Horizon Zero Dawn / Tropes A to M

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Tropes #-M | Tropes N-Z | The Frozen Wilds

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# — A

• 100% Completion:
  • Overall progress is tracked in the Progression page. To hit 100% you'll need to complete all 57 quests, scan 26 machines, gather 60 collectibles, buy 17 shadow items, earn 15 blazing suns in the hunting grounds, scale 5 Tallnecks, override 4 Cauldrons, and clear out 5 bandit camps plus 11 corrupted zones. Notably, you don't have to collect any Datapoints.
  • The DLC has its own separate Progression page. To hit 100% there are a further 16 quests, 15 collectibles, 10 shadow items, 11 unique mods, 5 new machines, and 3 open-world activities. There's also 100 pieces of Bluegleam to collect, which acts as currency needed to buy the best armor and weapons in the DLC.
• 1-Dimensional Thinking: Animals that are attacked will run in a straight line away from the source. This is useful for the player since larger animals usually take more than one shot from a normal bow to bring down.
• Achilles' Heel: Machines are generally plated all over with armor which makes it very difficult for your bow and arrow to do anything, and even on the unarmored parts they still resist damage well enough. However, all of them have several points along their body which are far more vulnerable to attack, with effects ranging from doing extra damage, to disabling their attacks, to rupturing and setting them on fire. If you scan them with your Focus you can identify these weakpoints and their effects, and it will cause them to glow bright orange for a time.
• Aesop Amnesia: If you shun any technological progress while the rest of the world doesn't, and refuse to even keep tabs on what's happening beyond your borders by outlawing any contact with the outside world, you will get your ass kicked eventually when someone decides to invade your territory. The Nora learn this the hard way. Unfortunately, they don't seem to have learned a lesson from this by the end of the game, if their dialogue is anything to go by.
• After the End: A Deconstruction. Humanity somehow lost most of its technology and civilization collapsed. The twist here is that our descendants now have to deal with strangely animal-like machines as well. It turns out the game's setting is about 974 years after the end in what was once parts of Colorado and Utah, after a Robot War not only wipes out human civilization but scours the world clean of all organic life in the year 2066 — putting the events of the game in 3040 A.D. Specifically, the end of the world was not merely a Cozy Catastrophe, "the prologue to another bloody chapter in human history" — humanity along with all life on Earth was only saved from annihilation due to heroic efforts by Sobeck and the rest of Project Zero Dawn. The world after the end is not "an oyster, which the fortunate few survivors with sword will open", it's a monument to what humanity could have been, and the survivors are actually "lost souls, trapped in benighted ignorance" by the egotistical madman Ted Faro, who killed the world by accident, then obliterated millennia of culture on a nihilistic whim to prevent future generations from learning that he was the one who caused the disaster in the first place.
• Age Cut: The Training Montage cutscene early in the game includes one: six-year-old Aloy makes an impressive leap while running the brave trail, and eighteen-year-old Aloy sticks the landing.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot:
  • The Old Ones had potential AI, but were extremely wary of it, putting heavy legislation around it in reaction to an incident where an AI named "Vast Silver" went rogue in some disastrous fashion.
  • The original Faro robots were designed to be completely autonomous, able to consume biomass in emergencies if they couldn't access a reliable fuel source. When one swarm suffered a glitch that severed it from any chain of command, "emergencies" became the default, and they just started attacking everyone and stripping the Earth bare of life to power themselves.
  • HADES was originally designed as a necessary evil to destroy failed biospheres so GAIA could start over. However, somebody activated HADES prematurely and broke its ties to GAIA (along with those of all the other sub-functions), causing it to start trying to destroy the current biosphere even though it's perfectly habitable.
  • GAIA is a straight aversion to this, as she is designed to be a Friend to All Living Things, and even sacrifices herself to try and stop HADES. In fact, all the worst parts of the world can be traced directly to the fact that a backdoor override was placed in her system, allowing Faro to delete APOLLO. Without it, everything would have gone exactly as planned.
