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Far off the southeastern coast of Tanaris, past the point where fatigue starts to set in, lies the ruin of an abandoned gnomish settlement resting underwater. It's Azeroth's own little Atlantis, and its full story has never been told in-game.
Early plans for GTA IV apparently included areas modelled on upstate New York and Long Island, on top of the core city. Those regions got cut somewhere along the way, and the game shipped with the more compact, densely packed version of Liberty City everyone actually knows.
M'aiq the Liar's signature line, 'M'aiq knows much, tells some,' is a twist on a line from Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, where Mannie says of his best friend Mike, 'Mike knows much, doesn't tell all.' Fitting company for gaming's most unreliable Khajiit.
Camel figurines scattered across Uldum usually just crumble to dust when examined, but rarely one will teleport you to a hidden area called the Steam Pools. There you'll face a huge ettin, Dormus, who drops the Reins of the Grey Riding Camel mount and a matching title if defeated.
Joe's ill-fated neighbour Natalie in season two is a TV-only invention. Because the show diverged so far from the ending of the Hidden Bodies novel, the writers needed a fresh obsession for Joe once he landed in Madre Linda, and Natalie filled that gap instead of the librarian character from the books.
San Andreas's map dwarfed everything the series had done before, packing in three full cities and twelve smaller towns across roughly 17 square miles of countryside. It was, by a wide margin, the biggest playground GTA had ever built up to that point.
The gunslinger companion Cassidy flat out tells you in dialogue that he was named after a character from a 90s comic. That comic is real: Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon's Preacher, which features a chain-smoking Irish vampire named Cassidy. Fallout 3 later returned the favour with a ghoul named Tulip, another Preacher reference.
Fans had spent years poking fun at how a lighthearted adventure hero racks up such a huge body count, so Naughty Dog leaned into the joke with a trophy literally called Ludonarrative Dissonance, awarded for killing 1,000 enemies across the game.
Horikoshi has praised Eiichiro Oda's willingness to let characters speak their minds, something he leaned on heavily for Bakugo. But he's also said outright that he just doesn't have the stamina to write something on the scale of One Piece, which shaped his decision to keep MHA a more contained story rather than a decades-long saga.
The character Black Belle borrows from two very different real-life figures at once, Belle Starr, the outlaw known as the 'Bandit Queen', and Annie Oakley, the famous sharpshooter. Rockstar seems to have blended traits from both into the one fictional character.
