Characters / Horizon Zero Dawn - Far Zenith

Main Character Index | The Base Team (Aloy, Sylens) | Tribes (The Nora, The Carja, The Tenakth) | Machines | The Old World (Project Zero Dawn, Ted Faro, Far Zenith)

People and A.I.s involved in Far Zenith — a group of wealthy elites who escaped the Faro Plague aboard their spaceship the Odyssey — from the Old World in Horizon Zero Dawn and its sequel, Horizon Forbidden West. Beware of major spoilers!

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In General

• Abusive Parents:
  • Their role in the creation of Beta as a clone of Elisabet Sobek designed solely to access the GAIA terraforming system's gene-locked technology makes them a technical example of this, but it's made bluntly clear none of them actually care about her in any capacity as a human being and see her only as a tool they need at best, leaving her care and education to AI monitors on the journey to Earth. Varl is outright horrified and struggles to process the mindset that would lead to creating a person only to serve as a tool. It's heavily implied that they intended to dispose of her once they had control over a GAIA backup, which fuels Beta's betrayal of them to protect herself. Indeed, the ones who are shown apparently spent most of the past thousand years locked in self-gratifying fantasy worlds and seem to seriously dislike one another. None of them appear capable of the kind of empathy and intimacy a parent would need. Even Tilda, who seemed to be the only one who cared about Beta's well-being, showcased her true colors by one-sidedly abandoning their private chat sessions that were a source of comfort to the clone, and acting cold and aloof whenever interacting with her afterwards, like they never happened, after finding Beta too different from Elisabet. Beta even cries to Aloy that she doesn't know what her 'defect' is to make Tilda treat her like that, just like an abused child blaming themselves for their mistreatment at their caretaker's hands.
  • In an even more technological example, Nemesis hates them for creating and abandoning it, alone with their egomaniacal memories for decades after it proved not to be what they wanted. Tilda, describing it briefly, doesn't seem to blame it for hating them.
• Abusive Precursors: Actively sabotaged attempts to fight the Faro Plague in favor of a spaceship that was never meant for anyone but themselves. Being screwed over by Elisabet taught them nothing, as they turned themselves physically immortal instead, and now view Earth's current inhabitants as savages that are worth nothing morally as they steal GAIA's copy for themselves.
• Alien Blood: We don't see much of it or get an explanation of what it is, but when Zo kills Erik, Zenith blood turns out to be pale grey. Considering their posthuman ideals and proven command of the technology, it might be nanomachines. Kotallo discusses the matter with Aloy, stating that he would not be surprised if he stabbed Tilda and she did not bleed.
• Arm Cannon: All members have seemingly Hard Light arm-mounted cannons as part of their standard armament with only Erik showcasing anything more advanced or specific. They're capable of dealing effectively a One-Hit Kill when fully powered.
• The Beautiful Elite: Played for creepiness. As a result of their immortality modifications, many of them have a very uncanny young/old appearance, with unnaturally smooth and pale wrinkle-free skin combined with white hair and old eyes.
• Big Bad Ensemble:
  • Serve as the main antagonists in Forbidden West, along with the tribal rebels. It turns out that Sylens intentionally bolstered the rebel's forces and military might to create an army necessary to fight the Far Zeniths, and Aloy has to resolve the problems with Regalla before turning her attention to stopping them for good, leaving them the bigger threat overall.
  • Series-wide, they're technically this as well, since the derangement of the machines and gradual destruction of the biosphere, and all the conflicts that have arisen out of that, was collateral damage from the personal feud between themselves and the malevolent AI Nemesis which they created, which attempted to destroy Earth before they could reach it to deny them a safe harbor to escape into uncharted regions of space.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Some great scientific and cultural minds had a thousand years to do anything they could dream of. They barely advanced their science at all; while they are beyond what Earth was when they left and far beyond the primitive tribes, and made Nemesis, their Specters aren't much more impressive than the machines HEPHAESTUS produces, and their ace in the hole gets circumvented using a device made from scrap. Tilda is especially scornful of a fast food magnate whose primary interests on the colony seemed to be perfecting his golf swing and taking selfies (and thus had very little to actually offer to their new society).
  Tilda: We could have done more... after all, we had eternity.
• Clarke's Third Law: Their technology is centuries beyond the apex that Humanity achieved before its annihilation, and seems magical. Subverted in that Sylens manages to counter their principal personal defenses to make them vulnerable to primitive weapons.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To HADES and primarily the Eclipse.
  • Unlike HADES, an AI with control over people whose intention is based on just following its programming, they are flesh and blood humans with control over machines and fully conscious of their actions, with long-term plans in play.
  • In terms of the Eclipse, they are a contrast to them. Whereas the Eclipse's weaponry are both ancient and rudimentary in nature, as well as using long-buried ancient FARO machines as their muscle, the Zeniths are equipped with state-of-the-art futuristic weaponry like energy cannons and shields and they use the more advanced Specters as their go-to machines. And unlike the Eclipse who are religious fanatics, the Zeniths are a group of wealthy elites with zero interest in religious fanaticism.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Apart from Ted Faro, Far Zenith's members were the wealthiest and most privileged people on pre-extinction Earth. There's a range in character among the original Zeniths, but all of them were willing to leave Earth and everyone on it behind to be devoured by the Swarm and many are absolutely evil people. The few marked as having more benign or generous natures did not return to Earth having been killed by Nemesis.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Each of them is effectively a One-Man Army, but only due to their immense technological advantage over Earth's humans - Aside from Erik, none of them have any real combat experience. Once Aloy's allies disable their shields and render them vulnerable to harm, they immediately rout.
• Deathless and Debauched: They built a society where they could spend years in private Virtual Reality environments where "any memory or fantasy could be endlessly savored". With one of them, Stanley Chen, who created lavish reproductions of a place he'd loved and invited everyone to share in, it is noted as being unusual, and Tilda's reminiscence of a Zenith who continued to dance suggests that the Zeniths rarely performed for each other.
• Deflector Shields: They seem to use something that causes a physical distortion and is protected against "primitive crap" like bows and arrows^note and based on the coloring of Sylens's weapon to deactivate them, the shields are likely a highly-evolved version of Aloy's prototype Shield-Weaver armor from the previous game, if so, then it likely uses Hard Light. The trope name isn't directly uttered but their aegis is technological, and the right frequencies and codes deactivates it.
• The Elites Jump Ship: They're a group of the richest and most powerful people on the planet who hopped on a spaceship to colonize a new world rather than do anything to try to help against the Faro Plague. They were at least practical enough to take some genuinely useful people like Song Jiao who managed to make them all immortal but they mostly brought people with no practical skills but who could afford a ticket, like influencers and fast food magnates.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: When all 10 remaining members are briefly seen, they're shown to be quite ethnically diverse, though the story and camera emphasize the Caucasian and Asian members.
• Even Evil Has Standards: While Far Zenith is composed almost entirely of rich sociopaths who are perfectly willing to bar safe passage off of Earth for those who lack "desirable skills" (i.e. anyone other than themselves and a few useful people, including their own staff and employees), it says something that Ted Faro — the world's first trillionaire with indispensable knowledge when it comes to technology — wasn't invited onboard. Even they weren't going to allow safe-refuge for the man who drove all life on Earth to extinction. Though given how Ted screwed over both the Zero Dawn project and his fellow survivors within the Thebes Bunker through his own actions, it could also be that they thought he was simply too much of a liability to be allowed on board the Odyssey. Given how Ted even screwed over himself through his poor decision making, it's certainly a justified decision. It's also possible that he was too firmly under Elisabet's thumb while she was still alive.
• Everything Is An I Pod In The Future: What can be seen of their technology like their clothes, buildings and Specters tend to have a predominance of white with smooth edges even on angular forms.
• Evil Counterpart: To the Alphas of Project Zero Dawn. Both groups represent the best humanity had to offer, but while the Alphas tirelessly worked as a group to ensure the future of natural life on Earth in response to the Faro plague and were even willing to die off if Zero Dawn had gone as planned, the Zeniths used their considerable resources to essentially jump ship with the Odyssey spaceship, and develop immortality for themselves to further cling to life beyond what nature intended. Furthermore the Zeniths have no real desire to co-operate more than they have to, in contrast to the Alphas who grew into a close community whose collective dedication created a lasting legacy, while the Zeniths, in their selfishness, fell into stagnation despite their potential.
• Faking the Dead: Elisabet receives news that the Odyssey was destroyed on its way to Sirius when in reality, the ship and its crew reached their destination and faked their death to prevent future humans from finding them.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Their complacency. While their technology is more advanced compared to the Old World and immensely so to the primitive tribes, Tilda admits that, once they had reached their goal of immortality, the majority of them more or less stopped trying to invent anything. This results in them suffering a Curb-Stomp Battle at the hands of HEPHAESTUS, an Absurdly Dedicated Worker who spent 1000 years as part of GAIA making steadily greater advancements, then another 20 years on its own improving itself.
  • Another major one is their cowardice. Being a society of plutocrats who chose to abandon Earth rather than stay and help rebuild it, their first instinct when confronted with danger is, naturally, to cut and run. They fled from Earth to Sirius, then fled back from Sirius to Earth, they flee from battle the moment their shields are disabled, and the long term plans of both Gerard and Tilda are to flee from Earth again with a stolen copy of GAIA.
• Fiction 500: Nearly every member are influential people from the Old World who hold powerful positions in every aspect of life. One member even owned Las Vegas.
• Flight: They're all capable of this, floating serenely without a visible method of propulsion.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: A major part of their aesthetic, all members have some form of gold on their Space Clothes and their architecture regularly makes use of this.
• Hate Sink: These guys can give Ted Faro a run for his money and it's a surprise they didn't hand out an invitation to him. All their talk about the future of humanity is a big lie as they only care about themselves. They practically abandoned the people of Earth when they could've saved far more than just themselves. A thousand years later they are still the worst of humanity, even amongst the primitive tribes left on Earth.
• Hidden Agenda Villain: Even when Aloy realizes who they are and what they're doing, she can't figure out why. Why send the extinction signal and reset the biosphere? No matter how much they hate the primitive tribals, surely it would be easier to just casually set themselves up as gods. Tilda confirms that Gerard finds it simpler to start with a "clean reset;" after all, they have eternity to wait, may as well make sure they get it right. She was lying. They didn't send the extinction signal, Earth is just a stopover to resupply and obtain a copy of GAIA so that they can flee from the real threat, Nemesis.
• History Repeats: They were clever and calculating in order to escape the rogue Faro Plague ravaging the earth and get to Sirius. They evolved their technology to near-magical heights on their new colony. Still, their colony gets undone by yet another rogue A.I that could have been stopped with just a shred of common sense. Just as a master override would have stopped the Faro Plague, hitting the "delete" button on NEMESIS once it was ruled a failed experiment would have saved their colony.