  • Just as bad as HADES, HAPHAESTUS was designed to create the various robotic lifeforms that inhabit the planet. The idea behind it was that it could create a variety of robots that mimicked animals and helped maintain the biosphere by gathering materials and using them for various repairs. Humans, ignorant of their function, hunted them for parts, and Gaia didn't mind because the robots they hunted could easily be replaced. When HAPHAESTUS broke loose thanks to the same signal that freed HADES, it immediately began producing aggressive attack robots to defend its creations, because now it deemed their hunting a threat to its purpose, ignoring the fact that it could reolace the robots faster than humans could eliminate them. It only knows that they are impeding its objective, and is producing ever-more dangerous machines to get the humans to back off. For that matter, without GAIA, it is simply producing the machines to produce them, without any larger context. It is the entire focus of the Frozen Wilds DLC.
  • From The Frozen Wilds DLC, CYAN (Caldera of Yellowstone Analytic Nexus) is also an aversion. She is a less sophisticated and more restricted AI than GAIA, designed to prevent the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera into a supervolcano. She succeeded, and survived the machine apocalypse because her creators put her in "sleep" mode, which lasted for several centuries.
• Alas, Poor Villain: Pick the right dialogue option after defeating Helis, and Aloy snarls at him to turn his face to the sun, a gesture performed in his culture by the dying. He shuts up for once and obeys right before Aloy kills him. Now, Helis is a fool and a butcher whom bastards manipulated into thinking he serves as an instrument of the divine. He gloats about how he can't fall right until his legs give out. Helis enjoyed the gig far too much to be a sympathetic character, but seeing the fire go out of him as he spends his last moment acknowledging it was all a lie is a punch to the gut all the same.
• All for Nothing:
  • The "Claw-back" of the Old Ones turned out to be this. A decade of massive investments in green technologies succeeded in pulling Earth's ravaged climate back from the brink, heralding a new era for mankind as previously flooded land was reclaimed and destroyed ecosystems recovered. And then Ted Faro had this bright idea about a line of self-replicating war robots that consume biomass as fuel...
  • Ted Faro's deletion of APOLLO and murder of the Zero Dawn Alphas was in all likelihood committed to keep from the world the fact that the apocalypse was his fault. However, the surviving recordings in all the bunkers still hold enough information for people to put together that he's the cause of the end of the world.
• All Love Is Unrequited: While there are many characters who take the opportunity to flirt with Aloy, both in subtle and not so subtle ways, the player is never given the opportunity to return said feelings and, in one particular case, can only outright refuse such a proposition.
• All There in the Manual: The major events that shaped Aloy's world into what it is today are told through quest dialogues and cutscenes, but if you want to get to know the Old World beyond this cataclysm, you have to track down and read/listen to the countless Apocalyptic Logs scattered across the map, which can then be accessed at any time in the Notebook menu section.
• Almost Dead Guy: Many quests involve Aloy rescuing and/or defeating someone, only to kneel over their battered body as they exchange a few lines and then die. This happens to good and bad characters alike.
• Amazing Freaking Grace: One of the first audio logs a young Aloy finds is recorded by a dying Old One, singing the strangely apropos last verse of the hymn.
  "The earth shall soon dissolve like snow, / The sun forbear to shine; / But God, who call'd me here below, / Will be forever mine."
• An Aesop: There seem to be two consistent ones throughout the game, and the franchise as a whole:
  • First, "Don't rely on one person in authority to fix things without trying to do something yourself". The Old Ones certainly made this mistake in trusting Ted Faro, which only made things worse, and even before that there's heavy criticism of their use of unmanned weapons in war. By contrast, Operation Enduring Victory was a collaborative effort by every able human, and it managed to indirectly save the world. In the modern era, the Nora matriarchs prefer to pray for absolution when there's trouble, which does no good, and Aloy essentially has to rescue GAIA, who might as well be a deity, herself.
  • Second, Belief Makes You Stupid. (In the lawful sense) Practically every race that has religious beliefs (Carja, Nora, Banuk, etc) has several characters who are stuck-up and obstructive, and an uncountable number of stories have characters put in physical and emotional distress because of rigid adherence to these beliefs or their tribe's cultural laws. Conversely, the most happiness occurs when other characters bend, ignore, or outright tear down these rules out of fairness and compassion. Perhaps the biggest example of this in action is Lanzra, who is so consumed by her religious beliefs that she's barely her own person, decrying Aloy as a curse (and later on, a blessing) without any self-awareness or actual judgement of her own. For her part Aloy has no issue with the beliefs of the various tribes she encounters, but is extremely critical whenever they're unfair, vague and/or don't make any sense, such as the idea that there can never be a Carja Sun-Queen, or the "one size fits all" punishments that the Nora and Banuk employ.
