Characters / Horizon Zero Dawn - Ted Faro

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)

Theodor "Ted" Faro

Voiced by: Lloyd Owen (English)

"Sometimes, to protect innocents, innocents have to die."

The CEO of Faro Automated Solutions (FAS), the world's leader in robotics technology.

Because of his nature as a Walking Spoiler, there are no spoiler tags for this entry.

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A - I

• 0% Approval Rating: Though he was once known as "the Man Who Saved the Planet", nobody liked Faro once he shifted his company to the war business. The people who worked under him hated his guts since as Elisabet puts it he was "Footing the bill while others get their hands dirty", and some like Elisabet and Margo Shen left his company to escape his control. In his bunker, the other survivors live in fear of him and the last two commit suicide to escape him. Fast forward a thousand years, Aloy and Sylens are disgusted once they learn of his involvement with the Faro Plague and destroying the APOLLO Database and the former shares this knowledge with her friends who all agree what a despicable man he is, and even GAIA, who is taught to love all life on Earth, has nothing good to say about him. The Quen are the only tribe to worship him but that is because their knowledge about him only stretches to about 2050, before the Faro Plague, and even that worship is lost once they discover his fate and the truth.
• Abusive Precursors: Created the robot plague that destroyed the biosphere and purged the APOLLO archive of all of humanity's collected art, culture, science, and technology, dooming future humans to ignorance and primitive existences to hide his crimes.
• The Ageless: Ted Faro achieves biological immortality through gene treatments in his Thebes bunker. Too bad it came with a series of mutations that had him basically stuck inside a geothermal reactor until the present day centuries later.
• Ain't Too Proud to Beg: After the Hartz-Timor swarm went rogue, Ted contacted Elisabet for help. The latter is fully aware of how desperate the situation is for Ted when he is willing to drop all of his lawsuits on her.
• All for Nothing:
  • He deleted APOLLO partially because he wanted to be absolved of guilt for his part in causing the apocalypse, not wanting the next humanity to know his crimes. He didn't account for surviving records of his conversations with Elisabet and the Alphas, which causes both Aloy and Sylens to know exactly what he did.
  • In Forbidden West, it's revealed that he was successful in purging every last copy of APOLLO and its backups on Earth... but thanks to Elisabet's deal with Far Zenith, there was a copy of it off-world, which is unintentionally brought back to the planet when they came looking for the GAIA terraforming system. Ultimately, Ted's attempt to hide the knowledge of his colossal failures from the future generations accomplished nothing but needless death and divisions throughout the new humanity and further crimes being laid at his feet— and these ones weren't done accidentally.
• Alone with the Psycho: After the end of the world, he became the "psycho" in the situation, killing anyone who found out about or threatened to expose his murder of the Zero Dawn team, eventually ending with the doctor caring for him and the doctor's daughter poisoning themselves to commit suicide rather than remain with him any longer.
• And I Must Scream: Ted’s attempts at achieving eternal life lead to him mutating into a horrific monstrosity that is left in constant agony and unable to leave his bunker over the course of a thousand years.
• Asshole Victim: Ted's final fate as a Genetic Abomination elicits disgusted horror and some level of pity from Aloy, but that says more about her nature than actually forgiving him for the destruction he caused and his erasure of APOLLO in a selfish attempt to cover it up. Sylens' reaction to learning this is to declare Ted deserved an even worse fate.
  Aloy: Let me guess: you would've scraped him into a jar so you could prod his brain, like what you did with HADES.
  Sylens: For a start.
• The Atoner: Subverted. He becomes a full supporter of Elisabet's plans due to his actions leading directly to the Robot War that will destroy all life on Earth. However Faro mostly did it because Elisabet would have told the world it was all his fault if he didn't, and his final on-screen action is him attempting to erase all knowledge of his actions from the historical record. His character profile in Forbidden West states that his erasure of APOLLO was ultimately more to protect himself rather than the future humans, confirming that Faro wasn't consumed by guilt but instead ego, and just wanted people not to know he was the one responsible for causing the end in the first place.
• Bad Boss: Scientists working under him, as Tala Aquino found, could have years of their work and well-developed projects scrapped at his whim because he didn't like Boring, but Practical things other companies had made progress in. After Dr. Sobeck left to found Miriam he started throwing lawsuits at her, so many that she only agreed to meet him about his swarm going rogue because he promised to dismiss them all. Obviously this gets quite a bit worse in THEBES.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: He planned to survive to the present day in order to meet the humans who would emerge from the Zero Dawn system and 'educate' them properly about the world, being worshiped akin to a god. He managed to achieve that, but the state he was in when they found him could be called nothing less than monstrous and they immediately kill him in horror of his existence.
• Believing Their Own Lies: It's perfectly clear that most of his actions - deleting APOLLO and its database, killing the Alphas, killing the other survivors in Thebes if they found out about his murders - were done to protect his own image, but from the way he talks he seems to think he's doing the world a favor, in spite of his true motives.
• Body Horror: His botched longevity treatment and the several centuries worth of resulting uncontrollable mutations end up disfiguring him into a horrific mass of flesh incapable of neither coherent speech nor movement, judging from the logs Ted recorded, the diagram Aloy discovers before meeting him in person and the horrendous howling and squealing he makes. The only mercy is that the system records "Brain Activity Minimal".
