An artist has accused Respawn Entertainment of stealing his design for an Apex Legends Battle Pass Loba skin; by fostering a work-culture that necessitated it.
As part of the Shockwave update (launched August 6th), the newest Apex Legends Battle Pass includes a plethora of cosmetics for Fuse, Pathfinder, Mirage, Alter, and Loba. The latter’s costume has gotten the wrong kind of attention.
Alisa Rastorgueva, Respawn Entertainment’s External Dev team Associate Art Director, tweeted concept art for Loba’s Battle Pass outfit, giving everyone a full look. She also showed Fuse’s outfit, and the Premium+ variant for both, noting “Concepts by Goodname Studio.”
We see Loba’s outfit is predominantly red, with a short-cropped jacket with armored shoulders and a large collar, a leotard underneath, skin-tight leggings with a seam running around the legs, and trainer-like heels with a giant tongue.
This design seemed very familiar to Beezul, Creative and Art Director for Town of Zoz and vtuber. They did a similar piece back in January 2019. A work-in progress was shared that same month, and the final piece was reposted in June of that year.
In Beezul’s piece, we can see a character wearing an outfit that is predominantly red, with a short-cropped jacket with an armored shoulder pad and pronounced collar, a leotard-inspired body suit that transitions into skin-tight leggings with a seam running around the legs, and robotic boot-like heels with a giant “tongue” or half a boot-cuff.
Beezul took to X about two hours after Rastorgueva’s tweet, literally drawing the comparisons himself, noting the similarities between the pieces. This would be in the collars, shoulder armor designs, leotards, the angular seams on the leggings, and even the poses.
“This is a perfect example of how NOT to use reference properly in a professional setting,” Beezul admonished.
Beezul’s lengthy thread that referencing was fine, sympathizing with tight deadlines. But designs that rely too heavily on others’ work, or one singular piece of work, might as well be AI generated.
He further recommends avoiding references from others’ professional or personal artwork, and that you can still meet personal development goals when meeting a client’s brief.
To illustrate his point, Beezul showed how his design took inspirations from multiple sources; Zero Suit Samus from Metroid, Cyberpunk: 2077, Overwatch, classic Capcom fighting games, 90s anime, and others. Nonetheless, it was only ever meant as a study, not for a product.
For example, the Apex Legends design also has loosely hanging straps on the hips. Similar was also seen on Pyra from Xenoblade Chronicles 2, another character design with sci-fi elements, a predominantly red costume with teal highlights, and skin-tight clothing on the legs. She also has a large semi-boot cuff on her shoes, much like Beezul’s design.
“Unfortunately in AAA sometimes your goal is mainly- I want a paycheck and I don’t want to think too hard to get it. If you lack passion that’s ok. Apex or League doesn’t have to consume your life and thoughts, but you don’t need to steal from passionate peers to live-,” Beezul warned.
Beezul concluded their thread, emphasizing, “Just want to point out, this isn’t JUST an issue of referencing a peer’s work too much. This is a PREMIUM skin in a AAA game that makes hundreds of millions of dollars. Players deserve better than some copypasta skin on the characters they play, especially if they are paying-“
Many sympathized with Beezul, though some were convinced no plagiarism happened. Beezul laughed that only 24 hours prior, he had discussed with a developer on his team “how AAA will rob you blind if you post on social media.”
This prompted another X user to ask if the individual artist was more to blame than the AAA company. Beezul proceeded to explain how he understood all too well.
“I’m mostly referencing the fact that these big studios typically have really high demands, high standards for finished products, and give artists little time to complete those demands. They also historically don’t hire junior level artists internally so there’s a massive lack of mentoring and proper leadership in AAA.”
“I used to work at Riot and back then these were very much all issues there back in the day,” Beezul revealed. “Not sure about now. Their skins team in particular would constantly be crunching to complete skins assignments while also getting random requests from other departments.”
“Which really made very little sense because back then the skins team was the only profitable team in the studio. No one else really crunched as much as they did for years (after new summoners rift).”
“If AAA would hire actual junior level people into concept positions they could have real in house training but instead people have to wild west figure it out while doing contract work and freelance that generally pay way less and give artists less time to complete tasks. This results in many artists just taking drastic shortcuts to meet demand from clients.”
Beezul even took the matter to Rastorgueva’s doorstep, or at least replied to one of her other tweets.
“Frankly disappointed to see how heavily referenced my work was in your premium skin. I think you can improve on how your artists and outsources use reference and do better to ensure they aren’t heavily taking designs from peers in the industry for a quick paycheck,” he berated.
RELATED: WB Games Job Listings Suggest ‘Hogwarts Legacy’ Sequel Now In Development
Even other Apex Legends staff snapped back. Lead VFX artist Michael Panov (@topmo3vids), dismissed the claims with “Yeah sorry but I am going to ask for a little more respect from you about some of my fellow coworkers that I know are busting their asses to bring cool and interesting work to Apex players. Let me use a diagram to illustrate…”
Panov then suggested in his accompanying image that the blue highlights Beezul added was merely “a drawing you deliberately drew blue lines over in an attempt to make this design ‘appear’ more similar to yours.”
Panov continued, showing five other designs of female sci-fi characters, seemingly to hammer home the point that the concepts in the Apex Legends design were more generic, and general trappings of the genre.
“Just some more works that you probably feel are copying you that I found by searching for ‘hero female character in red outfit’ on Pinterest,” Panov sneered in the final post.
Sure enough, all the designs do feature skin-tight clothing on the legs, and all but one are wearing predominantly red. Even so, out of the five designs, only three are wearing a jacket or follow “street wear” motifs. Only two are wearing trainers or heels, only two are in the one-hand-on-hip pose, and none have footwear with a giant tongue.
Other X users also claimed two of the images were AI generated, which if true would intentionally pull from multiple artists.
“Hey thanks for proving my point for me,” Beezul retorted. “These are all great examples of reference with all drastically different shapes and styles that all are red that also could have been used instead of mostly using just one design as ref! Good job dude! Thanks!”
Despite everything, Beezul seemed to take the matter in his stride. In reply to another X user expressing their sympathy, Beezul assured “I’m not stressed about it.”
“Someone clearly desperate for a quick and low effort paycheck. Artists hurting out there. It’s just sad that this artist clearly lacks passion for what they’re doing. basically mc donalds fast food art. Times are rough out there.”