    • The Oseram and Banuk downplay this, though it is still present. While the game doesn't show an Oseram religion, they're implied to have a strong cultural orthodoxy that presses out some of their more creative minds like Petra Forgewoman, arguing over minutia instead of pressing on. The Banuk, by contrast, have several cultural norms that risk trouble in unexpected situations, such as hunters not being allowed to harvest machine parts or the only way to achieve leadership being challenges rather than competency. While neither seems to greatly hamper either tribe, it still does show that it is still present in these societies as well.
• Ancient Egypt: There are numerous references to Ancient Egypt and its mythology:
  • Ted Faro's name is phonetically identical to the term "pharaoh", which in turn names "Faro Automated Systems".
  • Elisabet's surname, Sobeck, resembles Sobek, an Egyptian fertility deity.
  • The Peacekeeper robots, like the Deathbringer, are part of the "Chariot line".
  • The Deathbringer, Metal Devil, and Corrupter have actual names — Khopesh, Horus, and Scarab.
  • Ted Faro retreats to a place termed "Thebes" after killing the Alphas. As revealed in Horizon Forbidden West, it's even decorated like an Egyptian tomb, a decadant shrine to his own ego.
  • Faro Automated Solutions has a logo resembling a pyramid. The Cauldrons also employ lots of pyramids in their aesthetic.
  • A Nora tribesman is called Bast, after another deity. Strangely, he's a male bully, as opposed to the benevolent Egyptian goddess of the same name.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: On New Game Plus, by merely playing the game, you can get a full set of weapons and armor with additional modification slots fairly quickly. However, your reward for actually completing the entire main story quest on the hardest New Game+ modes are a few styles of face paint and a maximum of three different designs and colors that display on Aloy's focus when it's activated.
• Animal Motifs: It doesn't require a lot of imagination to see how some robots are clearly designed to appear similar to their organic counterparts. The term "Faro Robot" when mentioned in conversation, can easily be misheard as "Feral Robot."
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • If you're missing items you need to trade for weapons or armor from a merchant, you can assign them to your quest log as errands to help you remember what items you need. It won't actually locate them for you, however.
  • AI-driven companions never break stealth. Even if they're sitting outside tall grass mere inches away from an enemy, the enemy won't see them and violence won't break out.
  • Once you complete the requirements for one of the trials, the timer will stop so you don't have to worry about getting back to the Keeper before going over the required time for that trial.
  • When you rappel down from a Tallneck after overriding it, the giant machine helpfully emits a massive EMP that stuns or outright destroys every machine in the immediate area, preventing you from touching down in the middle of a hostile herd that would rip you to shreds before you can react.
  • When a Fetch Quest sends you to a specific location to hunt for resources, the normally random drops are disabled so that all animals or machines in this area are guaranteed to drop what you need.
  • All machines can be identified by the unique sounds they make, but none is more pervasive and obvious than the ominous bass hum that drones from your speakers when a Stalker is nearby. Given how extremely good these bastards are at ambushing you, this auditory warning signal is a very welcome thing indeed.
  • The game regularly spawns destroyed Watchers in Aloy's vicinity that can be looted for a handful of shards, ensuring that even completely broke players can always find the resources necessary to craft basic ammo and get on with the game.
  • Your inventory capacity is limited, so all quest rewards come in "reward boxes" that you can carry an unlimited number of and open whenever you have space for the items inside.
  • If you only have the base game and reach the level cap, the game keeps quietly adding up XP so if you decide to get Frozen Wilds, you'll start out with the skill points you would have earned to unlock the extra skills right off the bat.
• Apocalypse How: It appears that the Earth suffered a Class 2 event, with the advanced human society collapsing and regressing to a primitive tribal lifestyle. However, the Earth had actually suffered a Class 6 event when the Faro Plague devoured all biological life on the planet. Thanks to GAIA, though, the planet was able to recover. The only real loss was human knowledge.
• Apocalyptic Log: Aloy finds record logs from the ruins of the "Old Ones", with most being Augmented Reality. Lampshaded in an audio log, in which a scientist decried the idea of recording everyone's thoughts for posterity sometime before the Faro Plague consumes humanity.