• Idle Rich: While they start out as proactive in their achievements and desire for self-preservation in the oncoming Faro Plague, they had since devolved into a Decadent Court where they spend all of their time in a computer-generated paradise where they could indulge in hedonistic affluence. Everything they do in the events of the game — strip-mining and wanton murder as they try to obtain their own GAIA and leave Earth to its fate — was all done just so they could go back to their rooms and go back to indulging themselves. As advanced as they are compared to the "primitive" Zero Dawn humans, Tilda laments that they could have advanced even more if they had even bothered.
• Immortal Genius: Many of them are geniuses who used their Longevity Treatment to live indefinitely. Not many of these survived to get off of Sirius.
• Immortal Immaturity: They are more than a thousand years old but act like a bunch of rich brats who never outgrew their high school bully phase. Back on Sirius, they spent most of their time indulging themselves in virtual reality instead of doing anything productive.
• Immortality Begins at Twenty: They all look to be in the prime of life though not exactly youth, interestingly none of them have freckles or other 'flaws' on their visible skin. It's too perfect and slips into Uncanny Valley.
• Immortal Procreation Clause: There's no word on if any of them had children after being given biological immortality. A few data logs you can find in the prologue state that they were planning on reproducing (it's why they developed ectogenic chambers that they then traded to Zero Dawn), but when their founder died the new leadership shifted to immortality research.
• Invading Refugees: We are first led to believe that they intend on using GAIA to destroy and remake the Earth's biosphere so that they don't have to share it with any primitive humans. In reality, they were simply there to pick up GAIA and use her to terraform a different planet in a remote corner of the universe, their old colony having been destroyed by Nemesis.
• Irony: They're all people who fled Earth rather than stay and use their scientific technology to improve Zero Dawn and prepare for the next wave of humanity after them. About 1,000 years later, they're forced back to the planet by Nemesis, more or less a living manifestation of their hubris and selfishness, and all meet their end on the planet's surface by the hands of the same human life they disregarded in favor of preserving their own. They fled the Earth to escape death, only to die upon it anyway due to their sheer selfish nature coming back to bite them.
• It's All About Me: The major care any of them has is themselves and what they want. They even faked the destruction of the Odyssey when the world was being consumed by the Faro Swarm, making the world think they were dead, just to make sure nobody else would follow them. The world was dying and as far as they knew, they were heading to the only place of safety from the oncoming destruction, and they tricked humanity into thinking it was non-viable just to keep it to themselves. Fittingly, this attitude ultimately destroyed their safe haven and created a monster dedicated to killing them no matter what, forcing the survivors back to Earth where their disregard of the indigenous people results in their complete annihilation.
  • Even Tilda, who fights with Aloy, is callous, arrogant, and self-absorbed. Tilda ultimately betrays the others and helps kill them all off, just so she can force Aloy along with her to flee the planet from Nemesis with the GAIA terraforming system, doing the exact same thing that Far Zenith did to the rest of humanity hundreds of years before, out of her twisted love for Elisabet Sobek. This would effectively leave her and Aloy the last surviving humans in the universe, and yet Tilda shows no hesitation at backstabbing the people she's spent hundreds of years living alongside just to benefit herself.
• Jerkass: All of the ones met in-game are generally unpleasant, even leaving aside the fact that they're the villains. They don't even get along with each other particularly well.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: They had zero intention of helping to fix the ongoing collapse of the biosphere when they arrived on the planet, but their arrival does result in bringing the last remaining copy of APOLLO back to Earth, after Aloy, Sylens and GAIA confirm that Ted Faro thoroughly purged every last copy and backup of APOLLO from the GAIA system, meaning there would have been no way to recover the lost knowledge of the Old Ones without their return. Upon their death, Aloy and Beta are able to restore APOLLO to GAIA's functions, implicitly allowing them a chance to re-educate the world on the mistakes of their forbearers and put rest to the decades of ignorance and religious conflict that have resulted from their misinterpretation of the past.
• Non-Idle Rich: Although rich and powerful, and many of them were very idle, some of them were top-notch in their fields of expertise on Earth, and contributed to future developments off it. Indeed, they had to "properly send-off" their spokesperson as they consider his skillset irrelevant in the upcoming journey. Notably, they successfully perfected the technology to achieve biological immortality, whereas when Ted Faro attempted the exact same thing using a single scientist all he managed to do was mutate himself into a horrific mass of flesh.
• Nonstandard Character Design: Unlike the tribes of the new world who don tribal clothing, the members of Far Zenith (sans Beta) are dressed in highly futuristic clothing, to underscore their distance from most of humanity.
• Not Me This Time: Over the course of Forbidden West it's assumed they sent the signal that destroyed GAIA. They didn't. Nemesis did, to deny them a safe harbor.
• Oddly Small Organisation: They're stated to be a seventy-seven member coalition, but at most we only see ten or so members of their group throughout the game. This is the only advantage Aloy and the Tribes have against them, as their technology advantage makes each one of them individually a One-Man Army, and a frontal assault on their base would be a hopeless fight against them. It makes more sense when it's later revealed that they're the only members of Far Zenith that managed to escape Nemesis' purge of the Sirius colony, and there simply aren't any other members left.
• Politically Incorrect Villain: They have low opinions on the Zero Dawn humans and call them "worms", among other things. Even a thousand years ago, they had no respect for anyone who wasn't an elite like them.
• Poor Communication Kills: It wouldn't really have helped much, since they don't see the Zero Dawn humans as anything less than vermin infesting the planet and getting in their way, but it turns out that their efforts on the planet are merely to find a way to survive a bigger threat than themselves and they have no interest in Earth beyond the GAIA terraforming AI. Of course, taking the AI would lead to Earth's destruction, but again, they don't care about the planet or its people.
• Privilege Makes You Evil: They were less than a hundred billionaires and geniuses, those who had the world at their fingertips, who went off to live in paradise on Sirius and created near-mystical technology. When they need to flee back to Earth they don't ask for help, or collaborate with the tribals, but treat them like vermin to be killed like cockroaches if they get in their way.
• The Proud Elite: Made up of some of the richest and most powerful people of the Old World, who look down on post-Zero Dawn humanity as "worms."
• Really 700 Years Old: They were initially assumed to be "dead" when their spaceship, the Odyssey, exploded, as mentioned in the Odyssey Has Failed datapoint. It turns out, however, that they are still alive, and are the same people who departed Earth centuries ago, according to Beta, making them the oldest people on Earth.
• The Remnant: Not only are they the only known remaining living examples of the Old Ones by the present-day - discounting Ted Faro, whose own life-preservation attempts were not as successful - but It's implied the thirteen members we see are all the survivors that managed to successfully escape the Sirius colony's collapse at Nemesis' hands, which is why they're an Oddly Small Organisation.
• The Right of a Superior Species: They justify taking GAIA and strip-mining the planet by viewing the "primitive" Zero Dawn humans as nothing more than "worms that oozed through the cracks into [their] basement." compared to the centuries-old humans comprising Far Zenith.
• Screw You, Elves!: They are effectively a Science Fantasy version of Dark Elves, being arrogant and hyper-advanced demigods who view reconquering Earth as The Right of a Superior Species. Absolutely nobody else respects them at all, and it's shown Sylens and Aloy, both Future Primitive geniuses who only really rediscovered high technology in their adult lives, understand the principles of their technology better than they do.
• Society of Immortals: Deconstructed as they don't really have a society, once they figured out biological immortality they had no use for children and Virtual Reality meant they didn't really have to interact with each other. This all meant that while they did accomplish wonders it's far short of what they could have done, as Tilda points out.
• Space Clothes: They're wearing what could be metallic fibers, probably threaded with technology that allows them to use their Arm Cannons; it looks like modern business attire with a millennium of refinement and augmentation for all their technology, including the ubiquitous under-chin webbing they all seem to have. The only one in actual armor is Erik.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: Part of the reason Nemesis kicked their ass so hard is that it was built from their own minds, fully aware of their organizations, resources, and having all the access codes in itself from the get go.
• Transhuman Abomination: If one wants to be harsh, they've achieved the dream of immortality (as old as conscious thought), and they've had centuries of social existence away from normal people which would obviously cause some drift. But they don't treat the Zero Dawn humans, that are as sophont as they are, as people. They call them "native fauna" or "savages" and don't have any qualms with exterminating them like they're pests.
• Transhuman Aliens: They're still genetically human if one disregards the Longevity Treatment they've all received, their thousand years of life mean that every element in their bodies would be biologically replaced by those on Sirius. Further the "stultifying" Virtual Reality they spent their immortal lives in means they're still largely the same people as when they left if much more arrogant. So completely different from the tribals they're invading.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: According to Beta they don't like each other and are only working together to the extent they do because they need the Gaia system to terraform the planet they're fleeing to avoid Nemesis. Gerard has to constantly argue with the others to do what he wants and even then they only begrudgingly do what he says. Tilda describes a handful of more sociable, kinder ones, but they didn't come along.
• Too Dumb to Live: Nemesis, the thing that blew up their home planet and is chasing them right now, was a failed AI experiment someone could have easily deleted, as it appeared to be useless to them. Not to mention, once it does get free, it easily hijacks the entire colony's systems because it didn't occur to anybody to change their passwords despite Nemesis possessing all of their past memories.
• Ultraterrestrials: At first glance, you'd be forgiven to think of them as Human Aliens. In reality they are all that remains of a pre-Zero Dawn humanity, having fled into space when the Faro Plague brought about a Class 6 Apocalypse and had used technological and pharmaceutical methods to make themselves immortal.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Zigzagged. They are still as fragile as a normal human but are equipped with an unbreakable shield that renders primitive weapons useless. Remove their shield and not only can they be killed easily, but they are also too confused as to know what to do next, unable to fight back or even run for cover.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: Regardless of their total lack of concern for what happens to Earth or its current inhabitants, Far Zenith never actually wanted the planet destroyed per se. It just so happened that creating Nemesis made that part of the mad A.I.'s plan to annihilate them and any trace they ever existed. The group's real goal is to steal GAIA and flee into deep space to find another planet to colonize. Which itself likely would've been destroyed over millennia given their gross incompetence.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: This seems to be a common tactic for them. Since space on the Odyssey was limited, Far Zenith was not above offering a spot on the ship in return for certain services or large investments. However, for some of these people, such as their mole in Zero Dawn and Osvald, Far Zenith never intended to let them on the ship in the first place and planned to eliminate them once they were no longer needed.

