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Horizon Zero Dawn


deanb
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Yeah there's one more.

The guy who trades for weird shit (rusted nails n dirty baskets) buys it off you. Sort of an unmarked collectible I guess, like the folks that buy flowers n banuk figures from you. tbh I can't remember where the other is, just that it's a pair of handcuffs. It's a location between those two.... Maybe in the Cradle?...wait no there's Zero Dawn between those to, and that's a much bigger facility so I reckon its there.

 

I hadn't picked up on being a Death Stranding reference but the icon for them makes much more sense (cos certainly doesn't look like a doll) and this engine is used for making Death Stranding. I had been a bit confused by them, but I don't follow Kojima enough to have gotten the reference.

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That was such a goooood game. Just need to knock over the dummies for the platinum.

 

 

 

Love that post credits sting of Sylens and HADES although I'm not keen on HADES being able to fly about the place. Why didn't he just fly to the spire ages ago if he can do that? Would have preferred it if Sylens had just gone and collected him in the birdcage and walked off. Look forward to whatever comes next in this franchise.

 

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Yeah I'm not super keen on that ending ability either, would have as you said made sense to like go to the battle site and extract the core itself. Still it's never explained how Hades got from whatever facility he was in to be inside a Faro Titan. I've seen folks suggest it was more of a "representation of him transmitting himself a la wi-fi" which I can vaguely buy given code seems to generate weird red and blue strands and the transmission of the wake up code was shown visually too in a way it wouldn't really happen. But eh. Maybe something for the developers to answer a bit down the line.

 

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Yeah, I'm ok with a visual representation of an otherwise invisible data transfer. It's more that if that's a thing he can do when he has had his arse handed to him, why can't he do it earlier. A small niggle in an otherwise solid story.

 

Hope the next game/s sees us restoring / waking the other sentient cores, and maybe recovering Apollo from the odyssey.

 

 

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I kind of assumed that proto-apollo is gone given the Odyssey explosion. There's also a log where...I think it's Sobeck but might be one of the other Alphas, that's wary of the Apollo on Odyssey as being a proto-Apollo it doesn't have the "safeguards" that was gonna give new people tiered release for the full version.

 

But yeah be cool to go on a hunt for the other cores. Pretty much a given that you'll be rebuilding GAIA at some point given Sylens points out Hephestus has the tech to essentially build anything, so should be able to rebuild GAIA as long as you get the instructions for it (though I imagine a bit more immature), and I'd guess connect her back up with the sub-systems. And I guess figure out what the "signal" was that woke up Hades, though I'd take a stab that it's related to Faro in some way.

 

Faro is a weird one, like he's kind of the villain, but mostly in a kind of accidental way and being a bit of a..coward I guess. Him killing the Alphas is quite out of character for the most part, irks me a bit.

 

 

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yeah, it's a visual representation. My headcanon is that HADES is unable to propagate itself too much and is restricted to living in a particular computer in order to prevent another apocalypse.

 

I think the Odyssey will play a big role in a sequel. I'd guess that it survived and is the source of the HADES signal. The people may not have survived though.

 

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One of the datapoints says Odyssey suffered an antimatter containment failure when about to leave the solar system. No idea if that is a near-earth orbit thing, that would result in re-entry or if it means total annihilation.

I'm also unsure as to why Faro killed the Alphas. Perhaps to stop them rebuilding Apollo?

 

I think he makes a great villain because he thinks he is doing the right thing, and you can sort of see where he is coming from. Machines fighting wars = less human deaths = good thing (then it all goes horribly wrong). Keeping tree of knowledge from people by deleting Apollo and killing Alphas = people won't repeat our (his) mistakes = good thing. (Of course he doesn't factor in that it's human nature to be a dick in his calculation). There's almost certainly a large dollop of trying to clear his name so not entirely altruistic. Altogether, makes for a more complex villain.

 

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I'm of the feeling Odyssey is fucked. "anti-matter containment breach" is pretty "welp that's fucked" given the whole anti-matter+ regular matter = big kaboom. Also if it's on the edge of the solar system that's quite far away (I'm assuming they don't have FTL hence the talk of generation ships) so no landing back on earth. Don't really consider a case of unreliable narrator, what would anyone have to gain from telling the ZD team that Odyssey exploded? "We know you're dealing with a lot of stress right now but I'm gonna make it worse my lying to you and saying the Plan B fucked up".

