So I've been following 2 games as of late..
' State of Decay ' , an upcoming 3rd person Zombie survival horror game being made by Undead Labs.
and
' The Evil Within ' , made by none other than Shinji Mikami and the rest of Tango Gameworks.
But I was a little upset to see this http://i.imgur.com/L4IpySx.jpg

Apparently there is a screenshot of The Evil Within that has a screenshot from State of Decay in it.

This hasn't changed my view on either games, and deffinitely hasn't changed my mind on buying The Evil Within.
Just seems a bit... I don't know.. like Tango Gameworks is being a bit condescending to Undead Labs, if anything.

Those pictures look like similar groups but I don't think they are the exact same. The poses are the same, but how many ways is a Zombie going to walk or stand? That's what bores me about most Zombie Movies, all the enemies are the same and walk the same way.

The zombie count is different between those pictures, the groups are different between them (one has 5, one has 6 and one shows some zombies off to the left the other one does not). We also don't know if they are using the same engine, that would account from some of the similarities.

Pretty sure it's a photoshop. It's not at all uncommon for a graphic artist to pull in images from a quick google search, for example. Especially for minor background details.

The zombie groups do look a bit different, but it almost seems like different frames screencapped from the same video. If you look closely you can pick out some of the ground details, as well (the fallen-down streelamp behind the first zombie, and the past of dirt in the rear right under those zombies.)

Like I said, it's a common practice. The internet likes to make a big hoopla about it when they can latch onto one example but the truth it's just a very common practice. If you're just photo-montaging some images to add some texture to the background then it's not even really a copyright issue. Those zombies could have come from any source, is the point - it just happened to have come from another game in development.

Well all I know is the group shown has every zombie shown in the original screenshot it's supposedly taken from with the prowess they have in making these games I'm sure it's possible to edit in a few more zombies to make it look a little different, and even worse, you can see the white pole on the ground beneath them as shown from State of Decay screenshot.

True, I'm not waving my finger at Tango, it is common and there are no real laws being broken here.
Just, for a moment it felt like Undead Labs was being stepped on, though it's true it could not be intentional in the least. Typing in ' Zombies ' on google could lead to a picture like that fairly quick, I'm sure.
No matter the case, just thought it would make for interesting conversation.
It's fun when you look into these kind of things and seeing everyone's theories and such.

Well, all artists are inspired by those who came before. It's just the really great ones make us overlook that.

You don't get it, do you? They just trolled "WarZ or stateofdecay or whatever you call it" stuff!
Are you serious? Do you really believe that Tango artists inspired by that....and then having Mikami around....or please! They just trolling

I said that in the other thread but no one seems to listen
There's no such thing as being inspired by WarZ because WarZ is 0% original

The artist who made that specific concept image for "The Evil Within" was obviously making fun of WarZ for being one of the games that shows just how horrible and non-scary zombie games have become.

+1

This seems really lazy.

I agree.

I... think "trolling" is reading far too much into this. Obviously, only the artists involved going to be able to speak for themselves, and anything else is pure conjecture. "Lazy" is also maybe not the most apt word, either.

I don't want to get too "inside baseball" with this, but we are already on a thread that's basically doing just that, so:

We're looking at a promo picture, here. I'm not even entirely certain that everything else in the background isn't a photoshop, either. I doubt the game's yet in a state where you could actually "play" any of the levels shown, and they're probably just making use of what existing assets have been created so that there was something to show in time for the announcement. Also means the art team was likely on a bit of a deadline with this, and making use of what they had on-hand.

All of these shots are shopped to some degree or another (mostly color touch-ups, some gaussian blur, etc.) I'm not seeing anything that leads me to believe that the rest of the images we've seen were to the degree that this one is, but I haven't looked all that closely, either. This image, however, looks more like an early concept promo - the first hint is in the name of the file "conceptboxmanjpg." I'm guessing it was done well before the other images we're seeing, as kind of a "proof of concept," or even internally for the visual bible and level design.

Like I said earlier - it's rather common practice to pull stock images of the internet, modify them, and then fit them into your own concept. It occurs far more often than most people notice. My guess remains that those zombies could have been from any game (and obviously you're going to use a picture of computer-generated models of zombies for this, otherwise it'd really have looked out of place had they put Walking Dead zombies in there, for instance.) It just happened to be that one. I don't know where those guys pull their images from, but when you're in that kind of business you tend to make a habit of building a library of stock images to use for later (I think mine is something on the order of 12 gigs by now, and I'm not even what you'd call a professional graphic artist by any means.)

As for lazy? Well, it's a pretty quick job to do that one thing, and most of these pics aren't more than a couple of hours of work. But that's just... well, not the opposite of lazy, but... I don't know, standard I guess? It's just a nothing, really. Lazy would have been not bothering to do color correction, atmospheric perspective, and a couple of filters. Would have stuck out like a sore thumb.

Like I said (and maybe I'm wrong, who knows?) It's basically concept art that someone decided to use for promotional material (probably because it's the only thing I've seen with Pyramid Head's younger brother in it.) Who knows, at the time that image was created they might not have had their own zombies to use.

Anyway, I've probably talked far too much about a subject that doesn't really warrant it, but hey - it's late, I'm bored, and I don't feel like going to sleep yet.

It's just media, I doubt it's gameplay or anything. The same way people will use ARMA 2 to show off terrorist attacks or show a picture of an Ass Creed city and calling it real life. Even if it was intentionally ripped off/accidentally taken, it makes little difference to me.