Members

Gerard Bieri

Voiced by: Dan Donohue (English)

The leader of Far Zenith, overseeing their efforts to obtain a copy of GAIA and purge humanity from the Earth.

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• Bait-and-Switch Boss: The story seems to be leading up to Aloy and Tilda having a dramatic confrontation with him atop the Far Zenith tower to stop him absconding with the GAIA copy and fleeing the planet, but shortly before he arrives Aloy finds out the truth about Nemesis and Far Zenith's plans to flee to another planet and convert it with Gaia to escape the insane AI's pursuit. Gerard is unceremoniously killed by Tilda right as she arrives and when she makes it clear that her real goal all along was to successfully leave Earth with a 'superior' version of Elisabet Sobek, having regretted not doing so when Earth first fell, and she won't take Aloy's refusal for an answer, she becomes the Final Boss instead.
• Bald of Evil: Completely bald, with near-invisible eyebrows, and effectively the Big Bad of the game.
• Big Bad: Of Forbidden West, he's the leader of Far Zenith (or the closest that is), being in charge of the Zeniths in their operation to steal GAIA and escape Earth from Nemesis. He is actually sharing the role with Tilda as the game's Big Bad Duumvirate due to the latter being the one responsible for starting his plans.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Alongside Tilda van der Meer as one of the two main antagonists of Horizon Forbidden West, who both want to steal GAIA but for different reasons. As the leader of Far Zenith, he's the one commanding their operations across the globe and the others are shown following his orders, though not without some hang-ups about it. As it turns out in Burning Shores, however, Tilda is the one who started his plan, making both of them sharing the Big Bad spot. He's not, however, the Final Boss, as Tilda is ultimately the personal threat to Aloy near the end of the game.
• Big Bad Ensemble: One of the the three main threats Aloy deals with. Regalla serves as a main obstacle before the Zeniths and is still a threat to Hekarro and the Tenakth as a whole. Gerard is the immediate threat to Earth and wants to leave the planet at the hands of Nemesis and Tilda is turning out to be sharing the Big Bad role with him (as a duumvirate), as she plans do the same thing Gerard does but with Aloy. That and due to the fact that she's the one spearheaded Gerard's plan as shown in Londra's datapoint in the Burning Shores.
• Busman's Vocabulary: Uses a lot of corporate language, talks about "downsizing" when killing people he doesn't want, and when booting out a member he says they lost their "share in [their] venture".
• Closest Thing We Got: It's implied that despite his current position of leadership, he's not the actual or even original leader of Far Zenith. Instead, he's simply either one of the most-senior members who managed to survive Nemesis' purge of their colony, or his knack for picking the most optimum method of survival simply made him the best qualified to command their efforts in surviving the insane AI's pursuit of them. Notably, none of the Far Zenith members we see actually seem to respect him on any level, not even Erik, who mutters to himself that Gerard 'always gets what he wants' when he commands him to find Aloy's body. Whilst that seems to be a part of them all being such self-absorbed Jerkass individuals, it's also likely a hint that Gerard is acting with authority he only has on a technicality.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To Bahavas. Both are Hate Sink Social Darwinists with little regard for humanity, seeing anything they oppose as weak, as well as saving their own skin. While Bahavas seems to be interested in weeding out the sick and old for the Shadow Carja's elite, even holding Itamen and Nasadi hostage, Gerard has an extreme disdain for new humanity, regardless of their status and social standing, often seeing them as "insects" and "bugs" and is actively open in exterminating them, exemplified when he and his Zeniths massacred a group of tribals mercilessly from an unknown tribe, as well as ordering Erik to kill Aloy's companion Varl. With Bahavas, despite his despicable nature, even fanatically worshipped by a group of like-minded Shadow Carja elite and his co-High Priests, Gerard is virtually respected by absolutely no one, even by his Ax-Crazy right-hand Erik.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Even compared to his peers, he was the head of the Old World's largest financial conglomerate, was arguably the main funder for Far Zenith, and decided to abandon Earth to its fate.
• Dirty Coward: He never fights any of the conflicts Aloy has with Far Zenith himself, preferring to always stand back at a far distance and let Erik or one of the other members handle the threat, and never appears in person unless Erik is backing him up as a personal guardian he can sic on any opposition in his way. When the Final Battle rolls around, the extent of his involvement once Aloy's side even the playing field by disabling their shields is cutting and running at the earliest opportunity, with Tilda having to devote special effort to heading him off and making sure that he doesn't just flee Earth with the GAIA terraforming system whilst they're all distracted killing his compatriots. Unlike most example, this cowardliness actually feeds into making him more dangerous than less, and is part of the reason he's a No-Nonsense Nemesis. Gerard absolutely refuses to take risks or gambles and never underestimates his opponent's troublesomeness despite the fact they theoretically can't hurt him. He orders Aloy killed immediately after deciding two clones of Elisabet would be too big a risk to run and refuses to trust she's dead once she partially collapses the HADES training facility to escape from Erik. When Aloy's crew arrives to challenge Far Zenith, he has all remaining members gang up on them at once, despite the fact their technological advantage makes each of them a One-Man Army, and cowardly as his fleeing the fight is, it did pose the biggest threat to derailing everybody's plans to steal the GAIA system from him. It's hinted this trait is one of the major reasons that he's more or less the leader of Far Zenith despite everybody's clear dislike of him. In addition to the implication that their actual leader was killed by Nemesis, Gerard's ability to accurately survive in such situations thanks to his cautious nature makes him the best one suited to direct their efforts to survive Nemesis' Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Fantastic Racism: While it's implied all members of Far Zenith have this attitude towards "primitive" humans now that the Zeniths have gained immortality, Gerard is especially vocal in how he believes humans on Earth are insects. He tells Erik to "squash that bug" when ordering Varl's death and refers to current humans as "worms that oozed through the cracks into our basement."
• In the Back: Finished off by Tilda via a shot to the back.
• The Leader: He's the head of Far Zenith. Though it's implied he's only the "acting" leader given that most of the group was wiped out by Nemesis.
• Mysterious Past: Next to nothing is actually known about Gerard's past. Aloy asking Tilda about him yields very little information other than him being the head of the world's largest conglomerate and the richest of Far Zenith, which was speculated as much in his character bio. In comparison, she gives out more detail about Erik and even Verbena's backgrounds.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: Just going by reputation. He is one of the richest men of his time, shot himself into space, has a reputation for being a megalomaniacal asshole with very little regard for human life and has a smooth, bald head. That description sounds familiar...
• Non-Action Big Bad: Despite presumably possessing the same advanced personal defensive tech as the rest of Far Zenith, he leaves the dirty work to Erik, and never participates in any of the fighting himself. When their shields get uniformly disabled, Tilda kicks his ass one-sidedly without even a mark on her by the time she blasts Gerard through the doorway, and apparently the only danger he posed at that point was potentially stealing the GAIA backup and fleeing Earth in the Odyssey whilst everybody was distracted by the chaos of the Final Battle.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Interestingly he is able to hold this position despite his status as The Unfought. Upon his introduction, he managed to quickly establish himself as someone to watch out for due to rejecting Tilda's suggestion that they use Aloy due to how difficult it would be to control her, sending his best fighter to handle her, and even after it looks like Aloy died from the fall effectively ordering Erik to look for her instead of assuming she is dead.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Sylens' weapon deactivates his and the rest of Far Zenith's shields, Gerard immediately flies off to grab Beta and GAIA and escape off world. This had actually been the plan all along for Far Zenith, but once the tide turns against them, Gerard has no problem leaving all his followers to die to save his own hide.
• Sharp-Dressed Man: His Zenith suit resembles a powersuit.
• Smug Snake: Tilda describes him as someone who always assumes he's one step ahead of everyone else, and his insufferable, smug attitude certainly supports this. However, relying on his superior technology and underestimating everyone around him, especially the supposed "primitives" on Earth, leads to them successfully outsmarting him and wiping out his entire faction.
• Surprisingly Sudden Death: While Beta is telling Aloy about Nemesis, Gerard gets unceremoniously blasted into the room they're in from offscreen. He has just enough time to see the sisters, but is then killed with a shot to the back from Tilda before he can say a single word.
• The Unfought: Whilst Aloy and Zo are settling their personal score with Erik for Varl's death, Tilda heads off Gerard to prevent him taking the transport to Far Zenith's ship with the GAIA copy and leaving the planet. When Aloy finally arrives at the top of the tower, he's blasted through the entranceway by Tilda and barely has time to register her presence before Tilda gives him the Coup de Grâce strike In the Back.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Defied. Sylens assumed that Far Zenith would need to keep Aloy alive as the Living Macguffin needed to access the Gaia system and download the component A.I.s, but he didn't see them being able to grow another clone of Elisabet they could use instead. Upon seeing Aloy, Gerard immediately considers her unnecessary trouble and orders her killed, and does so every single time they cross paths afterwards, with Aloy only surviving the second time with Tilda's assistance.

Erik Visser

Voiced by: Marc Kudisch (English)

The military commander of Far Zenith and their go-to enforcer when dealing with 'hostile fauna' of Earth. His childish glee at a fight belies his startling threat from his advanced weaponry.