  Connor Chasson: I mean, seriously, "record our thoughts for posterity"? Great idea, Director Evans. Like I haven't done enough for posterity already? Like I wouldn't be...here...like this...if not for posterity? I'm done with posterity. Posterity can go—
• Armor Is Useless: Averted in nearly every appearance, whether worn by Aloy or otherwise.
  • Armor (and dodging) becomes essential on the higher difficulties, where a single attack will squish Aloy if it connects.
  • Attacking the armor worn by machines can knock it off (at the cost of alerting the machine if it wasn't already, and reducing the damage to around one-tenth), or destroyed outright with tearblast ammunition, to allow for successive hits to deal more damage. In most cases it's better to target the weak spots, but sometimes the armor covers those as well.
  • Different tribes' outfits' being tailored for their environments means Aloy gets differing benefits from wearing each:
    • Banuk Ice Hunter and Sickness Eater gear lessens the effects of cold and corruption (poisoning) attacks.
    • Carja Blazon gear protects against varying degrees of fire. This being the armor that shows the most skin actually makes some sense from this perspective, as a) it has less fabric that can catch fire, and b) its name implies an association with the Blazon Arch, a town in the middle of a Thirsty Desert.
    • Oseram Sparkworker gear mitigates shock damage, for the few enemies that use that element.
    • Nora Protector and Oseram Arrowbreaker gear protect from melee and missile attacks, respectively. Credit goes to the Arrowbreaker gear in actually sounding like wearing metal plates stiched to your clothes.
    • Nora Silent Hunter gear enhances stealth, to the point that it is possible to walk up to a group of unsuspecting hostiles and sequentially stealth-kill them (assuming the others weren't looking at it when it happened).
  • Attempting to shoot at Helis causes him to use his bracers for deflection.
  • Some of the few human enemies in the Cut actually wear helmets (or at least some sort of armored masks) that make it impossible to one-shot them via Boom, Headshot!. Good luck trying to wipe out the local bandit camp without triggering an alarm with these guys patrolling the perimeter.
  • Played straight in the case of armor-wearing hostiles susceptible to Silent Strike, where Aloy's spear is shown ignoring the armor altogether.
• Armor of Invincibility:
  • The Shield Weaver outfit projects a regenerating force field around Aloy that allows her to tank one or two hits without losing health. If you try at least to stay in motion during battle, this outfit should keep you safe from just about anything until you tackle the harder difficulties. Even on Ultra Hard, its defenses are strong enough to neutralize any one hit that would've instakilled Aloy otherwise.
  • On a more specialized note, there are outfit lines dedicated to protecting Aloy from one specific damage type: melee, projectile, freeze, shock, fire, and corruption. Physical resistances can go up to 90%, and elemental resistances can reach outright immunity. Enemies rely heavily on one single damage type with melee as a backup. If you're skilled enough to evade any secondary attacks, switching between specialist outfits depending on the enemy you're facing can make Ultra Hard a lot more manageable.
• Artificial Brilliance:
  • When Aloy startles a herd of "herbivore" machines (including Grazers and Lancehorns), one machine will usually stay behind to attack Aloy and distract her while the rest flee.
  • Machines that are heavily injured may run away from Aloy, only to unexpectedly return later.
  • If Aloy is in stealth, human bandits who hunt machines may still attack her mount.
  • If enemies with ranged weapons see Aloy enter a patch of tall grass and then lose sight of her, they'll often launch a few shots at where they saw her disappear on the off-chance of her still being there.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The human enemies you fight over the course of the game are far less impressive than the machines. They're prone to charging into traps, react obliviously to their buddies being shot with arrows, and will never attempt to sneak up on or flank Aloy. If you happen upon a group of human bandits fighting machines, they will instantly turn and attack you as soon as they notice you, even if there's a charging Thunderjaw headed right for them.
  • It is entirely possible to stand slightly outside a machine's aggro range and just hammer away at it with arrows. This can make fighting even the mighty Thunderjaw almost a breeze. Finding indestructible cover also works similarly.
  • All machines have a point where they'll stop following you, even if they can see you. This means that if you can outrun an enemy long enough, you can get to a point where you'll be outside of their melee threat range. This also applies to machines you've overridden, preventing you from getting an army of hacked machines following you around after you unlock the permanent override skill.
