Since
@Null requested more info on this topic during MATI today I figured I would just quote some posts in this thread since everything was covered pages ago. The short answer is that Joseph Cross is not a pajeet, he has been with Bungie for many years, and has worked on numerous other projects in the gaming and movie industry, including the live-action
Ghost in the Shell, DUNE (the Dennis Villeneuve one),
Foundation (the Apple+ TV show).
Here is his Artstation. To be clear, he has posted concept art in the style of Graphic Realism going back over ten years ago, so he is aware of the style and clearly likes elements of it for a long time.
A long very long post I made about how Bungie is a horrible political company (other stuff on that earlier in the thread as well):
Surprised there isn't a Bungie specific thread honestly. Not that I am super caught up on all the shit that happens with modern game devs, but Bungie is one of the absolute worst studios over the last several years in terms of lolcow behavior and potential. The idea that any new game from them would be good after the past 5+ years of nonsense from them is absurd. I'll go over some of the highlights from Bungie specifically, then make another post about Marathon and what has happened with that.
An example of steam charts showing how badly Marathon did during their alpha playtest, and how much better ARC Raiders did:
They sent more invites again (nothing for me yet), and this is the result:
Marathon devs talking about their artstyle inspirations (before plagiarism stuff came out):
The games art-style has a variety of inspirations, one of them being Mirrors Edge, this has already been said by it's art director and by it's official account. It looks nothing like GiTS either but it's still one of it's stated inspirations.
Plagiarism posts, specifically about how they ripped off ANTIREAL and other artists part of that collective:
Bungie once again has been credibly accused of plagiarism by artist
N² on twitter claiming that
designs they published in 2017 are plastered all over the Marathon alpha assets. (
A)
I will say this much: I had been aware of Antireal itself as a collective for a good few years prior, and I generally quite enjoyed a lot of the artwork and music that it was responsible for through collaborators like
Billain. I have a soft spot for Vectorheart stuff in general, and I do think Antireal has a distinct enough style going for it which makes it fairly strong in that sphere; the fact that
other people were able to recognise it (
a) well enough to report on the situation to the original artists arguably reinforces that.
Something that might be worth pointing out, though this is more related to N² / Antireal than Marathon itself: this is actually not even the first time that his work has been plagiarised.
Pictures from the livestream the devs did about the upcoming changes to Marathon based on feedback during the playtest. Important to note, that they didn't show any gameplay footage since they have to still go back and pull everything that was stolen from Antireal from the game, and they aren't sure how much stuff that is.
Bungie, for God knows what reason, decided it would be a good idea to do a stream in the middle of this debacle.
Paul Tassi (big Destiny 2 shill and Bungie defender) literally saying "It's over:"
Some other things I didn't see in the thread. A video from the beginning of the livestream Bungie devs did, just showing Joe Cross' apology to Antireal over art theft. Game director Joe Ziegler is on the left (formerly from Riot Games, the game director for Valorant), and Joe Cross the Art Director is on the right (the one giving the apology).
Some memes that came out during the livestream that I stole from the /dg general.