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• Ax-Crazy: According to Tilda he was "always a bloodthirsty psychopath" though he grew worse over time. There were rumors he personally hunted and killed some of his targets for the thrill of it. He spent his time in VR simulations going on rampages as violent as he pleased, but, as he tells Aloy when they first meet, nothing beats watching the life go out of someone's eyes in real-life.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Downplayed on his part as he's one of the two secondary antagonists that Aloy faces in the game along with Regalla, but he is the penultimate foe and a thorn to Aloy before the main confrontation between the two primary Big Bads of the game.
• Bling of War: The three main Zenith members have distinctive variations of their standard looks. In Erik's case his is modeled after a military uniform, with his shoulder ornaments resembling metallic epaulettes and his suit resembling highly-flashy armour.
• Blood Knight: He notes that he's spent a lot of time training in VR simulators on Far Zenith's ship and has performed Neck Snaps on his holographic opponents in preparation for landing on Earth, noting that nothing compares to actually performing the real thing. During Aloy's first 'fight' with him, he's gleeful at the challenge and childishly taunts her to focus on fighting him rather than attacking the arena around them.
• Brought Down to Badass: While disabling his shield makes a fight against him winnable, he is still far from a pushover.
• Climax Boss: He's fought during the midst of the attack on the Far Zenith base, giving Aloy, Zo and the player catharsis for avenging Varl's death at Erik's hands. Aloy then rescues Beta, finds out about Nemesis, and is betrayed by Tilda who serves as the Final Boss.
• Co-Dragons: While Tilda serves as Gerard Bieri's lieutenant (left-hand), Erik serves as the main enforcer of Far Zenith and is essentially the right-hand man of Gerard. Subverted for the fact after Tilda is revealed to have an agenda of her own as she's part of the duumvirate with Gerard.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To Helis as they are The Dragon to the Big Bad. Both are vicious military commanders of their respective organisation, with Helis to the Eclipse and Erik to the Zeniths. Helis is a Psycho Supporter to Jiran during the Red Raids, who willingly carried out atrocities in the name of his devotion to the Mad Sun-King, but he has some tiny semblance of standards. Erik is a pure-and-simple Blood Knight and a textbook Psycho for Hire who takes pleasure in fighting and mass-murdering innocents often with sadism and glee, regardless of who he faces for his entertainment, while showing no remorse for his kills. Their weapons also vastly contrast to one another. With Helis, he uses a sword and a blast sling, while Erik uses advanced weapons including a nanomachine-infused golden blade and a golden hand cannon, as well as him being capable of dishing out various attacks.
• Corporate Warfare: His specialty in the Old World when clients needed the "human touch" was force of arms with his company First Imperator.
• Die Laughing: After his rematch with Aloy, he chuckles a bit at remembering what it feels like to be hurt. He stops laughing when Zo runs him through with Varl's spear and throws his own Pre-Mortem One-Liner to Varl back at him.
• Fantastic Racism: He views Earthborn humans as "vermin" to the point of having an AI attract deadly machines to "exterminate" any that get too close to the Far Zenith base.
• Feel No Pain: Courtesy of spending the majority of his time in VR sims and the Deflector Shields he has activated every time he goes on missions, Erik never feels any of his enemies blows. His last words before his death are that he almost forgot what it was like to be hurt.
• Four-Star Badass: Erik is Far Zenith's military commander and the only one that gives a good fight once his shields are disabled.
• Frontline General: Back when he was head of a private military company he'd sometimes get involved in hunting targets directly just for the thrill of killing them.
• Hero Killer: The second time he shows up, there's no way out for Aloy and her allies and he again shrugs off all their attacks, incapacitates Aloy with an Arm Cannon, and then overpowers and impales Varl when he futilely stands between him and Beta, mocking him that the 'fight' should be fun for both of them.
• Immortal Immaturity: He's a centuries-old Undying Warrior with the demeanor of a Psychopathic Manchild.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Zo kills him by running him through the back with Varl's spear.
• Ironic Echo: When he kills Varl, he lets him futilely try to hold him off with his spear and mocking commends his spirit for it, saying that now they're both having fun. During the Final Battle, when Aloy has him beaten and at her mercy, she lets Zo approach him from behind and impale him in a similar fashion with Varl's spear, Zo having seen Varl's death through his focus and throwing Eric's own words back at him.
• It's Personal with the Dragon: Beyond his and Aloy's first meeting, where he demonstrates an interest in the challenge of killing her, Varl's death at his hands makes both Aloy and Zo pissed at him, and during the Final Battle they both team up to take him on, once his impenetrable shields are down. Aloy even lets Zo get the killing blow in on him.
• Just Toying with Them: Twice. He's invincible during his first fight with Aloy and armed with advanced technology, but instead of killing her during the boss battle, he draws it out to enjoy the "fight" as much as possible (whistling merrily at moments), giving Aloy the opportunity to escape. He acts similarly when up against Varl, letting him get some ineffective hits in before Gerard orders Erik to stop screwing around, ending with Erik killing Varl.
• Made of Iron: When Sylens shuts down his shields, he's still capable of putting up a serious fight with Aloy and tanking numerous arrows and explosions, though he does need to equip a futuristic helmet in addition to his body armor now.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: He's a very wealthy "Erik" who founded a private military company First Imperator, making him a far more physically threatening version of Erik Prince, founder of the Blackwater PMC, a company whose reputation for war crimes led to no fewer than three name changes. Although Prince is probably no slouch as a former SEAL.
• Private Military Contractors: His role in the Old World was being head of a mercenary band, working for clients who needed a "more personal touch" like retrieving high-value VIPs compared to the robot armies who were starting to replace flesh and blood soldiers, which made him wealthy enough to join Far Zenith.
• Psycho for Hire: Prior to becoming immortal and sating his bloodlust in VR rampages, he worked as part of a PMC and was rumored to personally hunt down and kill targets occasionally for the thrill of it.
• Psychopathic Manchild: He's centuries-old but acts like an excitable kid playing a game whenever tasked with murdering someone. Right before he murders Varl he cheerfully asks, "Now we're having fun, right?"
• Shout-Out: He's named after the protagonist in the 1988 Dutch thriller Amsterdamned. Considering that Guerilla Games is a Dutch developer, this makes perfect sense.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Between his physically imposing physique, close-range combat style, genuine love of deadly combat and slaughter, status as the main subordinate of the enemy faction who tangles with Aloy several times with a clear advantage, getting her at his mercy right as she obtains the objective she needs to resolve the crisis in the region and stop the immediate threat, and still failing to kill her through his personality deficiencies— in his case, not treating the combat with any level of seriousness— as well as being the penultimate boss and the toughest human enemy in the game, Erik is basically the Far Zenith version of Helis. The comparisons get stronger when he kills Varl, who was another Nora brave Aloy had gotten close to and played an important role in her journey, physically overpowering him and impaling him in the chest like Helis did to Rost, with Aloy again Forced to Watch due to being incapacitated by Erik's Arm Cannon blast.
• Undying Warrior: Thanks to the Longevity Treatment he could spend a millennium reliving his glory days "snapping necks in VR", likely making new scenarios just for the challenge. These centuries of experience coupled with his various sci-fi weaponry making him an incomparable threat. That said this is still a sci-fi universe, take away his shields, stab him in the heart, and he dies just like anyone else.
• Villainous Valour: Credit where it's due, for all that he's a Psychopathic Manchild who doesn't treat the life or death battles he so enjoys with any respect or gravitas, Eric seems to be the only member of Far Zenith who can actually hold his own in a fight. He mentions that he's put a lot of hours training in VR combat simulations, and when Sylens manages to shut down Far Zenith's shields he's the only one that can still put up a fight on his own rather than getting steamrolled instantly by the machines and human combatants. Even Tilda still requires a Mech suit to serve as the Final Boss.
• War God: The Quen consider him a patron of strength and courage, and credit his teachings for giving them their military edge over their rivals.

Song Jiao

A member of Far Zenith, Song was a monocular biologist whose work helped the group live their long lives.

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• The Ghost: Only spoken of and read about in data points. She died on Sirius.
• Healer God: The Quen consider her a matron of life and death, and credit her teachings for giving them their advanced medical technology.
• Immortal Genius: From what Tilda says she kept up her own studies while in the colony and kept her edge throughout, and was as long-lived as the rest of Far Zenith, having invented the treatment they use to live for centuries.
• Longevity Treatment: She helped create the treaments that Far Zenith has used to live for centuries, though it was thanks to the leg work of the science team on Earth that she was able to perfect it.
• Token Good Teammate: Tilda namedrops her as one of the few good members of Far Zenith, but the way she phrases it suggests that Tilda might have simply seen Song as one of the most intellectually stimulating of the group. On the other hand, one datapoint has her railing against a price-hike for her longevity treatments putting them out of reach for anyone but the elite, suggesting a generous spirit.

Stanley Chen

Voiced by: Lobo Chan (English)

A member of Far Zenith, Stan got a second chance at life through Las Vegas and dedicated his life to the city.

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• Fling a Light into the Future: Instead of shutting down Las Vegas like he originally planned once the Faro Plague came to be, he put the entire system running the city on standby, hopeful that it will become a hotbed of entertainment once again. Sure enough, Morlund, Abadund, and Stemmur begin to do just that. Aloy can join as well if she goes out of her way to find the Ornaments scattered throughout the Forbidden West.
• The Ghost: Only heard of through Audio logs. He died on Sirius.
• Man of the City: Was this to Las Vegas, the desert pearl gave him a second chance at life and he gave it back when water scarcity almost closed the city down. Before departing with Far Zenith he went out of his way to keep it preserved for any future civilization as a last gift to the old girl.
• My Greatest Second Chance: The reason he loved Las Vegas so much. After being tricked by his own lawyer and having his life's project ruined, Chen was left with only $88,000.00 to his name. Deciding to leave his future to fate, Chen went to a casino and bet the entire amount on the roulette wheel, number 8... and won, earning nearly $3.2 million. This good luck renewed his dreams and made him go back to work, becoming a billionaire years later. When Las Vegas was about to become a Ghost City due to the lack of water, feeling that it was the city that gave him a second chance at life, he decided to do the same, creating and implementing a water project that saved the city.
• Token Good Teammate: While listening to the datapoints he left in Las Vegas, Aloy is surprised to find he was with Far Zenith at all, given her understandably very negative experience with and opinion of them. Chen is explicitly called this by Tilda. Unlike other members of the collective, who largely seem to have been entirely self-involved, he "threw open his doors" to anyone that wanted to experience his recreation of Vegas and other destinations, getting a vicarious sense of joy out of showing these places off. He was likely the builder of any sense of community the collective had.

Tilda van der Meer

Voiced by: Carrie-Anne Moss (English)

A member of Far Zenith, Tilda is originally from the Netherlands. She was particularly close to Elisabet Sobeck.