• The Caligula: During his time in Thebes, Faro devolved into a small scale version of this. He was surrounded by beautiful women, growing more paranoid as the years passed, and murdered anyone who wouldn't go along with his plans.
• The Charmer: Brad Andac notes that Faro was quite good at charming people, and convincing them to get on board with building killer robots and suppressing their conscience.
• Control Freak: He had chips installed in the heads of everyone in his Thebes bunker to ensure their loyalty to him. A datapad found by him has him obsessing over controlling everything around him. This is likely a learned reaction to his disastrous mismanagement with the Faro Plague, born out of a desire to not repeat the same errors through negligence— but twisted in the worst possible way.
• Chekhov's Gunman: You'll see "FARO" plastered on an assortment of computers and consoles in the ruins young Aloy explores in the beginning of the game, and it won't be until near the very end before you realize everything significant about that name.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: It's stated that he deliberately instigated War for Fun and Profit — creating a market for his combat robots. When said robots begin to go rogue, he tries to cover the whole thing up. And that's before he deleted APOLLO and killed the Project Zero Dawn Alphas so future generations wouldn't learn that he was the one who caused the Earth's extinction.
• Dead Man's Switch: His base in THEBES was rigged to self-destruct if he ever died, likely as insurance against the other survivors in the bunker turning on him and trying to kill him for his role in the extinction of humanity. It says something about Ted that, with that option removed, all the survivors that he didn't 'put to sleep' with the control chips he had installed in their heads out of his growing paranoia and mental instability chose to commit suicide rather than spend the remainder of their lives inside the bunker with him.
• Didn't Think This Through: To say his lack of foresight is a big part of his character is an understatement.
  • He has four demands for his peacekeeper robots: 1) That they are able to consume biological material for fuel "in emergencies", 2) That they are able to self-replicate, 3) That they are completely invulnerable to hacking with no backdoors and 4) That they be capable of hacking and assuming control of any automated weaponry sent against them. If that sounds like an unstoppable ecological disaster waiting to happen, then congratulations: You have more foresight than Ted Faro. Any one of those four corners of the Apocalypse square missing would have just made it a messy Robot War instead of the end of all life on Earth.
  • Faro was so fixated on lawsuits and public image that his initial reflex to suppress news of the rogue swarm gave it enough time to grow and reach critical mass, at which point no military force on Earth could hope to contain it.
  • Whether his decision to delete APOLLO was because of guilt-induced sanity slippage or to avoid blame for ending the world, either way he put zero thought into the matter.
    • By deleting APOLLO, he essentially ripped out a vital piece of an interconnected system with no concern as to how it would handle the loss. The new generation of humans were supposed to learn from APOLLO and then aid in the restoration of the biosphere. Without it, the cradles were stuck educating their charges at a kindergarten level, and GAIA's prohibition on human interaction prior to a certain educational level meant she couldn't intervene to adapt to the loss. The cradles were eventually forced to dump their uneducated charges into the wild once food ran out and only basic forms of wildlife were recreated, as human oversight was intended for the reintroduction of larger species. It’s a wonder that their first winter didn't render humans extinct a second time.
    • If he was insane and really thought the reborn human race should be "innocent", he's just damning them to the same fate by not allowing them to learn from their predecessors' mistakes. If he just wanted to cover up his role in causing the apocalypse, there were still plenty of other pieces of information left in the world (readable by his own Focus gadgets no less) linking him to the catastrophic robot plague that was named after him. Sylens even notes that, based on incomplete data he found, he had largely deduced that Faro was responsible for destroying the world; Aloy just gave him the complete picture.
  • Ted then decides that he wants to live forever and become a god to Zero Dawn's new world... using questionable experimental treatments from a scientist cut off from his research and lab by the apocalypse. The result? He accumulates cancerous growths that start mutating out of control and (once the doctor kills himself) without any way to stop it.
    • Even if he didn't mutate, his plan to guide the new world was extremely short-sighted when you consider he wiped out all human knowledge. What could he possibly teach to everyone in the world that can replace even a middle-school education?
    • His plan to wait for future humans to discover him is doomed to fail as well since the door to his bunker will only open for him. The Quen discovered Thebes but were stymied by the gene-locked door until Aloy joined them and found an alternate way in, and she has to swim through an underwater cavern and then through a part of the bunker that has conveniently collapsed for that to even be possible. Granted, he probably thought he would be able to answer the door if anyone came calling, so this one isn't as bad.
  • He then compounds his mistake one last time. After the doctor who was laboriously repairing his mutations kills himself, Ted remembers hearing him say the facility's geothermal reactor would give him what he needed to grow strong again, and walks into the chamber. A thousand years later, he's a giant blob of flesh growing all over the core.
• Egocentrically Religious: Look at how much of Thebes is cathedral space and giant statues of him compared to how much of it is living quarters! His decision to wipe APOLLO and kill the Alphas may also have been influenced by his guru inviting him to consider who he is in a world without techno-nihilism.
