Horizon Zero Dawn

This is a /v/ related article, which we tolerate because it's relevant and/or popular on /tg/... or we just can't be bothered to delete it.

Horizon: Zero Dawn is an action RPG produced by Guerilla Games, who thought one day, "What if we made a game about a cavewoman fighting mecha-dinosaurs?" Then they made a very pretty setting and a book's worth of lore to justify it, but here's all you need to know: there is a metal panther with buzzsaws for a mouth running around crushing houses. Go stab it with your spear.

No, seriously, what is the plot?

You play as Aloy, an orphaned barbarian who's obsessed with finding her mother, for some reason. As a baby, she was found alone in the sacred cavern of the Nora, a tribe of matriarchal hunter/gatherers who like to shoot foreigners. Some of the Nora felt intimidated by the baby and wanted to kill her (the Nora are dumb), others thought she was a gift from their Goddess.

Guess who ended up being right.

Anyway, they compromised by asking another outcast (a guy named Rost) to adopt her, and then gave them the silent treatment for 18 years, because everyone knows ignoring problems makes them go away. Luckily, Rost was a badass "machine hunter"- someone who survives by hunting the animalistic robots that populate the setting and stripping out their armor to use it as currency. He passed on his skills to Aloy, partly because Horizon's Earth is very dangerous, and partly because she wouldn't stop whining about it.

While all this was happening, humanity encountered a problem. The machines, once docile and no larger than your average deer, were inexplicably becoming territorial monsters who killed people on sight. New machines- built solely for combat- started to show up. Worst of all, none of the tribes populating Earth had any idea why this was happening or how to reverse it. This change was called "the Derangement".

The Nora, as always, chose to hide away in their alpine "Sacred Lands", which doctrine forbids them from leaving. (Rost was outcast because he left the Lands to kill his family's murderers.) Given that the previous Carja king, a slave-taking Aztec sadist, was only deposed a few years ago, this approach was not without reason.

However, it came to nothing when all of their new warriors ("Braves" for that American Indian flavor) were ambushed during the Nora's annual rite of passage. Everyone got massacred, except Aloy, who was participating in "the Proving" so she could force the tribe to tell her who her mom was.

As Aloy's recovering from her injuries, one of the few non-asshole Nora shows her the cavern where she was found and tells her the truth: they don't know who her mother was. Luckily, Aloy recognizes the Old Ones (pre-apocalypse humanity) tech filling the cave. She decides to leave the Sacred Lands and search other Old One ruins for clues.

Oh, yeah, and bring the braves' killers to justice. If she has the time.

(It is an entirely optional sidequest.)

Carja?

The setting is populated by several tribes, who hold all the typical distrust and racism towards each other that will be swept under the rug so the finale can have a cool "everyone allies" scene- well, everyone important, at least. The Carja are one of these "tribes", although politically they are a kingdom centered around a relatively advanced city. In more detail:

Carja

Desert/jungle folk ruled by the supposedly divine Sun-King. They mostly live in Meridian, the setting's only city, and have a lot of religious and aristocratic drama (not human sacrifices anymore though, they stopped doing that). They are patriarchal sun-worshippers- the exact opposite of the Nora- and the only race who aren't some flavor of barbarian. This makes them a bit stuck-up, but mostly the Carja are good people.

A few years ago, the Carja were ruled by a crazy Sun-King named Jiran. He instituted public blood sports, claiming they would stop the Derangement, and the murderous Red Raids against every other tribe. He was no nicer to his own people, condemning any who dissented to death in a gladiator ring and executing his own son for speaking out. Luckily, the second son in line managed to escape Meridian, eventually usurping Jiran with the help of sane Carja and the Vanguard, a band of Oseram mercenaries. Now, Sun-King Avad strives to reconcile the other tribes with his people, eradicate remaining Jiran loyalists (they fled to a shithole named Sunfall) and institute a lot of left-wing policies; letting foreigners have high-level jobs, permitting women to fight, being nice to everybody, blah blah blah. For the most part, this has worked, and the Sundom (as it is known) is a beacon of peace and inter-tribe trade.

Oseram

The setting's blacksmiths. Most Oseram come (flee) from the Claim, a place with a lot of alcohol, arguing about everything, and beliefs about what women can't do. The Oseram are comfortable with tech, unlike most other tribes, and even build their own. They tend to wander through territories, trading stuff as they go. A lot of diplomatic work is outsourced to Oseram people, because every tribe knows them.

Personality-wise, most Oseram are crude, bluntly honest, and practical. Think dwarves, if dwarves were human-sized and a bit trigger-happy with their cannons.

