Bleak Faith: Forsaken developer Archangel Studios has issued an issue to IGN about allegations of stealing assets from games such as Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
Earlier this week, people noticed that the game utilized very similar animations for its characters and enemies from FromSoftware games and accused the Archangel Studios of reusing them.
“Since the start of development, Archangel Studios has always been transparent with their community about the use of Epic Marketplace assets. While only 10% of the game has been outsourced in this manner, it has helped speed up the development process immensely,” Archangel Studios explained in a statement to IGN.
It continued, “As a three-person studio, it was a vital resource to utilize throughout the four-year development. The assets in question were purchased from the Epic Marketplace in good faith and with the understanding that Epic went through the proper vetting and review process before listing them for sale.”
The studio also said that it had reached out to Epic Games about an investigation, to which it then responded, “Pursuant to the Marketplace Distribution Agreement, each Marketplace seller represents and warrants to Epic that they have appropriate rights to upload their content. As with any store that hosts third-party content, however, Epic is not in a position to independently verify such rights, and Epic makes no such guarantee to purchasers of the content.”
Archangel Studios noted that the assets that it had used for Bleak Faith have since been removed from the Unreal Engine marketplace. The development team has also removed all of these animations from Bleak Faith, stating that Epic’s answer wasn’t satisfactory and will work to replace the assets over the next few days.
“Some changes we included in the recent patches, and more are coming in the next few days,” the studio said. “Certainly this has been a huge lesson for us and hopefully other indie creators out there too that assets on these storefronts seemingly cannot be purchased in good faith.”
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a Soulslike survival-horror action RPG that was released for PC on March 10.
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He’s been writing about the industry since 2019 and has worked with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR, and Variety.
When not writing about video games, George is playing video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
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