  • The only machines seemingly programmed to handle water are Snapjaws. Everything else will refuse to cross even slightly deep water (the point where it slows Aloy down to run in it, but not switch to swimming). It's entirely viable to lure strong machines up to a creek, wade across, then turn around and shoot them to pieces while only having to worry about their ranged attacks. Swimming out into deep water can make for a great emergency escape from land-based machines as well for this same reason.
• Artistic License – Biology:
  • Zero Day was the predicted date of no life remaining on Earth. While Storyboarding the Apocalypse a graph shows phylums, bacteria included, dropping to zero. Bacteria are fast-breeding, ludicrously adaptable, tenacious, and the most successful form of life on the planet, living in places and conditions where nothing else can, eking out energy from the most unlikely sources. There are bacteria thriving inside of rocks 1900 feet below seafloor which is itself 8500 feet below the surface of the water. Nuclear radiation and the vacuum of space don't kill all bacteria. When conditions are too much for even the hardiest bacteria, they go dormant in structures called spores which are virtually indestructible and remain viable for at least 40 million years. Even in a world made toxic, even if the Swarm's nanites strip every surface so finely and continuously that bacteria attached to particles in the air can't settle (which they demonstrably have not), some bacteria would survive and thrive, if nowhere else than on and in satellites and in the rocks deep underground, and around Zero Dawn facilities. Of course, that's no comfort to multicellular life, or humanity. It's just catchier to say "no life remaining on Earth" than "only bacteria left alive."
  • In-game documents state that after GAIA shut down the Faro Plague, which took about a century once the Swarm went dormant, Earth's biosphere was sufficiently restored to once again sustain human life merely another century later. Even with ultrahigh-tech like the one we're shown operating at full capacity all around the globe, 200 years is a ridiculously short time frame for such a feat; even more so since only the latter 100 years could've been used for it.
  • Boars. The ones running around are just a few feet long and flee from people, and are part of a balanced starter ecosystem. It's easy to assume they're supposed to be Sus scrofa, the wild version of the domestic pig. The thing is, wild pigs are bastards. Boars in HZD are either heavily modified or some different type of pig.
    1. Even a small number are capable of shredding entire fields of interwoven plant roots and even uprooting small trees in search of desirable food, causing devastating soil erosion.
    2. They are not solely herbivorous, and will in fact eat anything and everything organic they can get in their mouths such as squirrels and rabbits. They actually prefer meat if given the choice.
    3. They breed fast, grow up fast, and given enough food and an absence of large predators, they can grow to the size of bears.
    4. They are vicious. A defining feature of historical spears designed for hunting boar is the crossguard, which prevented the animal from shoving itself right through the spear to savage the spearcarrier. Considering how every human alive is descended from a clone released into the world with the life skills of a kindergartener, they would not have survived if there were standard wild boar out there.
  • The various tribes, particularly the isolationist Nora, have an oddly diverse racial makeup. While they are descended from clones of people who lived in 21st century Colorado, over 900 years of interbreeding while confined to a relatively small geographic area ought to have made the human population fairly homogeneous.
• Artistic License – Engineering:
  • Tallnecks walk by stepping with both legs on one side at the same time. Something so tall and heavy would never be able to do that without instantly toppling over.
  • The fact that Lake Powell still exists implies that the Glen Canyon Dam has survived. In real life, the Glen Canyon Dam is so vulnerable to failure that it is the subject of an entire Wikipedia page, and many calls for its removal have focused on the risks it presents to human activities downstream. In short, the dam is anchored in unstable limestone that has been compared to "solidified sand dunes", Lake Powell is rapidly filling with sediment, and the dam nearly failed in 1983, less than twenty years after it was built and three years after Lake Powell was filled. Most observers believe that the dam's lifespan is less than a hundred years, and that it's not a matter of if it will collapse, but when. Realistically, the dam would've failed before the apocalypse.
• Artistic License – Geography: The setting covers much of modern Colorado and Utah, with the DLC expanding into the Wyoming region, yet it compresses everything to a scale that makes the distances easily traversable by foot, and rearranges some of the locations relative to their real-world counterparts:
  • All-Mother Mountain / Pike's Peak / the Eleuthia-9 facility is correctly shown south of Devil's Thirst / Colorado Springs and Devil's Grief / Denver, yet the distance is cut down to a five-minute jog.
