
The modding team behind Vampire: The Masquerade - Redemption Reawakened was in a weird spot. Hoping to avoid the DMCA/C&D death punch so many fan projects receive, they took their in-progress Skyrim remake of the 2000 RPG to Activision and Paradox, each of which owns the rights to part of the game. With a "yes" from Paradox and a "no" from Activision, the crew is now revising the mod into a "reinterpretation" of the original VtM: Redemption, cutting out everything Activision could sue them for and making it into more of a new story.
Redemption was the first Vampire: The Masquerade videogame, preceding the better-known Bloodlines by four years. It's a much more sprawling, melodramatic story than Bloodlines, following a crusader knight's doomed romance as he gets vamped up in medieval Europe, put in stasis, then awoken in 1999. Redemption's story, characters, and imaginative use of a vampire's immortal lifespan make it worth checking out, but it had some truly horrible early aughts RPG combat—just the sort of game that might benefit from a remake.