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The classic six Barrows Brothers eventually got two extra members bolted onto the group — Akrisae the Doomed, converted after intercepting a spell meant for a player, and Linza the Disgraced, added following a later quest. Neither of them shows up in every version of the fight though, so plenty of players have no idea the six were ever an eight.
In the season one carriage attack scene, the production used a real baby for the shot, and unsurprisingly it would not stop crying on cue. The team ended up leaning on VFX to fake several elements of that sequence, including the sword strikes hitting the carriage walls.
Brotherhood was the first entry in the series to let Ezio recruit and train his own roster of assassins, sending them off on missions across Europe. It's a small addition but it's the one that really cemented the idea of Ezio as a leader rather than a lone wolf.
The Rohan shoot was rough on the cast in more ways than one. Alongside Mortensen's broken toes, Orlando Bloom cracked three ribs falling off a horse, and John Rhys-Davies' stunt double dislocated a kneecap.
Out in the wilderness sits a corpse with a strange, almost feline curl to his lip. Dig through the game's internal files and he's actually labelled COUGAR_MAN, which has led people to tie him back to an old glitch from the original Red Dead Redemption where a human character model somehow ended up with a cougar's attributes.
Before Naughty Dog ever touched it, the Part I remake was quietly being built by Sony's Visual Arts Service Group, a support studio better known for helping finish other people's games. Sony eventually pulled the project and handed it to Naughty Dog outright, which led to a fair bit of frustration - and several departures - from the original team.
That half-burned pink teddy bear that keeps turning up after the plane crash is loaded with meaning. Fans generally read the bear's missing eye as a stand-in for Walt's own moral blind spot — he only ever seems to notice the damage he causes when it's impossible to ignore.
Umbacano's second quest, Nothing You Can Possess, borrows its title straight from Raiders of the Lost Ark, where Belloq tells Indy 'there is nothing you can possess which I cannot take away.' It's not just the name either - the whole setup of someone snatching away the relic you just risked your neck for is lifted from that exact scene.
The game's anima-based magic system lets players summon a spectral axe that fells trees instantly, turning what's normally a slow survival-game grind into a quick bit of casting instead.
Building a world this size took some serious engineering. The finished game runs on more than a million lines of code, and a staggering 30,000 of those lines exist purely to handle dialogue.