• Empty Shell: Implied when Aloy discovers him in the bunker. A readout notes that he has minimal brain activity, suggesting centuries of rampant mutation have effectively rendered him a vegetable.
• Enlightened Self-Interest: At his best, Ted was subject to this. Of course, even then 'self-interest' was held a bit higher than 'enlightened', as he readily had scientists throw out years of work and promising solutions that might face competition from other corporations, arranging for everything to be branded and setting up incipient monopolies to gain further profit and acclaim. A podcast episode featuring the lead writer for the games lays it out.
  "The one thing you can always be sure of with Ted Faro is that there's greed involved. So Ted is someone who knows how to spot the best possible business opportunity, and when the world is kinda falling apart in the late 2020s and the 2030s it becomes clear that corporations have a lot they need to do in order to be part of the market, to save the world. And he quickly gloms on to that. This is also where Elisabet Sobeck comes in, because she's this brilliant young scientist with a lot of ideas and proposals, and he's like great! This is great! Because we can simultaneously have this PR situation where we're helping to save the world but also making tons of money in the process."
• Even Evil Has Standards: Upon finding Dr. Narong Somptow and his daughter Kanya dead from a double suicide, Ted claims he never would have put Kanya to sleep because she's just a child. Given that Dr. Somptow was willing to work for and on Ted for so long out of fear of what he'd do to Kanya if he didn't, this claim is suspect, particularly since Ted compulsively shifts blame away from himself to make him look sympathetic.
  Ted: I never would have put them to sleep! She was just a girl, for Christ's sake!
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: His message to Elisabet Sobeck in her memorial congratulates her for playing the part of the savior and the messiah in her final image, apparently unable to understand that someone would actually be that selfless and all that matters to him is that Sobeck got to look like a hero and a saint and not her actual actions.
• Evil Luddite: Played with. He deleted APOLLO (keeper of the repository of all human knowledge), its database and backups, and killed all other personnel on GAIA Prime — supposedly to free the upcoming world of the "curse" of said knowledge. However, it is clear that he does so not out of hating technology itself, but out of refusing to admit that humanity's downfall was due to him rather than his knowledge.
• Expy: Ted Faro bears more than a passing resemblance to Ozymandias/Adrian Veidt from Watchmen, both being phenomenally wealthy men obsessed with their legacies who cause mass destruction and human suffering due to trying to save the world from itself in a misguided attempt at being the Übermensch. Where they diverge is that Adrian Veidt was genuinely trying to prevent nuclear war by giving humanity a manufactured evil to fight rather than themselves and bore at least some guilt and self-doubt even after his Evil Plan went off without a hitch, whereas Ted Faro was always a self-serving Narcissist even when he legitimately helped to prevent total climate collapse during The Claw Back, and his ultimate downfall came about when he used his massive resources and intelligence to manufacture an unstoppable War for Fun and Profit with his unstoppable Killer Robots that wound up killing off the Old World and it was only through the actions of Project: Zero Dawn that anything of mankind was left after the Faro Plague was finally shut down despite Ted's best efforts to absolve his own guilt over ending the world by deleting APOLLO so that the reborn humanity wouldn't have any knowledge of the Old World to work off of or judge him from. They both also have a distinct appreciation for Ancient Egypt, with Ozymandias taking his name and raison d'etre from the poem Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, the title being the Ancient Greek name for Ramses II, while Ted's last name sounds like "pharaoh" and his compound of Thebes (itself an Ancient Egyptian city) was festooned with Ancient Egyptian architectural stylings.
• Fallen Hero: According to CYAN in The Frozen Wilds DLC, before Ted's influence shifted to making "peacekeeping" machines that would later end the world, his company had primarily focused on using their advanced technology to reverse the planet's degradation, having been the benefactor to the entire Firebreak project. He was even given the title of "the Man Who Saved the Planet" by the media, something Aloy sarcastically notes people probably regretted.
• Fatal Flaw: Ted's ambition and ego end up decimating the whole world, but would end up being his downfall as well. He attempted to achieve immortality in his Thebes bunker while the FARO plague was ravaging the world, so that he could become basically a god to the new humans after it was over. He got a top-level scientist to achieve this through gene treatments, but the scientist was cut off from his lab due to the plague (and later committed suicide). The treatments work for anti-aging, but had Ted's flesh growing like tumors until he couldn't move anymore. By the time Aloy gets to Thebes with the Quen, death is a mercy.
• Fate Worse than Death: Faro is so much of a coward that rather than accepting death, he chose to cheat death and claimed immortality. Unfortunately, the procedure he underwent was imperfect and he ended up becoming a monstrous blob with little brain activity, unable to move for a thousand years and in constant pain. The Quen soldier who burned him practically ended his suffering.
• Fiction 500: Ted is the world's first trillionaire. He was able to singlehandedly fund both Project: Zero Dawn and Operation: Enduring Victory.
• Foil: To Elizabet Sobeck, of course. While both are the CEOs of renowned technological companies that influenced the globe, Ted's success comes primarily from being able to market (and take credit for) the success of his employees and make ruthless business decisions, while Elisabet was a genius in her own right and yet is most well-known for working with the Zero Dawn team. Their companies also express this: Elisabet's focuses on environmentally-friendly technology and is named after her mother, Miriam. Ted's company meanwhile is most famous for its automated military robots, and is also named after someone he admires (himself).
