Revision 7

Tides of Annihilation draws heavily from Arthurian legend but reinterprets it rather than retelling familiar stories. The game takes figures, locations, and concepts from the mythology and reshapes them to fit a modern-day action-adventure setting.

That distinction carries more weight here than on most pages of this wiki. Arthurian legend is not this game's canon. It is the material the game works from, and the studio has said plainly that it is not following it. Anything described below as belonging to the legend is background rather than a claim about what is in the game, and where the two disagree, the game is what counts.

The Studio's Stated Position

Ary Chen, game director and co-CEO of Eclipse Glow Games, has put it on the record: "We really respect the original King Arthurian legends and British culture", but "we are not copying it one-to-one. We will have our own interpretation and narrative." Developers gave players at the first hands-on event the same framing, describing the game as something other than a one-to-one retelling. Characters carry the names of legendary figures and are original interpretations of them.

Mordred is the clearest demonstration. In the tradition, Mordred is Arthur's treacherous son or nephew and a man. In this game Mordred is a woman, a demi-god who defends her standing as a Pendragon, and a rival who fights with the same toolkit the player uses, summoning spectral knights of her own and stealing one of Gwendolyn's in the middle of a fight.

Why the Arthurian Setting at All

The setting was chosen to fit a combat system that already existed. Kun Fu, the lead producer, has described the project as an action game first: the team built the knight-summoning system, then went looking for a world that would justify it, traced knights back to their origins, and landed on Round Table myth as the most attractive fit. A legend organised around a named company of knights suits a game in which several of them are summoned and swapped between mid-fight. Chinese-language coverage records the same point from the other direction, quoting the team to the effect that the Arthurian backdrop was not chosen with an overseas market in mind.

That order of work explains which figures the game reaches for. Press material describes a band of more than ten legendary knights, and the studio has said it wants to tell new stories about heroes who are not as well known in Arthurian lore, which is easier to do with names that carry less baggage. The Knights of the Round Table page covers the roster itself; this page covers what the game does to the legend it took them from.

Key Adaptations

The left column below is the legend. The right column is what the game does with it. Only changes visible in public material are listed.

Setting: London, not Camelot

Most Arthurian adaptations are set in medieval Britain. Tides of Annihilation places the story in modern London, creating a collision between contemporary urban environments and medieval supernatural elements. Twisted versions of London landmarks sit alongside portals to Avalon, and the city's Underground appears in promotional footage.

The first playable demo pushed that collision further by staging all of itself inside one building. The level is the Great Russell Museum, the game's version of the British Museum, and the invasion has left its galleries opening onto the cultures they display instead of merely exhibiting them. A city museum is an unusually literal way to stage a game about a modern capital sitting on top of older worlds.

The Eight Sisters

The primary antagonists are Morgan le Fay's eight sisters, collectively the demi-gods of Avalon. This draws from Geoffrey of Monmouth's Vita Merlini, which names nine magical sisters ruling the Isle of Apples. The game casts them as the force behind London's destruction. Tyronoe is the most prominently featured sister so far.

Official material confirms that framing for at least one of them: Tyronoe is described in the studio's own English-language copy as one of the eight sisters of Morgan le Fay. Which other names sit in that circle is far less settled. Niniane is grouped with the sisters in story material, yet in the first playable demo she travels with Gwendolyn as a companion and is the person Mordred is hunting. The game has not explained the gap, and this wiki should not close it by guessing.

Lesser-Known Figures

The developers intentionally feature obscure Arthurian characters. Sir Lamorak and Palamedes are deep cuts from the Prose Tristan and French romances. Tyronoe comes from a single passage in Geoffrey of Monmouth. This approach lets the game tell original stories without contradicting audiences' expectations about well-known figures like Lancelot or Guinevere.

The demo bore that approach out. Of the five knights players could field, Gawain, Kay and Bedivere are names a general audience half-recognises, while Gaheris and Palamedes are not, and the fight that gave players the most trouble was against Geraint, a knight almost nobody outside the romances has met. Choosing figures with thin popular profiles leaves the writers room to invent, which is the reasoning the studio itself gives.

Beyond the Arthurian Corpus

The game is not only Arthurian, and the first playable demo made that obvious within its opening minutes. The tutorial is taught by Guan Yu, a general of China's Three Kingdoms period who is venerated as a god of war, and the producer has said directly that a figure representing Eastern knightly spirit was always going to be presented as Gwendolyn's master. He is tied to the museum's Chinese wing, and the reasoning given is that the real museum already holds both Eastern and Western collections, so the game placed its Eastern knightly ideal where that mixture already existed.

The other wings reach just as far. The Egyptian galleries end in a fight against Anubis, and the Japanese wing holds Geraint in samurai form. The producer has been precise about keeping the traditions distinct rather than blurring them: Guan Yu's dragon, he says, is a true yellow Chinese dragon, drawn to be visibly unlike the dragon the Japanese character uses.

The result is a world where Arthurian, British, Egyptian, Japanese and Chinese material share a floor, with a museum as the in-fiction reason they can. Arthurian legend is the spine of the game rather than the whole of what it draws on, and the museum level is where the rest of it is on display.

Research and Consultation

The studio has described going outside itself for both halves of that mixture. Its account includes a collaboration with the Academy of Arts and Design at Tsinghua University, and a research trip to London during which the team went through the British Museum, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey in the company of local writers, scholars and museum directors. The team has separately said it ran small-scale playtesting in the city. None of that makes the game's version of the legend authoritative, and the studio has not claimed it does. On its own telling, the point of the exercise was to reinterpret the material rather than to reproduce it.

Chinese Studio, British Mythology

Eclipse Glow Games is based in Chengdu, China, making their choice of Arthurian legend an interesting cross-cultural decision. The studio's international team, with veterans from Western studios like Ubisoft alongside Japanese and Chinese developers, brings multiple perspectives to the source material. Producer Kun Fu has described their vision as one where "themes of courage, loyalty, and heroism intertwine with an epic story."

The demo is the clearest test of that stance so far. A game in which a Round Table knight appears as a samurai, the Grail is broken into collectibles scattered over two worlds, and the heroine's teacher is a Chinese god of war is not trying to pass as a faithful adaptation, and it has not asked to be read as one.