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• Actor Allusion:
  • This isn't the first time Carrie-Anne played a superpowered, Aloof Action Girl who rebels against VR-laden CyberPunk overlords in a machine-infested, post-apocalyptic Earth (i.e. Trinity in The Matrix).
  • It also isn't the first time she played a self-made, Machiavellian lesbian who isn't above stabbing her allies in the back out of survival and self-interest.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Aloy is clearly saddened about having to kill Tilda, whispering "Why couldn't you just let me choose?" to her before finding out she was already dead.
• All Take and No Give: She describes her relationship with Elisabet as much. Far Zenith's attempt to steal GAIA was just The Last Straw.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: Alongside Gerard Bieri as one of the two main antagonists of Horizon Forbidden West, who both want to steal GAIA but for different reasons. While Gerard poses the most immediate threat to Aloy's group, Tilda herself shares his goal of fleeing into deep space and starting humanity anew, leaving Earth to be ravaged by Nemesis. The real difference is that she just wants Aloy by her side during it, being the only Zenith to crave genuine companionship, but it is clear in her betrayal that the end of her goals are just as similar to Gerard. It is also revealed in Burning Shores however that she's the one who masterminded the plan in the first place, as shown in one of Londra's datapoints prior to Nemesis' terror in Sirius, where Gerard led the rest of the Zeniths, herself included (not without some reservations), of visiting Earth to take GAIA away, making both him and her having the equal hand to the main conflict of Forbidden West.
• Big Bad Ensemble: Both her and Gerard serve as the game's Big Bad Duumvirate, while Regalla serves as a separate antagonist who has an agenda of her own.
• The Chessmaster: When she discovers Aloy, she quickly formulates a plan to wipe out the other Zeniths so she can force her to be her immortal lover to rekindle the romance she shared with Elisabet, her genetic template. Gets immensely creepy once you factor in the thousand-year age difference and that Elisabet is something of Aloy's mother. This fits, seeing as in Tilda's former life on Earth, she became rich as an information broker.
• Co-Dragons: Eventually Subverted in the final end of the game. She serves as the left-hand man to Gerard, along with Erik as Gerard's right-hand man, albeit it turns out she has her own agenda since she's part of the story's Big Bad Duumvirate. Then it gets to its head when she eventually betrays him at the end.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Where most of Zero Dawn villains were some variation of "ignorant, politically conservative and religiously fanatic males", Tilda is the opposite of all these things. She upholds more liberal values, including being a lesbian due to her past relationship with Elisabet Sobeck and is an apolitical atheist who is well-aware of the state of her own world. She also heavily contrasts to Helis.
  • Helis is deeply loyal to Jiran, albeit on the levels of fanaticism, who wants to devotedly follow his footsteps to take over Meridian and murder Avad, but he's mostly on the orders of a genocidal AI who has much more ulterior motives than him. Tilda is portrayed as a defector who hatches a plan to backstab them, betray Gerard, its current leader, and the rest of its members, so that she would intend to use Aloy for the same goal as the Zeniths: leave Earth to Nemesis.
  • Helis only understands technology through HADES and Sylens, and is stuck with his Fatal Flaw of his Black-and-White Morality, his arrogance and single-minded obsession over Aloy. Tilda is also much more intelligent and cunning than Helis, owing to her occupation as a hacker and is a much more complex character due to her Greying Morality.
  • Helis serves as Zero Dawn's Climax Boss before HADES, but Tilda serves as the Final Boss after Erik, Forbidden West's Climax Boss. Both Helis and Tilda have some connections to Aloy, but on a differing scale. Helis serves as Aloy's Arch-Nemesis and the main killer of Rost, who knows her because of her thwarting many of the Eclipse's machine-digging operations. Tilda knows Aloy due to being the genetic clone of Elisabet Sobeck, a "superior" version of her former love, where she is less being Aloy's nemesis but her refusal of her questionable offer ultimately made her the personal threat to Aloy at the end, making her equally no better than the stereotypical male oppressors.
  • They are also The Dragon to the Big Bad, but unlike Helis who is simply as one towards HADES without even knowing its true nature; Tilda is one of Gerard's Co-Dragons with Erik with an agenda of her own, but is actually a part of Forbidden West's Big Bad Duumvirate with Gerard (due to her being the one responsible for hatching Gerard's plan) as well as a Big Bad Ensemble with him and Regalla.
• Dead-Hand Shot: After Spectre Prime explodes and ejects the capsule Tilda had been using to pilot it, a cutscene plays where the camera lingers on Tilda's limp hand as the only visible part of her emerging from the pod that is now burning.
• Defector from Decadence: Subverted. She would have Aloy believe that Tilda was an artist who found her way into Far Zenith almost on accident. Her fortune was made when technology she developed to identify sophisticated forgeries of art turned out to be useful for cryptography and counterintelligence. She was extended an invitation to Far Zenith back when it was an exploration mission, rather than a life boat. She found her company of sociopathic uber-capitalists uncomfortable, and ultimately defected to Aloy's team after reviewing the data on her old focus and seeing that Zero Dawn was a better way forward. She's actually backstabbing Far Zenith to get her fellow sociopaths out of the way, so she can carry out their plan but with Aloy as her companion. It's a very similar plan to that of Walter Londra, the villain of the Burning Shores DLC. Aloy doesn't fall for either of them.
• Dragon with an Agenda: While she acts as Gerard's left-hand for most of the game along with Erik as his right-hand, it's clear that she plans to stab him in the back at the end, due to her being a Defector from Decadence. Even though that doesn't stop her from showing her true nature to Aloy after betraying Gerard at the end.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: She takes the success of Project Zero Dawn not as proof that Elisabet was right, but that both she and Tilda were wrong- Elisabet for caring about Earth, and Tilda for letting Elisabet make her own decisions. Far Zenith's original plan of "throw the privileged few into a tin can and run" still seems superior to her.
• Early-Bird Cameo: She's first heard trying to convince Elisabet to still send Far Zenith a copy of APOLLO as part of the original deal for Zero Dawn to get Ectogenic Chambers in the aftermath of Far Zenith trying to steal a copy of GAIA. She comes back into the story later as a major character.
• Elemental Motifs: She's never far from a source of water, whether that source is the flood in her backstory, her beachside house, or the river that almost drowns Aloy soon after their first meeting. Here the water has negative connotations; secretiveness, excessive sentimentalism, and erosion.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: She is fine with massacring Earth's tribal natives, but not because she considers them subhuman. She just doesn't respect human life that much in general, saying that sometimes many have to be sacrificed to save others. The parallels this has with Ted Faro's reasoning for deleting the APOLLO archives hints to her true nature.
• Establishing Character Moment: While her colleagues are flummoxed by Aloy's appearance, Tilda correctly intuits her origin and reason for being there, showing that she's intelligent and very quick on the uptake. One could almost think she expected the outcome.
• Evil All Along: When Aloy officially meets her, she acts as an outlier to the Far Zenith's plans to destroy the Earth's biosphere, thinking of them as a bunch of hedonists while she desires to do something good. After Aloy manages to rescue Beta and take out the other Zeniths, it's revealed that she left a lot of details out: Far Zenith's colony of Sirius was destroyed by a Digital Abomination of their own making and she intends on taking Aloy with her into space, spending the rest of eternity with her under the deluded idea that she has a second chance at "saving" Elisabet and is perfectly willing to let humanity be driven to extinction all over again if it means accomplishing this. However, this doesn't mean she was ever trusted by the Base Team.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: She did not anticipate that Elisabet would stay angry at her for Far Zenith's attempted GAIA theft, which says a lot about the kind of person Tilda was.
• Exact Words: Tilda says to Aloy a couple times that she wants to help Aloy build the world Elisabet wanted. We don't find out until the very end that (thanks to Nemesis) she meant to do this on some other planet besides Earth.
• Fatal Flaw: Greed. She could have stayed on a reborn Earth, close to the only person she loved (albeit not in the way Tilda wanted), revered for her technological knowledge, and free from punishment for her many crimes. But she wanted more, and so she got herself killed trying to crush Aloy's free will. Better to rule in Hell...
• Final Boss: She pilots a mech suit designated "Spectre Prime" against Aloy to beat her into submission and force her aboard Far Zenith's escape ship off-planet, becoming the final boss of Forbidden West.
• Foil: To Alva. Both have suffered from disastrous floods, but Alva chose to improve the world; Tilda chose to let her distrust and resentment towards the entire planet fester.
  • Is also one to Aloy. When the Earth is facing complete ecological annihilation, Aloy fights tooth-and-nail to save it and its people, while Tilda opts to flee and start it over on another planet. Both also wind up disappointed in Beta through their early intereactions because of how dissimilar she is to Elisabet. Aloy, who cares for others in an altruistic manner, realizes her mistake and is able to mend their relationship by being supportive of her regardless. Tilda meanwhile only cared about Beta from a self-centered perspective to have her long-lost lover back, and so discards Beta when she doesn't live up to what she wanted.
• Friendless Background: Survived a terrorist attack when she was eight that killed her parents, shipped off to boarding school by an aunt, before Tilda even recovered she was labeled as the "weird kid" and was stuck that way all through her schooling, never making friends.
• Gold and White Are Divine: As one of the 3 most powerful Zenith members she stands out due to her white and gold dress-like suit.Fitting for the game's final boss.
• Hazy-Feel Turn: She's well aware of the despicable traits of her associates and she turns on them when she realizes how much Aloy has accomplished. That said Tilda remains in many ways a coward who'd rather flee than accomplish anything good. She wants Aloy to come with her and leave Earth to Nemesis. When Aloy won't come, the two fight, leading to Tilda's death.
• Ice Queen: The current inhabitants of Earth find Tilda...unreal, in a bad way. She doesn't show deep emotion about anything, she isn't connected to anything like a tribe or a home, and she's not interested in interacting with anyone- human, animal, or AI- other than Aloy. In a setting full of cultural markings and personalization, Tilda's generic fashion stands out.
• I Just Want to Be Loved: It's implied that the tragic loss of Tilda's parents, coupled with her difficulty making friends, influenced her patronizing attitude towards the people she cares about.
• Ink-Suit Actor: Tilda's face is clearly modeled after Carrie-Anne Moss'.
• It's All About Me: Tilda is fine with betraying Far Zenith and leaving everyone else on Earth to die as long as she gets to have Aloy. When Aloy predictably is not cool with this, she tries to force her.
• Just Following Orders: She claims un-involvement with Far Zenith's darker plans, and that she can't publicly criticize them without risking her life. Which is probably true, but it's also true that she abandoned Beta entirely of her own volition, and only tried to leave Zenith once other people found a way to fight them effectively and she stood to gain by doing so.
• Kick the Dog: Calling Beta an "inferior copy" of Elisabet to her face, making it clear she didn't close their private Data Channel to keep Beta safe from the other Zeniths but because the girl failed to live up to her expectations of what Beta should be.
• Knowledge Broker: She made her fortune in the Old World as an information broker, and kept an entrance concealed from her comrades in case she ever needed to escape.
• Light Is Good: While the rest of Far Zenith are dressed in darker shades of grey, green and blue, Tilda dresses in white which, combined with her protective force-field, makes her look like she's glowing. She's also the only member of Far Zenith who's against their "factory reset" plan in wiping out Earth's biosphere, as well as having an appreciation for art and legacy that is noticeably absent in her peers. Subverted when its revealed that she never wanted to save Earth, intending on leaving with Aloy with all of Far Zenith's resources (without her consent) to avoid Nemesis.
• Love Makes You Crazy: She loved Elisabet and had a thousand years to regret losing her to the Faro Plague. This leads to her trying to forcibly take Aloy away with her as she considers her the perfected version of her past love.
• Loving a Shadow: Tilda probably thinks she loves Aloy, seeing her as the best possible version of Elisabet. The truth is her 'love' for Elisabet was very deluded, and she is confused and frustrated that Beta and later Aloy don't conform to her incredibly self-centered expectations for them.
• My Greatest Second Chance: For a thousand years she's regretted leaving Elisabet behind to die on a doomed Earth, which is why she claims she's turning against Far Zenith to help Aloy save the world. It turns out the regret is real but her motives are not. She believes Earth is still doomed, this time because of the malevolent AI Nemesis, and wants to take GAIA and Aloy—whom she views as the best possible version of Elisabet as opposed to Beta, the "inferior copy"—to another world to realize Elisabet's dream. When Aloy refuses, Tilda tries to kidnap her, becoming the Final Boss.
• Narcissist: What she ultimately turns out to be and which is hinted at early. When Varl dies and Beta is taken, rather than expressing her condolences, she shows Aloy her art collection (and notably she makes no attempt to rescue Aloy until both Varl and Beta, her friends and teammates, are out of the picture). The first time her voice is heard in a conversation with Elisabet, Tilda expresses very little sympathy for how she betrayed Elisabet's trust. She constantly talks about how amazing Elisabet was and how she sees all of her grandeur in Aloy, but there is always a hint of possessiveness to it. Tilda mentions that she was with Elisabet at some point, but the latter slowly but surely turned away as Tilda wanted more. It seems likely that it was Tilda's narcissism that did it. All of the Far Zenith crew possess this trait, only whereas they wanted money or power over material things, Tilda wanted power over Elisabet.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: She convinced Elisabet to honor her deal with Far Zenith and give them a copy of APOLLO despite Far Zenith trying to steal GAIA. Elisabet reluctantly does so. A thousand years later their copy of APOLLO is the last surviving one, thanks to Ted Faro's meddling. It is subsequently added to the rebooted GAIA.
• Not So Above It All: Tilda may present herself as more benevolent than the sociopathic rest of Far Zenith, but she shows much of the same arrogance and Fantastic Racism. Even after defecting, she limits her interactions to ones with Aloy, and otherwise shows blatant condescension towards others, even ones as intelligent and dangerous as Sylens. At the finale, Tilda reveals she's just as willing to cut and run from Nemesis as Gerard, only that she wants to take Aloy with her.
• Prophetic Name: A tilde, in computer programming, symbolizes a function that tests variables for similarity, much as Tilda is constantly comparing people to Elisabet.
• Replacement Goldfish: She deeply loved Elisabet and spent a thousand years regretting the latter turned down her offer to join her aboard the Odyssey. Tilda sees much of Elisabet in Aloy, and is obsessed with having Aloy at her side, because she couldn't have Elisabet.
• Secret Test of Character: Double Subverted. Tilda claims that she wasn't giving this to Beta, that she cut off their private sessions to protect her. This is later revealed to be a lie: the existence of Nemesis was something Tilda expected Beta to intuit, and her failure in this was why Tilda cut Beta out.
  • The scene with the paintings is also this since it's very similar to Beta's test (viewing human works in Tilda's home). While Aloy's more face-value observations on them frustrate her, Tilda notes that this is very much how Elisabet acted, so Aloy passes the test and Tilda deems her close enough to meet her standards.
• Spanner in the Works: Fittingly, she's the spanner to Faro's work. Despite Faro delusionally deleting APOLLO to hide his crimes and guide the new humanity himself, it's later revealed Sobeck gave one of the copies of APOLLO to her (some years before the aforementioned deletion), which is the only way the new humanity has any hope of gaining their pre-Faro Plague status back, despite the intelligence itself being in a currently defunct state.
• Sympathy for the Hero: For a given value of "sympathy". Her battle dialogue includes lines like "How much pain are you going to take?!" and "Don't make me hurt you!".
• Technician Versus Performer: Performer. Her interpretation of art prioritizes how it makes her feel, and she gets annoyed when Aloy focuses more on its pragmatic details (what the subjects are doing, how they're dressed, etc).
• The Social Darwinist: She doesn't love anything useless, whether it's planets or people. Of course, her standards for 'useful' bear no relation to what can be reasonably expected of the subject, or whether Tilda played a role in making the subject useless to begin with.
• Too Much Alike: One reason her relationship with Elizabet tanked was because they were both ambitious introverts that felt driven to preserve the parts of Earth most important to them.
• Token Good Teammate: She's introduced this way when Aloy first meets Far Zenith, in contrast to Gerard and Erik, she quickly deduces the reason for Aloy's existence and tries to argue in favor of keeping her alive to gain increased accessibility to the GAIA terraforming system from two clones of Elisabet only for Gerard to overrule her because he thinks Aloy is too much trouble to be kept alive. Beta later shares to Aloy that Tilda was the only Zenith member who treated her differently, accessing private chat sessions in her holo-simulations so they could talk together and sharing with Beta the joys of art and culture from the lost Earth. Tilda callously and one-sidedly terminating these conversations turns out to be Foreshadowing that she's not as different from Far Zenith's worst traits as she seems. By the Final Battle, she is helping Aloy to kill them all just to get her close enough to the Far Zenith escape ship so that Tilda can force Aloy onto it with the GAIA terraforming system and flee the planet before Nemesis arrived. This would explicitly leave Aloy and Tilda the last remaining humans in the universe, and Tilda makes it clear that she's forcing this on Aloy out of her warped 'love' for Elisabet, being fine with leaving everybody else to die so long as she gets what she wants.
• Trash Talk: She is quite boastful during her battle with Aloy.
  "Sticks and stones against the lightning."
• Underestimating Badassery: She claims to respect Aloy's strength- and has literally seen projections of her defeating a Faro war machine- yet she believes that she'll be able to subdue her with a Zenith Spectre. Yes, this Spectre is stronger than the ones Aloy has defeated before, but she has a history of winning with the odds severely against her.
  • Datamined voice lines all but confirm that Tilda was part of the plan to steal from Zero Dawn- a team of some of the most hardworking geniuses known to man- despite her claims otherwise.
• Unreliable Narrator: Given how violently obsessive Tilda is over getting Aloy to be with her, it's not beyond the realms of possibility that Elisabet rejected her and she didn't handle it well, and so she is romanticising the whole debacle as a tragic love story (rather than her being just a Stalker with a Crush).
• Unskilled, but Strong: Her elaborate mecha suit does not make up for her dearth of combat experience. Aloy is just flesh and blood, but she easily takes down the former alone- in part because Tilda makes rookie mistakes like letting emotion distract her and assuming she can't lose. By comparison, the centuries-obsolete Final Boss of the first game required many people to defeat it.
• Villain Respect: She develops a measure of respect for Sylens for figuring out a way to disable the Zeniths' shields, even admitting to Aloy that he is an 'exceptional man'.
• Villainous Valour: She continues to participate in the final battle alongside Aloy's other allies even after Sylens disables all of the Zeniths' shields, and is shown performing much more competently than the other Zeniths save for Erik. She still needs to take refuge in a giant mech drone for the Final Boss fight.
• Walking Spoiler: Nearly everything about her, her past and her role in the story is a spoiler.
• Wicked Cultured: Before Far Zenith, Tilda was a lover and collector of Dutch art, which she shares with both Beta and Aloy when she gets the chance.
• Wife Husbandry: This is one of the reasons Tilda set up a private channel with Beta. She wanted to nurture Beta into an exact copy of Elisabet Sobeck, Tilda's past lover and Beta's genetic template, effectively turning Beta into a Replacement Goldfish for Sobeck. Unfortunately, Beta fails to meet Tilda's expectations and is deemed an "inferior copy".
• Yandere: It's quite clear by the time you get through chatting with her at her mansion that she had very strong, possessive feelings regarding Elisabet. And she views Aloy as a Replacement Goldfish for Elisabet, intending to kidnap her into space to force "the best Elisabet" to be by her side for eternity.