• Genius Ditz: Although other characters (understandably) like dumping on his decision making skills and personality, and he admits in a datapoint to himself that he's more a visionary than an engineer, he was very skilled at collecting bright people and motivating them to work together on incredibly ambitious projects, which does take brains. It's just that Faro also didn't have a single shred of common sense, and demonstrated some monstrously poor decision making skills.
• Genre Blindness: As noted by Brad Andac (though including himself as well in the admonishment), any number of the problems with the Faro Plague could have been avoided if he had paid attention to roughly a century and a half of science fiction.
  Brad Andac: Dr. Sobeck, Margo, they were smart to get out of Faro when they did. But not one of us took it as a warning sign. Just told ourselves they weren't cut out for the BTRI cabals-uh, that's Better Than Rapid Innovation. Better at competing. Better than the next guy. A better killing machine. Isn't it just amazing how a century-and-a-half of science fiction did nothing to swerve our species from the path of doom?
• Genetic Abomination: His final fate in Forbidden West, after all of his bunker-mates died Ted was left with the after-effects of a botched Longevity Treatment, which he'd undergone so that he could lead resurgent humanity after Zero Dawn finishes. The result was something so horrible^note A gigantic tumor several stories tall, it drove the Ceo to try and destroy him and the rest of Thebes before Aloy (and the player) could get the chance to see him.
• A God Am I: Played with. GAIA theorizes that if Ted's attempt at immortality had worked without a hitch, he would have attempted to educate the new humans of the world according to his ideals and controlled the terraforming system with his Omega Clearance. From what we see and hear of Ted in Thebes, this is almost certainly what would have happened. Just looking at the place, the living quarters and the medical facility parts of Thebes are completely dwarfed by an apparently pointless temple-like space complete with a gigantic statue of himself.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: His genetic experiment left him as a fleshy mass covering a geothermal reactor, unable to move for hundreds of years. From the guttural, inhuman growls he lets out, as well as the "Warning: brain activity minimal" on his stats when Aloy pulls them up, it's clear his mind is gone and it's not even clear if he's trying to react to seeing people again or if he's always making those sounds.
  • It seems to have started even before that point. The day he finds the last two others in the bunker with him dead, he decides he just needs time and energy to calm down his mutations. And there's the geothermal reactor right there. At some point, Ted apparently decided that meant cuddling up to it would fix him.
• Gone Horribly Right: Despite how obviously dangerous it is to have self-replicating, biomass eating, unhackable robots, they are indeed what the box advertised. It was just too bad humanity was doomed when one swarm glitched out.
• Gone Horribly Wrong: His experiment to make himself immortal in order to wait out the Faro Plague and greet the new humans makes him an ageless, immobile, growling flesh mass covering a geothermal reactor.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Literally everything bad about the current world has its roots with him, since his company's machines wiped out all life on the planet and he eradicated all human knowledge beyond a certain level. Forbidden West also reveals that the source of HADES' corruption had absolutely nothing to do with the Faro Plague (and in fact did not yet exist at the time), confirming that Ted managed to destroy the world entirely on his own out of sheer stupidity.
• Greed: This and narcissism are his two great flaws. FAS accumulated tremendous money and acclaim during the Claw-Back. Saving the world meant great PR, and Ted got a lot of the credit for his employees' work. But he always wanted more.
• Hates Being Alone: Evident in his final datapoint, where he complains that the last two other humans in the bunker with him have "repaid" him by killing themselves and leaving him alone. Then he decides that one day "Lis' children" will come seeking his guidance and he won't be alone anymore.
• Hate Sink: Even though he's no longer active, every detail discovered about him (not the least of which being the man responsible for the world's end) marks him as someone who was loathed by the rest of the Zero Dawn Project personnel.
• He Knows Too Much: In Thebes, Ted kills anyone who discovers he killed the Alphas, including Grigori (a spiritual guru) and Brianna (a holo-singer who was part of his harem).
• Hoist by His Own Petard: The degree to which he made his own fate is impressive. He's isolated in an apocalypse bunker because of his creations, and loses the limited contact he had with anyone outside of it because he killed the Alphas. Then the people in the bunker start finding out, so he kills them, leaving only his doctor and the doctor's daughter. He needs the former to handle the "mutations" caused by his experimental life-extending treatment, the latter as collateral to ensure her father's cooperation, but being Alone with the Psycho gets to them and they kill themselves. Ted Hates Being Alone but thinks of future glory and adoration, and so deciding that he has unlimited time now, and unlimited energy thanks to the reactor, he waits...
• Hypocrite:
  • In the final recording he leaves at GAIA Prime, Ted is shown to have gone crazy and deleted APOLLO and its database, the interface for the repositories of all human knowledge, claiming he didn't want the new generation of humanity to repeat the same mistakes the old ones did. However, it was his mistakes, shady deals, and abuses of technology specifically that led to all life on the planet being wiped out in the first place, and removing his actions from the historical record is almost a surefire way to guarantee that someone else will eventually make the same mistakes he did.
