Bleak Faith: Forsaken developer Archangel Studios has taken issue with IGN over allegations of stolen assets from games such as Elden Ring and Dark Souls.
Earlier this week, people noticed that the game used animations that were very similar to characters and enemies from the FromSoftware game, and accused Archangel Studios of reusing them.
“Since the beginning of development, Archangel Studios has always been transparent with the community about their use of Epic Marketplace assets. It’s helped me get up and running,” Archangel Studios explained in a statement to IGN.
He continued, “As a three-man studio, it has been an important resource to leverage throughout our four years of development. The asset in question was purchased in good faith from the Epic Marketplace and was purchased by Epic for sale. I understand that it went through a proper scrutiny and review process before listing.”
The studio also said it reached out to Epic Games about the investigation and responded with the following: However, like any Store that hosts Third Party Content, Epic is not in a position to independently verify such rights, and Epic makes no such warranties to purchasers of Content. “
Archangel Studios noted that the assets used for Bleak Faith have been removed from the Unreal Engine Marketplace. The development team has also removed all of these animations from Bleak Faith, saying that Epic’s response was unsatisfactory and will work to replace the assets in the next few days.
“We’ve included some changes in recent patches, and more in the coming days,” the studio said. I hope other indie creators also see these storefront assets as unpurchasable in good faith.”
Bleak Faith: Forsaken is a Souls-like Survival Horror Action RPG released for PC on March 10th.