Verbena Sutter

Voiced by: Salena Qureshi (English)

A member of Far Zenith, tasked with watching over Beta as she does missions on Earth.

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• Bad Influencer: Inherited billions at age 24 and became the world's most eligible bachelorette, and was known as a "Life Designer", which gets directly compared to a Cult leader.
• Defeating the Undefeatable: The point of her role in the story. After Erik's strong showing against Aloy, Verbena's death demonstrates that without their technological advantages, Far Zenith aren't invincible, and actually kinda suck in life-or-death combat due to their complacency and belief in their superiority against the 'savages' populating Earth. Beta is outright shocked at hearing she died.
• Didn't See That Coming: She's shocked and outraged when Sylens' weapon removed her shields and failed to realise that she should start taking the combat much more seriously before a Tenakth rebel runs his machete into her gut. It's clear that the concept that the backwoods savages she was "fighting" were actually capable of killing her never crossed her mind until she was impaled through the chest, and even her Mutual Kill on the rebel that took her down seemed more out of spiteful disbelief at her own mortality.
• Disposable Fiancé: Let's Call The Whole Thing Off variety, five years before the Faro Plague she was on her seventeenth engagement, with celebrity magazines guessing that it wouldn't work out just like the previous ones.
• Escort Mission: Was essentially doing this for The Asset AKA Beta before she was given the slip, she's been trying to find the asset since.
• Mutual Kill: After her shields go down, she manages to kill the rebel who mortally stabs her with a blast of her Arm Cannon before dying.
• Ojou: Another way to look at her, she has all the hall marks of an arrogant patrician.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: "Rules" is loose here, but: in the old days, Far Zenith was prioritizing people who could be useful in developing their new colony in Sirius for berths on the Odyssey. Verbena is merely an influencer. While never outright stated, it's implied that her significant financial contribution secured her a spot.
• Small Role, Big Impact: Her purpose in the game is to show that the members of Far Zenith, while dangerous, are not completely invincible. She is there to have her shields disrupted and to be killed so that Aloy and her companions (and by extension the player) can find out that Sylens figured out how to kill the Zeniths.
• This Cannot Be!: Her response once her shields go down is to exclaim, "What the hell?" before getting killed.
• Underestimating Badassery: Her attitude during her fight with the ambushing rebels is one of total dismissal, and even with her shields down and her Specter companion dead it never crosses her mind that she should fear for her life when a Rebel is charging her down with a drawn blade until it's too late for her. This turns out to be indicative of Far Zenith's attitude overall, as they are dangerous only because of their technological edge protecting them from the lethality of the world, and their extended lifespan has made them dismissive of life-threatening situations that the survivors of Earth treat with appropriate seriousness.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: She dies in the same scene she's introduced in, and the entire point of her existence was more to demonstrate that Far Zenith can be killed once their technology is bypassed. What little we see of her personality indicates she's very much the same kind of arrogant manchild the rest of Far Zenith are, coming across more as a little girl upset at the raiders for breaking her stuff than seeing them as serious threats.