  • In the same recording, he talks about how sacrifice is required for the greater good. This is a lot of bull considering that he doesn't have to decency to let go of his pride and ego when the fate of the world is at stake. His statement that "in order to protect innocents... innocents have to die" is also a complete lie since to him, the only person who is innocent is himself.
• I Control My Minions Through...: He was very charismatic and there was certainly money and prestige to be made working with him. But by the time he was living in Thebes it was fear. Narong Somptow worked for him as long as he did hoping to keep his daughter Kanya alive, having already seen Ted use the kill switch on his followers.
• Insistent Terminology: His killer robots are "peacekeepers". They consume biomass as fuel "in emergencies". They self-replicate but it's "controlled ... limited self-manufacture". The "peacekeepers" term, in particular, gets thrown in his face often. They keep the peace, all right - there's no conflict once everything on Earth has been consumed.
• Irony:
  • Prior to pivoting his company to military contracting, Ted was a major environmentalist and was involved in a multitude of programs designed to restore global stability and the environment, though some of the people under him saw that he was rather self-serving about that. He was so instrumental in bringing the world back from the brink of collapse that the media called him "The man that saved the world." Just over a decade later, he would destroy it.
  • By the time of Forbidden West he could be considered the last living pure-born human Old One on earth, having managed to outlive the apocalypse he caused and the deaths of every other human being, but the state his body's in is anything but human.
• It's All About Me: Combined with Dirty Coward, he could very well give Gaius Baltar a run for his money in this department. Even as the fate of his entire species was hanging in the balance, all he could think about was how it would affect him. In Forbidden West, the rebooted GAIA describes him as "pathologically narcissistic, impulsive, and unstable".
  • Even when the last two people in his doomsday bunker commit suicide rather than suffer his megalomania, somehow it's their fault for leaving him alone.
    Aloy: Same old Ted. No matter who dies, he's the one feeling sorry for himself.

J - Y

• Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: Zigzagged, in a way. On the one hand, Ted did feel genuine guilt over the fact that the Robot War world-eating plague was largely his fault and it's heavily hinted he couldn't handle the weight of it. However, the last action Aloy sees him commit was motivated largely by his desire to erase it all away.
• Jerkass Has a Point: When GAIA was being programmed, he went to Elisabet and demanded that they install a failsafe into the AI in the event that things went crapshoot, considering the sheer amount of power and authority over mankind's future GAIA had could be at risk since Elisabet was ensuring that GAIA was capable of having emotions. While Elisabet saw this as pointing a gun at her while she was still in her crib, GAIA wound up taking Faro's side in this one, seeing the logic in his reasoning.
• Karma Houdini: In the context of the the first game, last time Aloy sees him he's speaking to the Alpha leads of Project Zero Dawn via holographic communications - stating that he's deleted the sum of human knowledge, followed shortly by killing them all to keep them from doing anything about it. This leaves him in Thebes, a sealed bunker with food and other amenities, including "holo-holo girls" to amuse and pleasure him, all the while safe from the berserk war machines and the toxic environment those machines have made of the earth — machines he created. And just after seeing his image for the first time, Sylens says that he's found evidence that the Old Ones could preserve life indefinitely via cryogenics, so having Never Found the Body implies he could still be alive.. which Forbidden West reveals to be true, but in a different and very horriffic manner. Regardless he never actually faces justice and judgement, while the rest of humanity withers in tiny places and the planet hollows out.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Forbidden West reveals that Ted did eventually get his comeuppance for destroying the world and deleting APOLLO and its archives, by being mutated into a tumor-like abomination that is unable to move, and left to fester alone and in agony for over a thousand years within his bunker. As if all of that wasn't enough, all of that was by his own hand.
• Karmic Death: Just as the world perished to a growing plague of machines brought on by his stupidity, Ted himself ends up so mutated from a stupid genetic experiment to achieve immortality that his flesh has grown like a virus to cover an entire geothermal reactor. He was still alive well past the world dying and being reborn, and killing him in present day was mercy.
• Kiss Me, I'm Virtual: According to Margo Shen, Faro's compound in Thebes is a plush little space filled with exotic animals and "holo-holo girls". Virtual companions don't come up when Aloy visits Thebes herself, but he did bring a harem that included a holo-singer.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • He desired to live long enough to survive to the present day so he could guide the future generation of humans who would be born, ignorant of the Old World thanks to Ted's own actions, and whom would basically worship him as a god. He did this through experimental gene treatments to halt his biological aging that came with severe side effects and mutations due to said scientist being cut off from access to his lab thanks to the apocalypse that Ted caused. After the scientist committed suicide to escape his current situation, Ted's mutations spiraled out of control. When the Quen discover him, the Ceo orders him burned alive on sight out of disgust for the sheer nightmare Ted's become. He got his wish, but because he'd become as ugly on the outside as he was inside, nobody can stand the sight of him and end up wiping him from the face of the world.
