was almost immediately decried by the modding community. Even if it isn’t the case this time, what should happen when publishers take ideas and elements from modders? With the modding community growing in importance and size, this is becoming an increasingly important question and one that needs an answer sooner rather than later.īack in April 2015 Valve, the makers of the Steam game distribution platform, teamed up with Bethesda to allow modders to distribute paid mods. There’s no easy way to tell when the overlap is this abstract.īut Veer’s questions linger. “Of course, it raises some questions : should modders get some recognition from the industry, compensation? How could those two dynamics-paid content and free creation-should be managed? What kind of acknowledgement should a big publisher give to small creators? What is the kind of acknowledgement they can afford?”īethesda, for it’s part, claims that the similarities “are a complete coincidence” and, to be honest, they may well be. “I honestly thought Bethesda’s staff played Autumn Leaves, had a blast with it (I hope), took some things out of it and made their own thing for Far Harbor,” But that hasn’t stopped many from wondering if Bethesda pulled inspiration from Autumn Leaves and that includes Veer himself who wrote: Still, most who have looked at both have found that there are also broad differences including many unique characters to both and largely different story arcs. Those include a robot obsessed with paintings, a robot that the player can enter into a romantic relationship with and some of the imagery.

Both involve murder mysteries in vaults populated by robots, both have plot points involving voice modulation and there are similar scenes between. Some of the similarities are very striking. While the quest seems to be a popular one, modder Guillaume Veer, better known as BaronVonChateau, raised questions as to whether the mission was based on his mod for Fallout: New Vegas entitled Autumn Leaves. However, recently the vault was struck by a murder most foul that the player is tasked with solving. In the quest, the player visits a vault (vaults in Fallout lore are underground bunkers used to survive the nuclear apocalypse that took place 200 years prior to the game) populated by wealthy aristocrats who transplanted their brains into robots so they could live forever. Bethesda, the company behind (most of) the popular Fallout series found itself in a plagiarism controversy this month.Īs part of its Far Harbor DLC for Fallout 4, Bethesda introduced the quest Brain Dead.

Fallout 4 brain dead part 2