 

Far Zenith is likely to play some part in the future I'd think though (given it's likely Faro was also involved on that front)

As for Faro, I'm leaning more towards him wiping out Apollo to scrub mention of his name and mistake for generations to come. I get they wanted his money but the end of the day I'd say it was a bad idea to let him have any more involvement than that.

 

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Elizabeth was the only one who knew Faro's fuckup and she kept his secret in exchange for his funding the program, so it's understandable that the joint chiefs didn't see a problem with giving him access.

I can't say I agree that Faro could ever be seen as a good guy, though. Making warbots to reduce human casualties can kind of be twisted into having good intentions, I guess, but warbots that eat biomass, self-replicate, get smarter over time, AND have absolutely no backdoors? Faro was the dumbest motherfucker alive, and that's pretty much an objective fact because his stupidity ended all life on Earth.

 

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You don't just introduce something like the Odyssey to only blow it up in the backstory never to be mentioned again. It's Chekhov's starship, for crying out loud.

 

I think Far Zenith will also have a role to play. And I suspect there may have been other competing strategies to survive the robot apocalypse. As I've mentioned before, there are references to some weird man/machine hybrids in some of the journal entries in Sunfall. I really wanna see the weird world outside of the areas Gaia has attempted to repair.

 

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I think it's introduced just show that alternatives had been put in place and add some backstory to the game that isn't just Zero Dawn (there's a bunch of stuff that's no relation to ZD but just added in for flavour). It's angled as a kind of "competitor" to ZD that failed and adds gravitas to the race to "terminal day" that the Zero Dawn team had to deal with.

 

It's possible maybe that over the course of the thousand years since that it might have been not completely obliterated and maybe possibly been on a slingshot course that instead of flinging the debris into the Oort Cloud put it in a path that would bring it back into the solar system and it maybe might manage to miss the big old "anti-shit reaching interior of solar system" hoover that is Jupiter, then maybe manage instead to line itself up to crash to earth and maybe hitting the 30% of earth that isn't ocean and then yeah you could maybe go explore the ruins. But it's a vast amount of maybes. (though obviously the premise of the series is that someone made an AI controller robot army that has no back doors and self-replicates using the same shit humans are made of).

 

I just think it's much more likely we'll find out Far Zenith are vaguely important of sorts. There is also mention of vault-tec like bunkers built for people hoping to wait it out but Elisabet dismisses them as working. I've a feeling that it's maybe cos they have to survive the few hundred years it takes just to turn off the signal, as in the time any sign of life in those that seeps out the bunkers will lead to their immediate demise.

 

 

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I agree with Goh, and there's other get outs beside unreliable narrators. For example the anti-matter containment failure doesn't have to be catastrophic. If the drive is an Antimatter Catalyst Micro-Fission Fusion Drive then the small amount of anti-matter is used to kick off a fission reaction, that kicks off a fusion reaction, that produces thrust. In that case anti-matter containment failure would mean that you have some damage and lose your primary thrust, but not your entire ship, so limping home and crash landing would potentially leave Apollo intact in a black box.

 

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FROM: Elisabet Sobeck
TO: All-Alphas
SUBJECT: Odyssey Has Failed

All,

Some terrible news, I'm afraid. Far Zenith has informed me that the Odyssey mission has failed. Last night, telemetry indicated a catastrophic antimatter containment failure as the drives spun up to depart the solar system. The ship, its crew, its cargo of zygotes and seeds, its alpha-build of APOLLO - all were lost.

Zero Dawn is now the only hope for the continuation of the human species and Earthly life.

We must succeed.

Elisabet

 

It just strikes me as pretty definitive. 

 

But I guess we'll find more down the line with any sequel/DLC to come out.

 

 

 

BTW in regards to TCPs post, I just quite enjoy we're all pulling different things from the game.

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I just don't know what motive they'd have of saying that their attempt has failed. Like all other data points on Far Zenith they're very much "yeah the governments of the world have failed to get Odyssey running but we're better than that because capitalism so we'll totally have it up and running and successful". (and also one where it's implied due to terminal day they've had to speed things along..which could lead to cutting corners)

 

It'd be like if SpaceX issued a press release that their rocket blew up killing the two paying customers aboard, even though it did a successful round trip.

 

Even from a conspiracy standpoint there would be little point given it's leaving the solar system.

 

 

Edited by deanb
spoils
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