Bleak Faith: Forsaken developer Archangel Studios has issued an issue to IGN regarding allegations of theft of assets from games like Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
Earlier this week, people noticed that the game used very similar animations for its characters and enemies from FromSoftware games, and accused Archangel Studios of reusing them.
“Since development began, Archangel Studios has always been transparent with our community about the use of Epic Marketplace assets. Although only 10% of the game was outsourced this way, it has helped speed up the development process tremendously,” Archangel Studios said in a statement to IGN.
It continued, “As a three-person studio, it was an important resource to leverage during 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 screening and verification process prior to being offered for sale.”
The studio also said it reached out to Epic Games for an investigation, to which it responded, “Pursuant to the Marketplace Distribution Agreement, each Marketplace Seller represents and warrants to Epic that it has the appropriate upload rights to its Content. However, as with any business hosting third-party content, Epic is unable to independently verify such rights and Epic makes no such warranty to content purchasers.”
Archangel Studios noted that the assets they used for Bleak Faith have since been removed from the Unreal Engine marketplace. The development team also removed all of these animations from Bleak Faith, stating that Epic’s response was unsatisfactory and will work to replace the assets over the next few days.
“Some changes we’ve included in recent patches and more are coming in the next few days,” the studio said. “Certainly this was a great lesson for us and hopefully other indie creators out there that assets in these storefronts can’t seem to be bought in good faith.”
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a soulslike survival horror action role-playing game that was released on March 10th for PC.
Top 10 Soullikes
George Yang is a freelance writer for IGN. He has been writing about the industry since 2019 and has collaborated with other publications such as Insider, Kotaku, NPR and Variety.
When he’s not writing about video games, George plays video games. What a surprise! You can follow him on Twitter @Yinyangfooey
