How Plagiarized Animations Sold by Epic Marred a Promising Souls-Like's Launch

Over the weekend, the recently released indie Souls-like, Bleak Faith: Forsaken, was accused of having stolen a set of attack animations from Elden Ring. 

Late Monday, a patch was released, replacing the animations—it was accompanied by a statement explaining that the game’s developers had purchased a set of animation assets from Epic’s Unreal Marketplace, which included an animation that, by all accounts, seems to have been plagiarized from Elden Ring. The statement includes what the developers say is a reply from Epic, wherein the company says it's not in a position to verify copyrights on assets sold through its store, and makes no guarantees. (Although, the offending assets have been delisted). 

"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," the developers said. 

Bleak Faith: Forsaken is an indie game directly inspired by Elden Ring developer FromSoftware's recent catalog of action-RPGs. It also takes cues from, among other things, the incredible manga, BLAME! Its setting and visual design are striking—so striking, in fact, that the game managed to garner some hype in the months before release. More than its setting, though, Bleak Faith sets itself apart from many of its action-RPG contemporaries by being designed around keyboard and mouse, and mechanically referencing Dragon Age II as much as it does FromSoftware’s juggernaut catalog. And it has, through its marketing, sold itself as having been made by just three people working under the banner of Archangel Studios.

But the controversy surrounding the game unmakes this narrative. Like many games which claim to be made by a single developer, or an impossibly small team, Bleak Faith: Forsaken is the product of quieter forms of collaboration. The video game industry is, after all, notoriously bad at crediting contractors and quick to assign auteur status to charismatic directors and designers—to the detriment of the credited and uncredited alike, in the case of Bleak Faith.

The game’s developers were, almost immediately following the game’s release, accused of stealing attack animations from Elden Ring. Given that Elden Ring and Bleak Faith are melee focused, animation driven action-RPGs, some similarities are to be expected, but the two games’ respective animations were identical—something made all the more clear by the animation-driven combat that defines both games; the two animations didn’t just look the same, they felt the same, too. However, the studio behind Bleak Faith didn’t rip the animation themselves. Instead, the animation was included in an asset pack listed on the Unreal Marketplace.

Since 2014, Epic—the company behind Fortnite, the Epic Games Store (which is now Steam’s primary competitor), and the massively popular Unreal Engine—has hosted the Unreal Marketplace, which allows developers of all sizes to not only purchase design assets for use in Unreal, but actively list new assets and profit off of their sale. These assets range from sound packs to animations and even entire gameplay systems. This allows developers to, in theory, focus on their strengths and purchase what they don’t feel comfortable or willing to make themselves. Outsourcing development like this is standard practice among larger studios and publishers, and the Unreal Marketplace extends that practice to anyone working in Unreal, including the developers of Bleak Faith.

However, Epic takes an approach that puts all of the onus on the uploader—who may be acting in bad faith—to not infringe on any copyrights. Epic's Marketplace Distribution Agreement holds that the uploader agrees that their content does not infringe any copyrights, and that Epic has the right to forward their name to any third parties claiming infringement. It also says that uploaders must cooperate with Epic if it does decide to take action on enforcing copyright, but that it's not under any obligation to do so. The agreement plainly states that the uploader is "solely responsible" for their content, and Epic has "no responsibility to you or any third party." 

Epic declined Waypoint’s request for comment.

Moderation at scale is a challenge for any platform of sufficient size. Just look at the morass that is Twitter or Facebook. This leaves all of the responsibility of verifying the copyright status of purchased content on developers, the vast majority of whom do not have the time or financial resources to check the status of every asset they purchase (something that even Epic itself claims that it is unable to do). 

“The team sincerely thanks everyone for bringing the issue to light. The utilization of stolen assets is unacceptable, and we hope other indie creators won’t ever find themselves caught up in a similar situation," the developers said in a statement to Motherboard.." Asset marketplaces are a critical resource for development teams, particularly those on a minimal budget. We hope the proper vetting and review protocols are put into place soon to provide verified assets for creators of all shapes and sizes to use on their upcoming projects.” 

This is especially disappointing in the case of Bleak Faith, because it is the exact kind of game that asset stores like the Unreal Marketplace should be built for. It is not a good video game in the traditional sense. The enemies have mediocre AI. The game’s attack animations are slow to the point that they can become unwieldy. Character models are a bit rough, and textures bend and stretch in awkward ways as they move. But what Bleak Faith: Forsaken lacks in polish, it makes up for with sheer vision.

The Omnistructure, the impossibly large, deeply alien construction in which the game takes place, always looms overhead. Its architecture juts and hangs. It changes style constantly, from gothic to brutalist to romanesque. It has trees and light and patches of grass growing between the cobblestone. The building’s intended function is unclear, but its effect is not: it is a place that does not just resist comprehension, but unmakes it. And it is beautiful in its volume, in the impossible distance between the disparate points of its rooms that feel like cities.

It is a piece of world and visual design that does not merely do justice to the FromSoftware games from which it derives its mechanics, and much of its tone, but one that makes me wish that the developers of Elden Ring had dared to dream even grander. The Omnistructure is a triumph.

The game’s mechanics, too, are steeped in this same ambition. Weighty, animation driven combat is notoriously difficult to get right. Most of the time, you end up with attacks that either feel so light they lose all sense of power, or so heavy that they begin to feel sluggish and unwieldy. These difficulties are only exacerbated by building the game around keyboard and mouse controls, which are similarly difficult to get right for action-RPGs. Coupled with the game’s skill and perk systems—which are modeled after, among other things, Dragon Age—Bleak Faith is attempting to do a lot at once mechanically.

And of course all of it fails to come together. It couldn’t possibly do so, especially not with only three primary developers. In a perfect world, something like the Unreal Marketplace could help shore up the gaps, but Bleak Faith's controversy shows that Epic has not only abdicated its responsibility to the people who need its market’s help the most, but has created a massive legal liability for anyone who dares to use its service. Archangel Studios has learned that better than most.