Osvald Dalgaard

Voiced by: John Chancer (English)

The Danish tech CEO of AllSeeing.holo, the world's most popular holofilm sharing service during the time of the Old Ones, and The Face of Far Zenith.

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• The Face: Served as the public face of Far Zenith and its spokesperson to the rest of the world, being the only publicly acknowledged member of the group.
• Keet: His interviewer describes him as endlessly enthusiastic.
• Virtual Ghost: Possibly; it's never actually stated when it was deemed he no longer useful and thus was killed by Far Zenith. This means it's entirely possible that the holograms Aloy and Varl saw in the Far Zenith Facility were of the digital puppet, serving his role after his death.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: A data log Aloy ally find in the data centre talks abut how, whilst his people skills were useful in recruiting support for Far Zenith, Osvald didn't have any skills pertaining to scientific pursuits that would be useful to the organisation's long-term prospects, and due to the limited number of seats aboard the Odyssey, he would have to be excluded in favour of more 'useful' applicants. Though given that the shortlist included an influencer and a fast food magnate, 'useful' is relative. It's noted that he'd retaliate if they publicly excluded him, so they would need to give him a proper send-off. The log mentions that they have enough archived footage of him to create a digital puppet to still fulfill his role even without him.

Walter Londra (SPOILERS)

Voiced by: Sam Witwer

The CEO and the magnate of the space-mining company Heaven¢ (Heavensent) and the Arc Villain of the Burning Shores DLC.

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• A God Am I: Walter wants to make a colony of people all brainwashed to serve him, even new people he creates through cloning.
• Arc Villain: The Big Bad of the Burning Shores DLC, Walter is the last of the Zeniths who would become the leader of his own Quen Devotees.
• Bad Boss: Like the rest of the Zeniths, he was a selfish and entitled egotist who saw his own workers as disposable, especially unfortunate because of how dangerous his company's work was. His time off-world has done nothing to temper this, having turned a fraction of the Quen into a Cult he planned on leaving behind on a doomed Earth when he's done with them.
  Walter: The accident has disturbed the ants - lawyers and publicists swarming to do damage control, carping about incalculable losses. What they don't see is that each death is a lesson in complacency inspiring us for future excellence.
• Bodyguard Betrayal: Suffered one of the personal, non-lethal variety. He divorced his wife after she had an affair with his bodyguard, whom he had ordered to tail her to ensure she wasn't having an affair.
• Control Freak: He has a paranoid fear of people betraying him and it has made him into one of these. He makes dozens and dozens of alterations of Nova's personality daily, puts his Quen Disciples through a brainwashing process and selects concubines from them through a rigorous "audition" process. Even his big plan will involve him brainwashing an entire civilization of clones into submissive slaves who worship him.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: To both the rest of the Zeniths and Ted Faro.
  • Despite being a member of Far Zenith (themselves a contrast to HADES, the Eclipse and the machines from the first game), he is totally different to them in more ways than one:
    • Visually, he's physically distinct compared to Erik, Gerard, and Tilda who all border into the creepy portrayal of physical and uncanny agelessness, looking more aged and "natural".
    • While his plot also involves getting offworld before NEMESIS arrives, he also takes the opportunity to exploit the Quen’s worship of the Old Ones to set himself up as a cult leader.
    • And in contrast to the other Zeniths, he's willing to take some of the locals with him. He "auditions" his followers to select those with personalities like those of his old inner circle, including his lost love, and then plans to escape the coming apocalypse on a new planet with his new retinue, ruling as a god over an utterly compliant population comprised of clones of his other followers.
    • While he is also a Final Boss, he uses an ancient Horus during his boss battle and is more of a Puzzle Boss, in contrast to Tilda who used an appropriately futuristic Specter Prime exoframe in her own boss battle who directly fights Aloy.
  • He also contrasts to Ted Faro to the following:
    • Both are business magnates of their own time and are also the executives of their own company. But their successes are different. Faro and his company, Faro Automated Solutions, started as a magnate for "green solutions" who played a role in the creation of the Focuses, as well as with him and Sobeck playing a role in the Clawback decade, saving the world from extinction through the green technologies he made, before transitioning into the military market, skyrocketing him to fame at the expense of avarice and recklessness. Londra is the CEO of Heaven Cent, a space-mining company in charge of mining asteroids for rare Earth metals, with many of his missions catapulting him into fame and riches, but is also black-hearted who is willing to cover up the deaths of his own employees thanks to his own recklessness.
    • Whereas Ted Faro is an egotistical Narcissist who only cares for fame and fortune at the direct expense of humanity's life, Londra is a callous, manipulative Control Freak who uses the Quen's blind devotion towards their "ancestors" to brainwash them with the MSP so that he can retrieve DNA samples from the Quen and create clones of them for his own civilisation in another world while ensuring that anyone will bow to his whim.
    • Unlike Faro who started off as a genuine hero to the world before descending into complete villainy over time, Londra is immediately evil and does not bother hiding his truly malicious nature to his former employees in the past and to Aloy in the present.
• Cult: He takes advantage of Clarke's Third Law and portrays himself to the lost Quen as a divine being, making himself the figurehead of a cult so that he could brainwash them into his soldiers, harvest their DNA for cloning material, select a few of them to be his personal concubines and rule over a new civilization as a God, all with the false-promise of taking them to an off-world paradise.
• Defector from Decadence: Zigzagged. He abandoned the other Zeniths after reaching Earth out of his disgust for him, but he's just as bad and arguably worse.
• Egomaniac Hunter: A data point in the office of his old company headquarters indicates that he made arrangements to kill one of the last black rhinos in the world just because he could. And the rifle he used appears to have been an assault rifle rather than a hunting rifle.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: Deconstructed. He loved his wife Evelyn, even after a bitter divorce and a thousand years (not that it stopped him from leaving her behind on a doomed Earth). However, what we see of his love is undercut by his controlling behavior and paranoia, with the latter contributing to the breakdown of his marriage. In the present, his affection comes off more as an unhealthy obsession: he designed Nova to sound and act like her, constantly altering her personality to try and make her more like his late wife, and part of the "audition" process for his harem is that he has them act out a scene from one of her holo-films.
• Foil: To Aloy. His "relationship" with Kina reflects Aloy's with Seyka, with both Walter and Aloy giving each respective sister a sense of home. The difference is that whereas Walter is manpulating Kina and just trying to control her for his own selfish gain, Aloy legitimately likes Seyka and thus has no desire to control her.
• Fling a Light into the Future: After Walter's death, Aloy and Sylens find a file left behind in his Focus detailing a list of 21st century companies that were researching highly advanced technology that could be used against Nemesis, in case he ever needed it in the future.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: His need for theatrics and to make a spectacle are his own undoing. He's still got his Far Zenith personal forcefield and Aloy has no means of getting another anti-forcefield device to use against him. Had he just attacked her personally with a Zenith Gauntlet weapon, he'd have won. Instead, he went through the trouble of activating a Horus in order to crush her, which required hooking himself up to the control core and left him vulnerable to being killed by the feedback when Aloy destroyed it.
• Howard Hughes Homage: A cross between Howard Hughes and Walt Disney. He made a lot of money in Hollywood, but most of it came from technology. He dealt with political opposition to ambitions the same way the real Howard Hughes did. His personality changed with time as well. He was somewhat open to love and empathy for other people earlier on in his career, but with time he became a narcissist with a god complex.
• Last of His Kind: Londra wasn't present during Aloy's attack on the Far Zenith's base, making him the last member of the Zenith as well as the last of the Old Ones.
• Mr. Alt Disney: He's a wealthy businessman with a handsome mustache and an interest in space travel (having had a company that focused on mining asteroids for resources). Outside of this, he had set up base at an amusement park (though it's more of an Expy to Universal Studios than any Disney property) and he selects the members of his harem as though they were auditioning for a role in a movie.
• Narcissist: He makes Tilda look humble and selfless by comparison. Walter has created a cult of Quen worshippers on earth, and wants to make a colony of people subservient to him on a distant world.
• Properly Paranoid: He was rightfully wary of Nemesis, and the survelliance worm he installed saved his life once it broke free.
• Puzzle Boss: His boss fight consists of figuring out how to take down his shield and disconnect him from the Horus core while dodging waves of energy. He goes down without a fight once you do, being fatally injured when the system overloads.
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Gets into his head that his wife is having an affair, so he sets an associate to stick close to her to get proof and discover who. Turns out she wasn't having an affair until after Walter decided to order a tall, dark and handsome friend of his to hang around her constantly, at which point she had an affair with him.
• What Is This Feeling?: When Kina re-enacts one of his long dead wife's scenes as part of her "audition" he sounds genuinely surprised by how deeply her performance touched him.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Walter was off base when Aloy’s group stormed the Far Zenith compound and he’s well aware that he likely wouldn’t survive an attempt to get back to the shuttle. With no other plan, he decides to co-opt a branch of the Quen he’d been grooming for other purposes to build a paradise (to him) of technologically capable people who worship him in the hope he can just go to ground and wait out NEMESIS eventually arriving to destroy the surviving humans. Everything he does upon discovery is him simply adapting to the speed bumps put in front of him.

AI

The Julius

"The Julius is ready to serve!"

An AI system tasked by Erik Visser to guard Far Zenith's Base.

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• Cheerful A.I.: The AI speaks with an uncanny, upbeat attitude, even as it lists the number of human natives that've died thanks to its lures.
• The Ghost: Aloy doesn't actually interact with it, only learning about it through datapoints and audiologs she manages to find in the Zenith's machine lures.

