Destiny 2 Fanartist To Be Paid, Credited, After New Cutscene Referenced Their Artwork

Destiny 2's Season of the Deep this week revealed a major 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 a 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 dev team account acknowledged the "mix-up," saying they would be reaching out to the artist to offer credit and compensation.

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 mix-up occurred.

Though Bungie is doing the right thing by the artist in offering credit and compensation, this isn't the first time fan art has accidentally made its way into official Destiny 2 materials, with a similar mix-up occurring in a 2021 Witch Queen trailer.

For more on Destiny 2, check out our guide to the Week 5 seasonal challenges for the Season of the Deep.