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Mordred
May 8, 2026 at 09:07 AM
Applied Title Case to body headings
Mordred is one of the principal antagonists in Tides of Annihilation. She is a powerful demi-god allied with the forces of Avalon and one of the most prominent boss encounters shown in pre-release footage. Her confrontation with Gwendolyn takes place deep inside a shifting wing of the folded mirror realm, where architecture and gravity bend during combat. Mordred is voiced by Aliona Baranova, who is known for her work on Baldur's Gate 3 and is the real-life partner of Jennifer English, the voice of Gwendolyn. That off-screen pairing threads an extra layer of tension through their on-screen confrontations.
In traditional Arthurian legend, Mordred is the treacherous knight whose rebellion brings the age of Camelot to its end. Depending on the version of the myth, he is either King Arthur's illegitimate son by his half-sister Morgause or Arthur's nephew, but in every retelling he occupies the same structural role: the trusted insider who turns. While Arthur crosses the sea to wage war, Mordred seizes the crown at home, and the two armies eventually meet at the Battle of Camlann. Arthur kills Mordred in single combat but takes a mortal wound in return, after which he is carried away to Avalon to be healed or to rest until he is needed again. Mordred therefore represents the collapse of the Round Table and the end of the old world, a mythic shadow the game explicitly draws on when it introduces him as an enemy of the surviving Arthurian order.
Tides of Annihilation reinterprets Mordred as a female demi-god aligned with the forces that shattered London and pulled fragments of the city into the mystical realm of Avalon. The game takes the familiar silhouette of the traitor knight and reframes it for its own setting: rather than standing against King Arthur, this Mordred stands against Gwendolyn, the lone human survivor who walks between the two worlds. She is one of the named demi-gods Gwendolyn must confront in her search for the Grail fragments, and her presence signals that the old Arthurian hierarchy has already collapsed long before the player arrives. Marketing materials and pre-release trailers position her as one of the story's headline antagonists rather than a mid-game obstacle.
Like the other demi-gods of Avalon, Mordred is considerably stronger than the rank and file Spectral Knights that Gwendolyn summons during combat. She is shown speaking, reasoning, and mocking her opponent during their fight, which sets her apart from the faceless Colossal Knights that serve as living terrain elsewhere in the game.
In the gameplay footage released through the State of Play reveal and subsequent Xbox Partner Preview trailer, Mordred appears as a poised, armored figure who fights with controlled, deliberate motion rather than brute aggression. Her design leans on clean silhouettes and metallic detailing, fitting the game's broader visual approach of combining classical knightly iconography with high-contrast fantasy lighting. Facial capture is used heavily during her pre-fight and mid-fight exchanges with Gwendolyn, and the arena's shifting geometry is lit to keep her in frame even as bookshelves and walls rotate around the combatants.
The Mordred encounter is the headline boss fight of the eleven-minute extended gameplay video that followed the game's reveal. The demo shows Gwendolyn engaging her in the middle of a library whose shelves hang from the ceiling and whose floor turns into wall mid-combo, a dimension-shifting staging that the developers have compared to the architectural flips of Inception and Doctor Strange. The arena is not a static platform: it folds, rotates, and reassembles while the fight continues, which means the player has to track both the boss and the direction of gravity at the same time.
Mordred herself demonstrates a mobile, combo-heavy style. She closes distance quickly, punishes unsafe dodges, and mixes sustained melee pressure with wider area attacks that force the player to reposition. The demo specifically highlights her as a test of the Dual Frontline Battle System, the core mechanic that lets Gwendolyn swap and combine hits with her summoned Spectral Knights in real time. The showcased strategy pairs an offensive knight for pressure with a defensive knight for openings, using parries and summoned guards to interrupt Mordred's longer strings and create space for retaliation.
Arena type: an inverted library within the folded mirror realm, with shelves, walls, and gravity rotating during combat
Role: demi-god boss, one of roughly thirty boss encounters planned for the full game
Tested system: the Dual Frontline Battle System and the player's ability to switch spectral knights on the fly
Tone: dialogue-driven, with Mordred taunting and conversing with Gwendolyn throughout the fight rather than attacking silently
Mordred's encounter is rooted in Avalon rather than the ruined streets of modern London. In Tides of Annihilation, Avalon is not a single island but a layered, shifting realm inhabited by demi-gods who have outlasted the fall of the Round Table and turned against the human world. The inverted library where Mordred is fought is one of its many pocket spaces, reachable only through the folded mirror realm that Gwendolyn learns to traverse. Tying Mordred to this setting reinforces her status as a survivor of the same mythic age that produced the Knights of the Round Table, now weaponized against their would-be heirs. Where the spectral knights Gwendolyn summons are echoes of Arthurian champions bound to her cause, Mordred is one of the demi-gods those echoes once failed to stop.
Within the marketed portion of the story, Mordred functions as a personal antagonist rather than a generic boss. Her fight with Gwendolyn is built around conversation as much as combat: the two characters exchange barbs between attacks, and the staging of the encounter is clearly meant to be a confrontation with a specific, named enemy rather than a faceless obstacle. That framing is reinforced by the casting choice. Jennifer English and Aliona Baranova are partners off-screen, and placing them on opposite sides of this fight gives the performances a charged, almost intimate edge that the developers have leaned into in their public-facing material.
As one of the featured demi-gods of Avalon, Mordred sits near the top of the adversary hierarchy that Gwendolyn must work through to reach the Grail and pull her sister and her city back from ruin. The game has not yet confirmed where her fight falls in the final critical path, but her prominence in trailers, the scale of her arena, and the care given to her performance all suggest that she is positioned as a marquee encounter rather than a mid-chapter filler boss. Further details about her backstory, motivations, and fate are expected to be revealed closer to launch.
