The Archangel development team has ended up at the center of a controversy that Bleak Faith Forsaken reuses some animations from Elden Ring. While having specified that it has not “borrowed” any assets from FromSoftware’s action-RPG, the studio provides a new update on the situation by confirming that the animations will be removed.
Archangel has previously said that he has regularly obtained a bundle of assets from the Epic Games marketplace which he has subsequently employed within his soulslike. However, Tim Sweeney’s company stepped in to specify that “Pursuant to the Market Distribution Agreement, each Marketplace seller represents and warrants to Epic that it has the appropriate rights to upload its content. As with any store that hosts third-party content, however, Epic is unable to independently verify such rights, and Epic makes no such warranty to purchasers of the content.”
Not being able to count on protection of any kind, Archangel has therefore decided to remove the offending animations: “This is not satisfactory for us and therefore we have made the decision to replace the resources purchased from the shop in the next few days (some changes have been included in recent patches and others will arrive in the next few days). Certainly this has been a great lesson for us and hopefully also for other indie creators out there that the assets featured on these storefronts apparently can’t be bought in good faith.”