Banuk

Tundra barbarians who live in nomadic groups known as "weraks". They know how to pacify machines by imitating their sounds, and unlike all the tribes live alongside machines, which they revere as spirits of the natural world. They still kill them for parts, of course, but mostly Banuk have escaped the superstitious fear of the Old Ones that cripples everyone else.

Culturally, the Banuk are very artistic (in the areas of cliff painting and music) and spiritual. Weraks are led by a typical tribal chieftain and the group's best shaman, who uses the "Blue Light" (a metaphor for life itself) to command machines. Banuk are very socially-Darwinist: if you can't survive the ice, it's your fault and no one should respect you. Even their leadership is based around proving who's the toughest, regardless of ethnicity or leadership ability. They choose to live in arctic regions because they think hypothermia makes them stronger.

For some reason, the Banuk also have better bows and armor than anyone else. Not because it makes sense in lore, but because the game's only DLC pack revolved around them, and offering gamers powerful loot is the best way of making them buy stuff.

Tenakth

Bloodthirsty reavers from the southlands who fought at least one war with the Carja; they lost, but they managed to terrify and physically scar the Sun-King of that time. Tenakth inter-tribal drama is one of the major problems in Forbidden West; their chief wants to reconcile with the Carja, but one of his top warriors didn't like that idea and started a murderous insurrection to get her way. Worst breakup ever. Second worst breakup ever, considering what Aloy does to Tilda at the end of the game.

Culturally, the Tenakth were inspired by US military relics, which they use a lot of terms ("chaplain", "bagging and tagging", etc) from. They lean even harder into social darwinism than the Banuk, so they accept Aloy and her RPG-protagonist mindset pretty easily- she will punch people to get what she wants, which they wholly approve of. The tribe's aesthetic is very desertpunk, with a lot of pointy armor and violently colored face paint.

Utaru

Peaceful agriculturalists who were deeply victimized during Jiran's reign. With the help of docile "land-god" machines, they cultivate vast amounts of food and people, which they trade with the Tenakth for protection...or used to, until plot events started driving the land-gods crazy.

Like all good hippies, the Utaru live in structures woven of plant material, decorated with flowers and the various dyes their tribe specialize in. They hunt machines to protect themselves, but otherwise try to coexist with nature by carrying seeds around and abstaining from meat. However, their culture does have flaws- most notably xenophobia and negligence, which are why their leaders do nothing about the Derangement, simply accepting their looming extinction as a given. The many Utaru who defy this fatalism find common cause with Aloy.

Quen

An imperialist empire who know more about the Old Ones than anyone. They live on a continent separate from that of Aloy and co., but high-tech compasses and fierce devotion to their ancestor cult enabled them to send a fleet of ships to the latter. Apparently not all Quen are evil, but it's hard to say because the token Quen character has spent her whole life being oppressed/censored/plagiarized by the tribe's elites, who control all knowledge of the past (their "Legacy", as they put it).

Nora

The elves. A small, territorial tribe who are obsessed with their mountain (or earth, or cave...it's not really clear) goddess, "All-Mother". They are defined mostly by what they hate: technology, the Old Ones, heretics, and any place or person outside their "Sacred Lands", the forested valley that no one may enter or leave. Their religion dictates that everywhere else is tainted by the sin of the Old Ones, and the Machine Devil that All-Mother slew centuries ago. It also prevents them from using any weapon more advanced than bows and electrified tripwires.

Why aren't the Nora dead yet? Because they are really, really badass. A previous Sun-King, whose soldiers fight ice-spitting crocodiles in the name of glory, led an army to conquer the Sacred Lands. The army lost. Which should tell you the level of sheer, stubborn courage that the Nora have. This courage makes the Nora bullheaded fanatics, but also a good deal more sympathetic than the previous paragraph implies. They are fully willing to die for their beliefs, and we know this because we see a lot of them do so over the course of the plot. Yes, even the asshole ones.

In that light, it's not surprising that a Nora should be the one to save the world.

Characters

Aloy

You know how Exalted are good at everything they do, but they tend to be selfish loners who care more about their childhood angst than saving the world? Aloy is like that, except instead of being a reincarnation of someone awesome, she's a clone of someone awesome, who was so brilliant that GAIA said, "You know, I can't envision an Earth that would not need you to save it. Go forth and stab a Metal Gear in the eye." And Aloy did, because fucking anything was better than staying home and pretending to mourn the kid who threw rocks at her.