  • His last known fate by the end of Zero Dawn had him established as a Karma Houdini who successfully outlived both the majority of humanity and the Alphas who ultimately saved the planet from his mistakes, receiving no retribution or comeuppance despite all the devastation that had been wrought by his decisions. In Forbidden West his final fate is to continue receiving no retribution for centuries...all alone, left alive and unharmed but condemned to stew in solitude with nothing but the consequences of his own actions haunting him over the years as they steadily eroded both his mind and body until he's a monstrous abomination. Nobody from the Old World ever gave Ted Faro the payback he so richly deserved from them, but in exchange, he suffered a fate more horrific than anything they could have done to him, all through his own ineptitude, short-sightedness and inability to accept his mistakes.
• Lethally Stupid: His profound Genre Blindness, namely refusing to give his company’s robots, which reproduce exponentially and derive fuel from biomatter, any form of failsafe to stop them if they go rogue, leads to the extinction of all life on Earth (save for bacteria more than likely). The fact that he would later demand Elisabet to install a failsafe in GAIA shows that he had learned his lesson.
• Manchild: From making sure his demands are met to diverting his faults to others, Faro clearly acts like a Spoiled Brat who hasn't grown up. When Sobeck calls him out for making the Chariot Line an Invincible Villain, Faro uses Insistent Terminology much like how a child tries to twist their story as much to avoid getting in trouble. He went on to become a Psychopathic Manchild during his time in Thebes, playing god on people's lives while still shifting the blame on others.
• Meaningful Name:
  • As you might expect with a last name that sounds like 'Pharaoh', he's very much a leader of men. For a double shot, his "tomb" is called Thebes. There's a mortuary temple at the real Thebes called the Ramesseum, constructed at the order of Ramses II — known not only for being one of the more likely Pharaohs to have been in charge during the Book of Exodus, but also for inspiring Percy Bysshe Shelley's Ozymandias, a poem about constructs and knowledge being eroded by time until what's left means the opposite of what it was made to represent. "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!" would be a perfect epitaph for Faro. There is also his first name, Theodor, which is Greek for "God's gift".
  • In addition, the name Ted invokes another survivor from the end of civilization doomed to live out all time as a Body Horror monstrosity.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: From what we see of the man, it's clear that he isn't actively malicious, just greedy, uncaring of others, and profoundly foolish. All the same, every decision the man makes on his own leads the human race from bad to worse with one singular exception. He personally pushed the concepts that made his robots so dangerous onto his design team, he deliberately instigated conflicts around the world to drive up sales for his machines, and he ultimately decided to erase the whole of collective human knowledge and culture, all of his own judgment without realizing what a bad idea all of it was. Forbidden West reveals that despite what he loudly proclaimed, that last part was more to do with protecting himself and obscuring his role in the downfall of humanity, demonstrating active maliciousness for once even if he attempted to justify it to himself. He even planned to eventually take advantage of the ignorance he'd caused in the new generations of humans that would be born and 'guide' them properly in the new world.
• Monumental Theft: Ted wanted to relocate the flooded Tower of London to FAS headquarters, free of charge, and also "re-purpose" it in the process. This seems like it was just an offer and he didn't get to go through with it, but the proposal was wildly loathed and a British MP is recorded as treating it like an attempted theft.
  I'd rather have my own head mounted on a spike atop the Tower than have our heritage purloined by a [DATA CORRUPTED]
• Morality Chain: Reading between the lines of the files and holos Aloy discovers, it's fairly obvious that Elisabet was Ted's only real friend (at least before she left to start her own company), and he clearly respected her. While he becomes increasingly unstable as the world spirals toward oblivion, it isn't until she dies that he truly breaks.
• Mysterious Backer: He foots the entire bill for Project Zero Dawn upon Sobeck's insistence. And by "insistence", we mean she threatened to tell the Joint Chiefs that he was responsible for why the plague couldn't be stopped by conventional means in the first place if he didn't sign off on Zero Dawn and pledge to fully fund it. This also ended up biting the project in the ass, as he was able to suborn someone into giving him a higher level of access (Omega, above Elisabet's Alpha Plus) to the project than the people actually working on it, which is how he was able to delete APOLLO and kill the Alphas.
• Narcissist: Ted's attempts to protect his own ego and stature even in the face of destroying the world lead to him deleting the sum of human information and undergoing a doomed-from-the-start genetic experiment that left him as a mutated mess centuries later.
• Never My Fault: A variant - it's heavily implied that part of the reason he deleted APOLLO was because he couldn't handle the guilt of being single-handedly responsible for the destruction of life on Earth, so he instead decided to put all the blame on the knowledge that allowed him to build the Faro Plague in the first place instead of his own incompetence. In other words, he is a craftsman blaming his tools.
  • In Forbidden West when listening to one of his last audio logs wherein he bemoans how the last few survivors in the Thebes bunker have committed suicide rather than remain locked up with him, and laments how they've 'left him alone' in there, Aloy notes that no matter how many people die, he always spins it so that he feels sorry for himself instead of recognizing and accepting his errors.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: He used his Omega Clearance to kill the Alphas and plunge humanity into a second dark age. Centuries later, his Omega Clearance becomes a crucial tool in capturing HEPHAESTUS, who has grown beyond its programming and removed Alpha Clearance from itself.
