Destiny 2‘s Season of the Deep this week revealed a new cutscene that explains the origins of The Witness, but one fan artist noticed one of the images used in the cutscene looked surprisingly familiar to one of their own works.
Artist Julian Faylona, also known as ElementJ21, noticed a moment in the animated cutscene that bore strong similarity to one of their Destiny 2 fan works, titled The Veil of Darkness. After tweeting a comparison between the two images, the official Destiny 2 account acknowledged the “mix-up”, saying they would be reaching out to the artist to offer credit and compensation.
We’ve discovered that an external vendor that helped to create this cutscene mistakenly used this art as a reference, assuming it was official Bungie art.
We have reached out to the artist to apologize for the mix-up and to credit and compensate them for their awesome work. https://t.co/Sqkg5tRHKj
— Destiny 2 Team (@Destiny2Team) June 22, 2023
The Bungie tweet explains that “an external vendor that helped to create this cutscene mistakenly used this art as a reference, assuming it was official Bungie art.” Artist ElementJ21 previously posted The Veil Of Darkness to Bungie’s community site, resulting in the image displaying a Bungie website tag when it appears on a Google Image search, so it’s easy to see how the mixup occurred.