Final week Bungie blew the doorways clear off its convoluted and mysterious lore by releasing a cutscene that spelled out precisely what The Traveler—that huge white moon central to the collection’ storyline—was, and the place it had come from.
For Future followers that should have been extraordinarily satisfying, however it was one thing else for artist Julian Faylona, aka ELEMENTJ21, who observed that a part of the official video certain regarded like a chunk of their very own Future fan artwork that they first printed on-line in 2020.
“I simply realized Bungie took inspiration from my piece for this week’s cutscene”, they tweeted final week. “Definitely took me abruptly once I watched the cutscene”. As you possibly can see beneath, the similarities between Faylona’s piece (inexperienced, on the suitable) and the artwork in Bungie’s trailer (black, left) present that the phrase “inspiration” is getting used very generously:
In response, Bungie instructed PC Gamer over the weekend that they “are planning to compensate and credit score them for his or her work.”
“We found that an exterior vendor that helped to create this cutscene mistakenly used this artwork as a reference, assuming it was official Bungie paintings. We’re at present ready to listen to again from the artist to take the mandatory steps to treatment this case.”
Whereas these “firm lifts fan artwork” tales can usually be acrimonious—and rightly so, given they’re usually outright theft—on this specific case Faylona has been surprisingly chill about the entire thing.
“To be sincere, I’m genuinely excited and comfortable that the piece I made 2 years in the past—which, even again then, I totally acknowledged is predicated on the Future franchise—made it into the cutscene,” they mentioned to PC Gamer in a press release. “It was completely surprising and utterly caught me abruptly. A lot in order that I wished to make a shoutout about it.”
