Bleak Faith: Forsaken developer Archangel Studios has been accused of using animations from FromSoftware games including Elden Ring for their own.
As reported by PC Gamer, there are some striking similarities between some of Bleak Faith’s animations and those from the likes of Elden Ring and Dark Souls. A compilation has been put together of these instances, including an enemy with a large sword in Bleak Faith having similar attacks as the Abyss Watchers in Dark Souls 3. There’s also a character that has similar moves and animations to that of Malenia from Elden Ring.
On the Steam forums, a developer named Roia addressed the accusations, saying: “Any animations not made in-house are from the Epic Marketplace and have been up there for years, rigged to an Epic Skeleton.
“We’ve heard this comment before, but you can buy the animations yourself if you want as they are publicly available and have been for a long time. Any other question or concern should be taken up with Epic themselves.”
Roia continued: “We’re willing to rework things if there’s something amiss going on in the marketplace but we’ve received no notification from Epic and we too are their customers. The marketplace was used to fill in generic art and was still edited to fit in the general needs of the art direction. About 10% of the total game art is from there.”
Over the weekend, a Twitter user accused Bleak Faith’s perk icons to be AI-generated, and Archangel Studios explained that the use of AI-generated images was “somewhat of an oversight” and that the studio would redo them.
It’s rare to see a commercial gaming product accused of reusing animations, but it has happened in the past. In 2019, both a PS4 line-up trailer released by Sony Japan and a No More Heroes 3 trailer were accused of plagiarizing animations.
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
