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In Stormsong Valley you can find NPCs named Severus the Outcast, Harald the Scarred, Ranald Flamehair, and Herme the Wise, a playful stand-in for Severus Snape and the Harry Potter trio, part of a wider scattering of wizarding-world nods across the game.
No matter which armour set you put on Kratos throughout the game, if you look under the waistcloth you'll spot red leather straps peeking out. It's the same Spartan gear from his Greek days, just quietly worn underneath everything.
Yordle inventor Heimerdinger has a line where he mutters "42... there's just something about that number," which is a direct nod to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where 42 is famously the answer to life, the universe, and everything. Feels about right for a genius who spends his days building giant turrets out of scrap.
Before she became the gauntlet-swinging enforcer we know now, Vi's design was completely different. A senior Riot animator revealed her original concept was a roller derby cop named Ruby, patrolling the streets of Zaun on skates rather than punching her way through walls.
There's a body floating in the lake just west of Fort Nikel called Nath Dyer, and on him you'll find a primrose and a love letter he never got round to sending. Dig into the construction set files and his hidden internal name is 'NathanMcDyer' - almost certainly a nod to Nathan McDyer, one of the QA testers who worked on the game. Poor Nath never got the girl, but at least he got a tombstone-worthy in-joke out of it.
After you free Cash and Dr Kellerman from the laughing gas trap, look back through the glass into the room they were held in. Rocksteady snuck in a not-so-subtle nod to the much-maligned 1997 Batman & Robin film here, poking fun at one of the franchise's lowest points at the time.
The Joker's 'now you see it, now you don't' pencil gag looks like an obvious CGI trick, but it wasn't one. Visual effects supervisor Nick Davis said the team avoided building a digital pencil because the film was shot in IMAX, and a CG element would never blend seamlessly into an image that huge and detailed.
A study out of North Carolina State University had a group of 60 to 77 year olds play WoW at home for two weeks after establishing a baseline cognitive score. Those who'd started off with lower scores showed a noticeable improvement in mental agility by the end of it, which is a pretty solid excuse to get your gran into raiding.
Out in Azsuna there's a rare spawn called the Treacherous Stallions, two hostile unicorns standing guard over the corpse of a third. That dead unicorn is simply named Charlie, a direct wink at the cult animated short about a bedraggled unicorn dragged into disturbing adventures, and beating the pair actually rewards you with a kidney.
The historical Sir Francis Drake really was buried at sea in a lead coffin somewhere near Portobelo, Panama, and to this day nobody has ever found it. It's a nice bit of real-world mystery that lines up neatly with the treasure-hunting premise of the game.