• No Celebrities Were Harmed: His slick presentation, public persona, futurist tendencies, spacey personality, as well as casual tech-bro affect calls to mind a number of Silicon Valley tech magnates (albeit his company is based in Salt Lake City, Utah) like Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Jobs, and Elon Musk. Faro made his mark selling Focuses which are earpieces that seem to have replaced laptops and smartphones completely, which is miniaturized in the Apple tech aesthetic.
• Nothing Is Scarier: It’s not shown to players what exactly Ted’s mutated form looks like, but based on Aloy’s reactions to a hologram of it alone and the Ceo's sheer revulsion looking at him directly, it is apparently an incredibly horrific sight, and yet still something the Ceo can recognize Ted Faro in.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: Sobeck and the Alpha Team thought Ted was a dim rich asshole who was living it up in his Thebes bunker while being ignorant about their technology and its designs, with Sobeck and others trying to "keep him happy" and out of their way. Faro probably didn't understand all they were doing, but he didn't have to be - he was able to get Hank Shaw to make a secret backdoor that allowed him to undo all their work and then kill them off by venting the air inside and asphyxiating them.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: He ardently believes that just giving all of humanity's knowledge to the next generation of humans will simply doom them to repeat the same mistakes, which is why he destroys APOLLO and kills the rest of the GAIA Prime staff. However, much of his motivation for doing this was his self-centered desire to not have the future humans know he caused the apocalypse. Forbidden West proceeds to outright state his motivations were entirely self-centered, as seen throughout the Thebes base level. This ranges from adding control chips that would kill survivors who find out what he did to the Alphas and APOLLO to rigging the station to self-destruct if he ever died and building statues of himself throughout the station. It becomes crystal clear his motivation to erase APOLLO was never about preventing humanity from making the same mistakes so much as to protect his own image.
• Obliviously Evil: Zigzagged. It takes a special kind of evil to screw over humanity twice and still deny his faults and sins. While he at least has the excuse of lack of foresight for causing the Faro Swarm to be an Invincible Villain, the same cannot be said of when killed the Alphas and the other survivors in his bunker without batting an eye. Despite all this, Ted still thinks he is a victim of everything that has happened. Apparently, Faro developed a Messiah complex ever since he solved a major environmental crisis during the Claw-back decade, which made him see himself as anything but the savior of the world.
• The Paranoiac: When he locked himself, his girlfriends, a guru, a doctor, and said doctor's daughter in THEBES, he became progressively paranoid, especially after killing Grigori. By the end, not only had he killed anyone who knew about his actions but everyone remaining committed suicide to escape him.
• Playing Both Sides: Not only did his company sell weapons to opposing sides of a war, FAS also deliberately sparked tensions between them to ensure that they would continue buying from FAS.
• Predecessor Villain: While he starts out relatively well-intentioned, Faro graduates into the human villain of the Old Ones' final days when he murders the remaining Alpha personnel and completely destroys all traces of APOLLO on Earth.
• Restart the World: What his goals evolved into after Sobeck died, with his Omega access he was able to delete the APOLLO database and seemed to fully intend to rule as a God-king in the new world, molding it in his image. Even after an apocalypse he wanted to come out ahead.
• Romanticism Versus Enlightenment: Ted is the "Enlightenment" to Elisabet's "Romantic"; while Elisabet was taught to respect all life at a young age and left Faro's company out of moral principle, Ted was more focused on Enlightened Self-Interest, moving from environmental restoration to creating weapons when he saw more profit in it. This is best illustrated when Ted wanted a failsafe installed in GAIA; while Elisabet saw GAIA's blossoming ability to empathize as the most important part of Project Zero Dawn and believed having a failsafe would be like pointing a gun at a newborn, Ted saw a massive security risk in creating an all-powerful sentient AI given such a monumentally important task the ability to have emotions of its own.
• Sanity Slippage:
  • By the time he murders the Alphas inside of GAIA Prime, Faro is clearly not quite right in the head. Where he tried to make excuses before, he stammers instead, is noted to be twitchy in his interactions with the others, and repeatedly tells people to stop trying to access the GAIA network, his actions and mannerisms showing that he's cracked under the guilt of what he did to mankind... and came to the wrong conclusion.
  • A Datapoint found early on in Forbidden West elaborates on this, explaining that he had a "Savior Complex" and couldn't cope with the idea that he was the one ultimately responsible for Humanity's extinction.
• Self-Made Man: If one thing can be said for Faro, it's that he wasn't handed his money; he managed to build the largest corporation in the world and become the richest man in history on his own. Granted, doing so involved massively shady and unethical business practices. Elisabet actually points out that he's just a 21st-century Thomas Edison — a sub-competent engineer whose only real talent is recruiting gifted people and exploiting their work for his own profit.
  Elisabet Sobeck: Look on the bright side, Ted. From here on out, you get to do what you've always been good at. Footing the bill while others get their hands dirty.
• Significant Birth Date: Crossing over into irony, as Ted was born on Christmas Eve.
• Skewed Priorities: The world is coming to an end as a result of his own stupidity, and yet the only thing Ted prioritizes the most is keeping others from knowing the true cause of said apocalypse.
