Editing Horizon Zero Dawn (section)

==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.)