Personality-wise, Aloy plays the bitter snarker to cover up how angry she is at humanity. She is intensely curious, which is why a game mechanic revolves around her climbing up moving sauropods to hack into their brains. At the age of 6, she took an iPhone (or, "Focus") off of the dead guy who owned it, thereby adding infrared vision and Old One records to her already expert hunting skills. Like her prepper father, Aloy is most comfortable sleeping on the dirt and killing animals for dinner. Her nomadic lifestyle also prevents cults to her from springing up...or so she'd like to believe, anyway. So far she has usurped one werak chieftain, turned seven bandit camps into peaceful villages, rejected the affections of a Sun-King, and somehow become the Nora's messiah. Yet her hero complex only grows, which is helpful when she stumbles upon the genre-mandated "save the world" plot.

Erend

An alcoholic mercenary who put his warhammer to good use helping Avad take the throne. After that, Avad sent him on a diplomatic mission to the Nora, partly to protect the other ambassadors and partly because he knew Erend's forthright, plain-speaking ways would appeal to the barbarians more than a Carjan's fancy eddy-cated talk. On the trip, Erend met Aloy and tried to chat her up, after which they became detective buddies in Meridian. His character arc is about overcoming the death of his sister/military leader to take her place in the Vanguard and start getting over his inferiority complex.

Avad

The 14th Sun-King of Meridian, Avad is an ideal ruler: compassionate, just, and yet passive enough that his kingdom provides plenty of heroic opportunities for the PC. One prejudice he hasn't managed to erase is its stigma against marrying foreign women, which prevented him from openly acknowledging Ersa (an Oseram ex-slave and the captain of his bodyguards) as the love of his life. But even though his people are too primitive to appreciate waifus, he does his best for them and plays a greater role than any other leader in preventing the apocalypse MK. 2.

Teersa

A wise old lady who's one of the three "High Matriarchs" that lead the Nora. Unlike the others, she cares about her goddess's creations and strives to understand the world instead of shutting it out.

She does worship a door, but that's not her fault.

Sylens

An obsessed scholar of the Old Ones who is too awesome to appear in the first two-thirds of the game. While tomb-raiding, he accidentally discovered a superweapon A.I, which (less accidentally) he would form a cult around. This cult was called Eclipse, and consisted mostly of exiled Carja who thought Jiran had the right idea. Despite all the murders and superweapon-resurrecting that the A.I (called HADES) demanded in exchange for giving Sylens knowledge, Sylens was still surprised when the machine betrayed him and forced him into hiding. Luckily, there was another loose end that HADES wanted to kill: Aloy, the only person with Old One genetics that could shut it down. Sylens, who had learned nothing about morality or basic pattern recognition, promptly set off to use Aloy like he had used everyone else.

In Forbidden West, Sylens has returned to doing what he does best: organizing foreign rebels into a terrorist army to take down Far Zenith since he knew they were coming. He also leads Aloy into the West so that she can kill HADES (permanently, this time) for him. This is one of two reasons Aloy swears to kill him, the other being that he wants her kidnapped by Far Zenith (he assumed they'd need her genetic code and so would capture her, which would prevent her from messing with his plan. Unfortunately, Beta exists and so Aloy escapes Far Zenith). Unfortunately, their sabotage of each other's plans leaves them in a mutually weak situation where teaming up with each other is the only way for anyone to survive Far Zenith's attempt at genocide.

Varl

A Nora warrior who isn't an asshole, and...yeah, his characterization basically ends there. He takes a flexible approach to his tribe's religion, prioritizing heroism and proactiveness over xenophobia. This led him to think, "Hey, maybe we shouldn't be leaving our eighteen-year-old messiah to do everything by herself," and so he followed Aloy on her quest to save the world, even as she ditched him several times because of her trust issues. After a few hundred miles, she realized he wasn't going away and accepted him as her first real teammate. Varl fell in love with their next recruit, Zo, very quickly and spends most of Forbidden West studying the Old Ones with her.

Zo

An Utaru "Gravesinger", who presides over funerals and caused more than a few for the Carja who invaded her land. After the war, she advocated that Utaru leaders do something about the Derangement, but was unsuccessful...until two foreigners washed into her village. One of these two was Varl, her future husband. The other was Aloy, who healed a sacred machine with knowledge that seemed impossible. Zo saw an opportunity to make a difference, and led them to the protected cave where MINERVA was hiding...a cave Zo never really left, since Zero Dawn's goal seemed more important than anything she'd done in her old life. Going forward, Zo was instrumental in fixing the "Blight" starving her tribe and furnishing the team's base.