• Slave to PR: How Elisabet was able to get him to fund Project Zero Dawn, by threatening to reveal his role in the out-of-control Faro Plague to the authorities and the world at large if he didn't play ball. It's also implied to be part of the reason he deletes the APOLLO database, so future generations wouldn't know of his mistakes.
• Sole Survivor: He's the only Old One (who stayed on Earth rather than leaving like Far Zenith) alive all the way to 3041, but by that point he's lost his mind and any ability to speak and the very people who worshipped the image of him choose to Kill It with Fire.
• Start X to Stop X: He believes that in order to protect the future of, in his words, "innocents," he has to kill the Alphas, also "innocents," to prevent them from trying to salvage APOLLO.
  Ted Faro: But sometimes, to protect innocents... innocents have to die.
• Straw Hypocrite: It's implied that he doesn't genuinely believe his own words about the new humanity being better off ignorant of what came before, and is using them as a front to cover up his real intention behind deleting the APOLLO database, which is preventing the Zero Dawn born humans from knowing that he was responsible for the apocalypse. Especially since Sobeck made it clear that part of APOLLO's purpose was to make sure the new humanity doesn't repeat the mistake of the Old Ones, and that would involve ensuring that Faro gets deservedly invoked Condemned by History.
• Take Our Word for It: His Genetic Abomination form in the present day of Forbidden West. When Aloy sees a holo-schematic of the reactor of Thebes, his body apparently transformed into a massive tumorous growth that covers the inside of the room. The fleshy noises and sounds it makes when the Ceo sees his form off-screen do not paint a pretty picture. The expressions on both Aloy and the Ceo's faces say more than enough about the horror, but apparently he's not totally unrecognizable, because the Ceo pauses to ask if "that" is Ted Faro. It's almost certain that if his body was seen in-game, it would have ramped up the game's rating.
• Talking to the Dead: Though the timeline is unclear, it seems as though Ted documenting his plan to wipe APOLLO is addressed to Elisabet after she sacrificed herself, further indicating that his grip on mental stability is loosening.
• Taught by Experience: A very dark, self-centered example. After his lack of foresight and refusal to have any "back door" built into his machines causes the whole mess, he actually does build a backdoor access, called Omega clearance, into Zero Dawn, and uses it to have one final say in the project.
• Techbro: He's a tech mogul whose superficial charm hides his nature as a corporate sleazebag and a raving narcissist.
• Turn to Religion: A datapoint in Maker's End, apparently recorded as it sank in that there was no containing the rogue Swarm, has him getting an employee to arrange a religious conference. When he retreats to Thebes, his bunker, the only people sealed in with him are his doctor, his doctor's daughter, a harem of women, and a guru, presumably met thanks to that conference.
  • Guerilla put out a podcast episode going into a little more detail - Ted was looking for someone, anyone, who'd absolve him, and found a luddite-leaning guru willing to tell him it's really technology's fault. This put Ted on the path to wanting to destroy APOLLO and kill the Alphas, which is not at all what Fasbach had in mind.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: The events leading up to the post-apocalyptic state of the world can be traced to this one man, whose company was responsible for building the robot soldiers that accidentally went rogue and ended up destroying all life on Earth. After Elisabet Sobeck's Heroic Sacrifice, he unilaterally deleted APOLLO, the gatekeeper of the repository of humanity's accumulated knowledge, to prevent post-Zero Dawn humanity from gaining all human knowledge under the belief that such knowledge would "curse" them. However, what actually happened was that without APOLLO, the new humans regressed into primitive tribal societies that are deeply divided, warlike, and superstitious, which is just as crappy as it sounds - though still not without hope.
• Villain Has a Point: It was his idea to create a manual override for the system - with the justification being that they have no way of knowing whether GAIA will work as she's supposed to. While GAIA ends up behaving, the manual override becomes important for stopping HADES.
• Villain with Good Publicity: Faro is highly regarded among the Quen (being dubbed "The Renewer") due to them deciphering only up to the 2040s due to the limit of their Focuses, which was the decade Faro and his machines saved the planet from climate change. It's to the point that Sobeck had the title of "The Assistant" despite the one actually doing the saving (both during the Claw Back and later with Zero Dawn), and it's implied that if the Quen ever know the truth, they would not regard Faro so positively.
• Walking Spoiler: More than most others in Zero Dawn, as it is next to impossible to talk about Ted Faro himself without being aware of how he is the reason for the downfall of humankind.
• War for Fun and Profit: He deliberately inflamed tensions between his clients in order to maximize sales of military robots.
• We Used to Be Friends: Elisabet used to work for Ted and together, they managed to help save the environment during the Clawback decade. After Ted moved on to the war market, Elisabet left the company in disgust to start her own environment-friendly robotic firm.
• Would Hurt a Child: He claims he wouldn't have killed a kid, but in Thebes his doctor clearly felt he'd be willing to hurt her at the minimum.
  Dr. Somptaw: "If I said no, what would he do to us? What would he do to you? You're my little girl. I was trying to keep you alive!"
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Ted kills all the Alphas after Project Zero Dawn is secure (i.e their work was done), and he came up with his plan to erase old knowledge and become a god to new humanity. Played with a bit in that this plan likely didn't come to him until after Elisabet was dead.