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Go back and play the first game and you won't hear Arthur's name mentioned anywhere. Rockstar never had a sequel planned when RDR1 released, so one of the most loved characters in gaming simply hadn't been written yet at that point.
Keep an eye on the background during any of the show's big interdimensional or portal-hopping episodes, there's a small pink and blue alien creature that the animators have snuck into pretty much every single one of them as a running visual gag for eagle-eyed fans.
Ulysses, the mysterious antagonist from the Lonesome Road DLC, was originally written to be a companion you could recruit in the base game. He got cut for time, but the personality stuck around and shaped who he became later. If he'd made it in as planned, he'd have been the only companion who actually sympathised with Caesar's Legion while still distrusting the NCR, which would have made for some interesting party banter.
After Al Mualim strips Altaïr of his rank for a botched mission, he's handed a hit list of nine targets scattered across Damascus, Acre, and Jerusalem to earn his way back into the Brotherhood. Each kill drips out a little more of the game's Templar conspiracy, right up until the reveal that Al Mualim was pulling the strings all along.
Veronica Dare, the ONI officer who takes command of the squad before the drop, is voiced by Tricia Helfer. Sci-fi fans will know her better as Number Six from the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, so ODST quietly doubles as a bit of a genre casting crossover.
The Gravemind almost always speaks in a distinct poetic meter, trochaic heptameter, and when Cortana challenges it on this habit, it explains that it carries the memories of countless poets from cultures far beyond human experience, giving it both the vocabulary and the quickness of mind to compose verse as it speaks rather than labour over words.
Standing outside the Villa Auditore as Desmond and activating Eagle Vision reveals a trail of red footprints leading to the Assassin insignia, an unused navigational aid the developers later admitted was an oversight, since red was meant to signal danger, not direction.
Fans of Wano's backstory got a treat during the show's anniversary run: a fully voiced manga adaptation covering the origin of Ryuma, the legendary Wano samurai whose blade Shusui eventually ends up in Zoro's collection. It let a fairly minor piece of lore get full production treatment usually reserved for main story arcs.
Early on, Luffy tries to recruit a bird for his crew that's actually a Newscoo, the seagull species from the manga whose entire job in this world is delivering newspapers and wanted posters between islands.
