Epic 'Not in a Position' to Verify Assets After Elden Ring Animation Scandal Engulfs Bleak Faith: Forsaken | Push Square

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Update: After being engulfed in an Elden Ring animation imitation scandal, three-person team Archangel Studios has released a statement explaining how Bleak Faith: Forsaken ended up with identical assets to FromSoftware's hit open world RPG. Effectively, it explained that 10 per cent of the game's development was outsourced to Epic Marketplace assets, and it bought the packs in good faith. Since escalating the issue to Epic Games, it received the following response:

Pursuant to the Marketplace Distribution Agreement, each Marketplace seller represents and warrants to Epic that they have appropriate rights to upload their content. As with any store that hosts third-party content, however, Epic is not in a position to independently verify such rights, and Epic makes no such guarantee to purchasers of the content.

The assets have since been removed from Epic Marketplace, and Archangel Studios is committed to replacing them all in the game. The team explained in a statement:

[The response from Epic] is not satisfactory for us and so we have taken the decision to replace the assets purchased from the store over the next several days. Some changes we included in the recent patches, and more are coming in the next few days. 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.

Original Article: Plenty of games lift ideas and concepts from FromSoftware's revolutionary gameplay formula, popularised by Dark Souls back in 2011. This is so common, in fact, that an entire cottage genre of «Soulslike» games now exists. Bleak Faith: Forsaken, a Soulslike game released on 10th March, has allegedly taken things one step