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Ubisoft actually put a number on how much the Hookblade sped things up: roughly 30 percent quicker traversal than in the earlier games. Makes sense when you consider Ezio's supposed to be pushing 50 by this point and needs all the help he can get scaling rooftops.
The PC version of Assassin's Creed II had infuriated players by demanding a constant internet connection just to play offline. Ubisoft quietly scrapped that for Brotherhood's PC release, settling for a single login instead, which was a genuine relief for anyone with an unreliable connection.
Tucked away at the Sepulcher in Silverpine Forest is a Forsaken innkeeper who goes by the name Bates. Given that the surrounding zone is dripping with gothic horror atmosphere already, it's hard to believe the Norman Bates nod running the local lodging is a coincidence.
Michael Dorn, best known as Worf from Star Trek: The Next Generation, voiced the super mutant Marcus in Fallout 2 back in 1998. When Marcus showed up again in Fallout: New Vegas more than a decade later, Dorn came back to voice him again, making Marcus one of the very few characters in the franchise to keep the same actor across that big a gap.
Ask Telaendril for rumours and she'll tell you that Gogron gro-Bolmog once had a pet rabbit as a kid and petted it so hard he accidentally crushed its skull. That's basically lifted from Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, where Lennie does much the same thing to a mouse and a puppy while dreaming of one day tending rabbits of his own.
One of Brotherhood's memories has Ezio disrupting an assassination attempt in the ruins of the Colosseum during a stage play depicting the death of Jesus Christ. Reviewers at the time singled it out as an unusually mature moment for a game about historical stabbing, handled with a lot more care than you'd expect.
Walter White isn't a random name — he's named after the poet Walt Whitman. His alter ego Heisenberg is a nod to real physicist Werner Heisenberg, the guy behind the Uncertainty Principle in quantum mechanics. Chemistry teacher turned criminal, named after a scientist known for unpredictability. Makes sense once you think about it.
No Rest for the Weary asks you to stab a wounded, crawling enemy rather than just leaving them be. It's a grim little piece of dark humour hidden in the achievement list.
Before it had its iconic name, Minecraft was a scrappy little project Notch was calling Cave Game while he tinkered with it in his spare time. He was openly borrowing ideas from Dwarf Fortress, Infiniminer and even RollerCoaster Tycoon, mashing them together into something nobody had quite seen before. Funny to think the biggest game on the planet started life sounding like a budget dungeon crawler.
