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 sequence’ 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 positive appeared like a chunk of their very own Future fan artwork that they first revealed on-line in 2020.
“I simply realized Bungie took inspiration from my piece for this week’s cutscene”, they tweeted final week. “Actually took me without warning once I watched the cutscene”. As you possibly can see beneath, the similarities between Faylona’s piece (inexperienced, on the appropriate) 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 the moment 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 typically be acrimonious—and rightly so, given they’re typically outright theft—on this explicit case Faylona has been surprisingly chill about the entire thing.
“To be trustworthy, I’m genuinely excited and completely happy that the piece I made 2 years in the past—which, even again then, I absolutely acknowledged relies on the Future franchise—made it into the cutscene,” they mentioned to PC Gamer in an announcement. “It was completely sudden and utterly caught me without warning. A lot in order that I wished to make a shoutout about it.”