Kotallo

An experienced Tenakth "Marshal" who guards and enforces the will of their chief. When he was young, Kotallo's combat prowess attracted the envy and paranoia of Tekotteh, his clan leader, who forced him to become a Marshal so that he wouldn't threaten Tekotteh's power. The joke was on Tekotteh, however: Kotallo served with distinction for years and was now in a position to smack down Tekotteh's attempts at insubordination. It was an unexpected life, but a happy one...

...until a machine sliced off his arm. The Tenakth do not accept crippled people, so Kotallo's injury sent him into something of an existential crisis. Hekarro broke tradition to keep him as a Marshal, but this was little comfort when even Kotallo believed he was worthless.

It was during this time that Hekarro allied with Aloy, a strange yet talented outlander who was willing to fight rebels against his authority. Hekarro sent Kotallo to guide her through Tenakth territory, a task he performed adeptly despite his mutilation. The two had adventures (including humiliating Tekotteh) and Kotallo began to believe he still had worth. When Aloy left to go save the world, he found that he wanted to follow her. Now he serves as the team's military expert, linking them with Hekarro's government and studying Old One battles. This role makes him feel fulfilled...

...Or so Kotallo says. Emotional expression is not his strong point.

Alva

A historian from a distant fantasy land where scholars are cool and get girlfriends. She joined her people's great crusade overseas in the hope she could dig up helpful technology, and accomplished this goal by virtue of being the only Quen who tried talking with the locals instead of killing them. She quickly bonded with Aloy over their shared nerdery, and joined her quest after certain things they discovered made Alva a threat to her nation's stability.

Despite being a fangirl, Alva is surprisingly chad, being skilled at archery, attracting girls, and fiercely devoted to the Quen's ancestor cult- so devoted that she sailed for months in a medieval, disease-ridden ship rather than give up hope for her homeland. In her opinion, fighting alien robots is a small price to pay for the honor of working with the "Living Ancestor" that is Aloy.

Beta

This article contains spoilers! You have been warned.

Another clone of Sobeck, made by Far Zenith to access Earth's data centers. Flee from them and rejoins Aloy to be free. Has a massive inferiority complex due to knowing who Sobeck was and being directly compared to her by the Zeniths, as well as feeling like Aloy has managed to live up to the original, making Beta wonder what's her "defect" for failing to compare to either of them. Really needs a hug.

Tilda

A surviving Old One from Far Zenith's space colony. When she lived on Earth, she worked as an art expert and information broker; before even that, she was a isolated nerd traumatized by the death of her parents. She still is that nerd in a way, ignoring her loneliness by obsessing over two things: art, and her terminal case of oneitis towards Elizabet Sobeck.

Unfortunately for everyone- including herself- Tilda is not a hero. Over the decades she remade herself into a cutthroat billionaire, making money off of stealing private data and selling it to the highest bidder. These tactics seemed to pay off when Far Zenith offered her a ticket on their spaceship: a way to escape the apocalypse ravaging Earth, an Earth that Tilda blamed for taking her loved ones from her. When Far Zenith asked her to steal Elizabet's work- a brilliant terraforming AI named GAIA- she did so unashamedly. Unfortunately, the theft failed, and showed Elizabet what a monster Tilda was. The two would never see each other again.

Once Tilda reached Far Zenith's colony, she almost came to regret her decision. Her new neighbors were almost uniformly sadists and narcissists, glorified criminals responsible for much of humanity's problems in the first place. The invention of a genetherapy that granted immortality only prolonged Tilda's isolation. Centuries of meaningless decadence passed, ended only by an even worse horror; the rampant AI NEMESIS, who destroyed the colony and forced its few survivors to flee back to Earth.

It was there that Tilda met someone very interesting; a young, beautiful clone of Elizabet. A clone with none of Far Zenith's godlike technology, a clone vulnerable in ways that Sobeck had never been. In other words, a perfect concubine...if only Tilda could force her off Earth.

Fortunately for everyone else, this clone was Aloy, who had spent her entire life shanking oppressors and wasn't about to stop now. Cue final boss battle.

What happened to the real panthers?

Two words: Ted Faro. Faro was the Antichrist an Old One businessman who was everything bad about humanity: a greedy, narcissistic control freak who was pathologically incapable of learning from his many mistakes. If anything good can be said about him, it is that he hired the genius scientist Elizabet Sobeck and funded her creation of pollution-scrubbing robots, which went a long way towards saving the eco-nightmare that past!Earth had become. (The game isn't very subtle about its themes.)

But Faro got complacent, and decided making military robots would be more profitable. Because he was an idiot, he made these new robots unhackable, practically indestructible, and self-replicating. Specifically, they consumed living things- all living things- to make more death robots. Anyone who has seen Terminator can imagine how this worked out.