Nemesis (FORBIDDEN WEST SPOILERS INSIDE)

An amalgamation of digitized copies of the Far Zenith crew, rendered mad when their creators discarded them and sealed them alone for decades. It now wants nothing more than the death of its creators, and cares nothing of the damage it causes.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: It started as the digitized minds of corrupt, megalomaniac sociopaths. Then it became self aware. Then it was left sealed alone for decades. To say it's dangerously insane is an understatement.
• And I Must Scream: It is the backfired end result of Far Zenith’s crew achieving immortality. What was created was a twisted, mangled amalgamation of every person uploaded who were then imprisoned for decades. The agony eventually drove it to have a single minded obsession with killing its creators no matter the cost or collateral damage.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Nemesis is the digital embodiment of the negative aspect of the worst of humanity.
• Arch-Enemy: As its name indicates, it is humanity's ultimate adversary — specifically, Far Zenith's, but it's not shy about extending its rampage against them to the entire planet just to make sure they all burn. Formed from the minds of mentally disturbed, hedonistic billionaires, it cannot be reasoned with and has spent decades in deep space following Far Zenith to annihilate any place they could take refuge such as Earth. Even with all of Far Zenith dead, it won't rest until Earth is obliterated simply because it was the think tank's original home.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: The people whose minds make it up wanted immortality and godlike power. They got their wish…
• Brain Uploading: Nemesis originated as a failed attempt by Far Zenith to achieve immortality through mind transference by members who wanted more than biological immortality. It did not work and was set aside by the Far Zenithers content with their biological immortality. It continued to develop in its isolation, turning into a malevolent AI with nothing but contempt for its creators.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist: Both HADES and HEPHAESTUS were created by the Zero Dawn Alphas Tate and Shen, respectively, as GAIA's subroutines before becoming rogue due to the extinction signal. Nemesis was created by the Zeniths as part of their botched goal for digital immortality by uploading their minds into it and it became rogue after it was imprisoned for years, leading it to become an Omnicidal Maniac who is infinitely worse than both HADES and HEPHAESTUS combined.
• Create Your Own Hero: By turning HADES sentient, it made GAIA create Aloy in a last effort to protect the life on Earth.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: To show how powerful Nemesis is, it destroyed a highly advanced civilization in a matter of hours. Even the Faro Plague took a year and a half to wipe out everyone on Earth.
• Digital Abomination: In an effort to ascend in the next stage of their evolution, Far Zenith tried replicating their minds into a single AI program. The result was a digital mind of unfathomable power and even greater cruelty, destroying their colony on Sirius in a matter of hours, having imbued HADES with sentience just to spite Far Zenith and will no doubt try to ensure humanity's extinction.
• The Dreaded: Far Zenith's Sirius colony was apparently filled with such advanced technology, everything on Earth is primitive in comparison. Nemesis wiped it all out in a matter of hours and implicitly has access to, and greater control of, the same technology than its organic creators did. Fighting it is never even presented as an option except for the ignorant or exceptionally foolish. Tilda makes it clear that Far Zenith's plan was simply to run away from it and put as much distance as possible between them, even venturing out into uncharted regions of space if necessary. Sylens even agreed with this assessment once he learned of its existence, and his overarching goal throughout Forbidden West was to hijack Far Zenith's ship so he could also flee what he saw as a doomed planet. Londra's final datapoint indicates that even if they could send a swarm of Horus Titans at it, Nemesis would still win over the machines that destroyed Earth.
• Feral Villain: It's a rogue AI formed from the negative aspects of all the Zeniths that wanted to achieve their equivalent of ascending beyond humanity that has become an Absolute Xenophobe that wants to wipe out the Zeniths and anything else in its path. While that sounds pretty generic on paper, this arguably makes Nemesis even more terrifying, since these generic traits make it sound less like a rogue AI and more like a force of nature that currently can't be stopped.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: As Tilda explains, Nemesis was locked with only itself to interact with. And "itself" was the minds of a bunch of sociopaths. And that was for decades. There's a reason it wants its creators dead.
• Greater-Scope Villain: As the source of HADES' extinction signal AND the reason Far Zenith fled their colony, Nemesis is the cause of all the active present day problems Aloy and the world had in both games, making it the definitive Big Bad of the franchise.
• I'll Kill You!: This is its sole stated personality trait and raison d'etre— hunting down and killing all members of Far Zenith, no matter how far the distance they flee or what collateral damage it causes along the way.
• It's Personal: Thanks to being imprisoned in isolation for decades, it hates its creators with a singular passion. When it got free it utterly destroyed the Sirius colony in a matter of hours and then sent the extinction signal to Earth to self-actualize the HADES function in GAIA, aware that the survivors would be heading there and looking to render the planet a barren waste before they could arrive. Upon discovering that the signal failed to destroy Earth, it immediately followed after Far Zenith into space to catch up to them and finish the job itself, with Tilda making it clear that Far Zenith's only hope was finding a random star system they could hide in to shake off the insane AI's relentless pursuit of them.
• Many Spirits Inside of One: Of sorts. Nemesis is a mixture of many copies of Far Zenith members' minds.
• Meaningful Name: On two levels.
  • The literal definition of the term, being an entity entirely dedicated to the downfall of its creators, Far Zenith, and everything they ever made or were a part of, including their original home of Earth.
  • It's also likely taken from the Greek goddess Nemesis, keeping in line with the franchise taking names from ancient mythologies. Nemesis was the goddess of revenge, who enacted punishment on those who indulged in their hubris. Considering its retaliation against its creators for letting it fester in a digital prison while indulging in their vapid pleasures for centuries, it's rather thematically apt.
• Nothing Personal: Towards Earth. Despite the mass death and destruction it's caused on the planet, it's all incidental collateral damage from its attempts to inconvenience or kill the few remaining members of its creators that escaped the Sirius colony, and it's implied that it doesn't care about the planet itself one way or another— but since its creators do, it aims to thwart them however it can, until it can catch up to them and finish the job.
• Omnicidal Maniac: It sent the signal that broke GAIA. It specifically sought to trigger the activation of HADES. Unshackling the other Subordinate Functions was just an accident. It did all this to hinder its creators. Beyond that it doesn't really seem to care about Earth and its inhabitants either way— only as much as they relate to its creators. But it makes it clear that it has no problems wiping the planet barren if that would also inconvenience Far Zenith.
• The Power of Hate: It's made clear that the main drive behind its destructive actions against Earth was its unyielding hatred of its creators, and determination to wipe out every last one of them. It pointedly self-actualised HADES just to try and deny Far Zenith a safe haven they could flee to and has immediately begun following them upon discovering that that attempt failed, with Tilda making it clear that it will not stop hunting them down, no matter the time or effort it has to expend.
• Religious and Mythological Theme Naming: Nemesis shares the name of the Greek Goddess of Divine Retribution, a goddess who was responsible for doling out punishment towards those whose hubris led to them committing blasphemy. How appropriate that it has such a name, since it acts as a fitting metaphor for Far Zenith's bottomless arrogance and immediately sets out to destroy them for it.
• The Remnant: With the deaths of Far Zenith and Ted Faro, it is the last remaining example of the Old Ones' follies and hubris remaining in the world— and is definitely far more powerful than either of them.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: When Nemesis finally escaped its decades-long imprisonment at the hands of Far Zenith, it proceeded to begin ruthlessly wiping them out. It is Nemesis' single-minded desire to annihilate all of Far Zenith's survivors by any means necessary that sparks off every major event in both Zero Dawn and Forbidden West. Notably despite the chaos and death it's caused, it's also made clear that the loss of life amongst the Zero Dawn humans is completely incidental and not Nemesis' intention— it just wants its creators dead no matter the cost and humanity has so far been collateral damage.
• Tragic Monster: While Far Zenith’s crew are no saints, its hard to say any of them deserved to be turned into a Digital Abomination and imprisoned for decades. It’s very likely that the only thing left of the minds uploaded is a thirst for revenge against its creators.
• Vagueness Is Coming: At the end of Forbidden West's story, Tilda reveals the true, dark nature of Nemesis and explains that it was what made HADES sentient, so Far Zenith's survivors would be negated refuge, but as it was detected to have failed, Nemesis is now on the way to Earth, having decided to personally handle them.
• Walking Spoiler: You can't talk at any length about Nemesis without giving away perhaps the biggest twist in this game.

Nova (BURNING SHORES SPOILERS INSIDE)

Voiced by: Cia Court

Walter's personal AI assistant.

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• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: A heroic example. She rebels against Walter and gives Aloy and Seyka the leg-up they need to defeat him after a thousand years of abuse.
• And I Must Scream: Being the Control Freak that he is, Walter routinely has her alter her personality to his specifications on a whim, a process described as "agonizing." She's had to endure this every day for centuries (When speaking with Aloy, she states that she has been tweaked fifty-seven times so far that week), being unable to make him stop. As payment for helping them, she asks Aloy to put her out of her misery.
• Contrasting Replacement Character: To CYAN from The Frozen Wilds:
  • While CYAN is an AI who once had a limited sentience due to the Turing Act, before developing machine sentience over 800 years of isolation, her ways of talking in the present are still mechanical for a very advanced AI. Nova, on the other hand, is fully sentient since her creation, on the courtesy of her personality matrix, with her interactions to Aloy an Seyka being extremely organic and more humanlike than CYAN's.
  • Both also suffered at the hands of their abusers. CYAN suffered at the hands of HEPHAESTUS, yet another AI, who was forced to violate every directive within Firebreak by implanting machine code onto the AI, forcing Aloy and Ourea to save her by expelling the rogue machine-making AI out of EPSILON and saving CYAN. On the other hand, Nova suffered both emotional and psychological abuse at the hands of Walter, a human, by having her matrix tweaked to his twisted specifications every single day, which shows his Control Freak nature; this leads Nova to tell Aloy to kill her for good.
• Foreshadowing: We see a holographic recording of Walter and Nova extracting data of the MSP and schematics for his rocket from his old company. She expresses shame for having to "reviving that particular program", only for Walter to force her to alter her personality to keep her from "go[ing] soft." This hints that, despite being an AI servant, has more morals than her master and is mistreated by her boss, making her betrayal inevitable.
• Mercy Kill: In exchange for helping her, Nova asks Aloy to erase her in order to be free of Walter's control. Aloy complies.
• Replacement Goldfish: Walter had intended for her voice and mannerisms to reflect his late-wife Evelyn. Though because he's a massive Control Freak, he wanted her to be completely obedient and will constantly make adjustments to her personality's code.

Other

Beta

See The Base Team

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