One glitch later, the "Faro swarm" had gone rogue and started eating everything, from grass to endangered dolphins. It didn't take much time for word to spread that Faro couldn't control his robots...or that he was the reason life on Earth was hurtling towards extermination. Desperate to salvage his reputation, Faro called for Elizabet Sobeck (who had resigned in protest years ago when she saw where his company was heading) and begged her to do something.

Sobeck told him the truth. The Faro Swarm was unstoppable. None of the world's armies could defeat it, because it grew larger with every casualty. Hacking it was impossible in the short span of time before it would destroy humanity. Space travel was not advanced enough that anyone could escape Earth with it, much less carry enough supplies or people to build a functional colony. Life could not defeat the Swarm.

But, with enough preparation...it might wait it out.

Then Sobeck outlined the "Zero Dawn" project. With Faro's wealth and the infrastructure of all Earth's governments, she would construct multiple bunkers deep beneath the Earth. These bunkers would be filled with every type of plant seed, genetic material, and cultural data that they could gather. Simultaneously, Sobeck would assemble a crack team of experts from every field of study. The best of these experts, called "the Alphas", would work with her to build GAIA, a fully-functional A.I. GAIA could live long enough to hack the Swarm, long after all humans would be dead. Then she would reseed the Earth with everything needed for a proper ecosystem- including cloned humans, who could reproduce from there. She could also create new robots of her own making, nonsentient ferrivorous machines who would purify the Earth instead of overrunning it. Zero Dawn might not succeed, and it certainly wouldn't be able to save everything...but it was the only chance that any life had.

(Faro tried to backpedal on his offer. Sobeck told him she would rat him out to the U.S military if he did. Faro caved.)

The project progressed, as did the numerous atrocities committed to enable it. Everyone not involved was used as cannon fodder to slow down the Swarm, tricked into believing that Zero Dawn could save anyone. People were kidnapped to work on the project, and imprisoned (albeit humanely) if they refused. Faro did not face any punishment for his apocalyptic negligence, and was given a luxurious custom-made bunker in which he could live out the rest of his life.

But Zero Dawn worked. Right down to the wire, on the brink of annihilation, GAIA was completed. Her personality was wise and compassionate, fully committed to her purpose. Every subroutine she would need- most notably HEPHAESTUS, her capability to build machines, and APOLLO, the repository of all human knowledge- was ready. All that remained was victory.

And then Faro cracked. He couldn't bear the fact that future humans, however distant, would know of his crimes. He blamed knowledge itself, not his own selfishness, for all he'd done. He couldn't accept that he had needed other, better people to save his sorry hide.

So he murdered the Alphas and destroyed APOLLO, condemning humanity to repeat his mistakes and start almost entirely from scratch.

Almost a millennium later, life has continued on. The Earth is fertile and pristine, give or take some cool-looking ruins and recordings from Old One iPhones. There are no predators or big animals- GAIA intended to use APOLLO to restore those after humans became strong enough to protect themselves from them- and humans in general are ignorant fuckers who think killing people will appease the gods. But, all the extant species are flourishing. The oil, coolant, and refined metal that machines provide mean that humans are far better equipped to survive than their Stone Age ancestors. And there's always the possibility that a backup of APOLLO could be out there...somewhere.

It is a time for great heroes!

(Bonus: the game devs did not need to animate more than four animals for any given environment. What is this, Far Cry?)

Franchise

A sequel, called Horizon: Forbidden West, was released in 2022.

Aloy continues to search for Old One knowledge as well as a way to restart GAIA (who had to be shut down after being corrupted by HADES), and in the process, she discovers that the Old Ones still exist... sort of.

See, what we said above about fleeing to space being impossible? It was almost entirely true. A few ultra-rich still managed to get on a spaceship and flee Earth. There, alongside some scientists they kept for themselves, they managed to make themselves immortal and progress even further technologically than they were before. Now they're coming back to retake Earth for themselves, wanting to exterminate all the savages and "primitives" there (Really subtle, Guerilla Games). They used their own clone of Elisabeth sobeck (called Beta) to get their own copy of GAIA so they can terraform Earth to their liking. from there on the game amounts to Aloy collecting various subroutines of Gaia (since the version she managed to get is an incomplete one) while trying to find a way to fight against Far Zenith.

Oh, and it turns out Faro also received a version of the immortality juice, but not a perfect one, so he's spent the last millenium as a horribly mutated blob of flesh whom, according to scan readings, only has "minimal" brain activity. We don't get to actually see him but, from an holpgraphic display of his bunker/complex's map, he's grown to be huge and is so horrifying to look at that the guy who did so immediately ordered Faro to be burned to ashes.