  • The Shadow Carja capital Sunfall / Bryce Canyon / the Zero Dawn facility is shown due north of Lake Powell (rather than northwest), and closely west-southwest of the Shattered Kiln Bandit Camp / Provo Utah Temple (rather than hundreds of miles north-south of each other).
• Artistic License – Law: A relatively early text datapoint titled "1st Amendment Virtual?" implies that the notion of whether First Amendment of the United States Constitution applies in virtual spaces is an unsettled question. However, it is functionally settled law, private virtual spaces such as social media are not considered public spaces and thus their private owners can moderate them as they see fit without being held liable, further reinforced by Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (which mostly just acts as a reinforcement mechanism to prevent frivolous lawsuits). However, the outright arrest of people performing a protest in a virtual space would certainly be a violation of their rights under the First Amendment regardless.
• Artistic License – Military: The Old Ones, even professional soldiers, constantly use the terms "railgun" and "DEW" (Directed Energy Weapon) interchangeably. Railguns do require and apply tremendous amounts of energy, but functionally they're still kinetic weapons that hit the target with a hunk of metal going at high velocity. A true DEW would, as the name implies, project some form of energy like coherent light, focused heat, microwaves, magnetic fields or gamma radiation to deal damage.
• Artistic License – Physics:
  • Experiments and simulations have shown that after almost 1,000 years of being exposed to the elements without maintenance, there would be no trace left of human surface structures and machines. In fact, it would take only a fraction of this time to utterly wear down everything contemporary mankind has ever built, with the likely exception of ancient structures like the Giza Pyramids or the Great Wall in China because these are basically just piles of stone located in fairly forgiving climate zones. Relics in permafrost regions also get a pass because decay and erosion progress at a literally glacial pace there. Of course, approaching this topic realistically would take away a large part of the game's incredible Scenery Porn and postapocalyptic atmosphere, so no-one's complaining about this one.
  • Dripstones (AKA stalaktites/stalagmites, depending on the direction they grow) take a long time to reach a significant size. It's unlikely that the ones that encrust nearly every Old World bunker would've grown as large as they are in the 950 years that have passed since the Old Ones disappeared.
• Augmented Reality: As a kid, Aloy finds a "Focus", which lets her scan stuff and read documents from the Old World. The lights (and text) she sees are invisible to everyone else, which contributes to Aloy's growing semi-mystical reputation amongst the various tribes she helps, able to see what nobody else can, interpret ancient logs for accurate information, follow the Eclipse' otherwise untraceable communications, and apparently open doors and activate machines by waving her hands in semi-mystical means (actually interacting with the holographic displays).
• Automatic Crossbows: A sort of cross between an arbalest and a machine gun is the "Rattler" weapon that launches a stream of bolts into the enemy at once. It's inaccurate, but when you just want to launch a flurry of bolts at an enemy in a hurry rather than a precision strike, it's useful. On a Frozen enemy, even at Ultra Hard difficulty, it can become one of the most efficient ways to take down a machine.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • The Strike From Above and Strike From Below skills — it's cool to be able to Goomba Stomp a Watcher or yank a human bandit from their guard tower, but the moves are heavily situational and most of the time it's easier just to snipe the target from a distance. The main reason to take them is that they lead to the extremely useful Leader Strike skill, which gives you the ability to make stealth kills on even the toughest humans. The one benefit Strike From Above has is that it doesn't require stealth, only height advantage, but the times you can manufacture such a situation are still limited.
  • The Frozen Wilds added the Dismount Strike skill, which is essentially Strike From the Back of a Horse. It is no more powerful than a Strike From Above, requires you to completely blow your cover to pull it off, and the odds of you managing to pull it off more than once in a battle are slim. You could just as well shoot the target from horseback, keeping your mount and distance.
  • The Double Arrow and Triple Arrow skills. They can give you a strong alpha strike from cover, but they really hurt your precise aim and it's too slow to load multiple arrows once you're in combat. In the end, their best use is to boost status effect application with either freeze, burn, shock, or corruption arrows — a few uses of a triple arrow shot nearly guarantees the appropriate effect — and for smaller machines, like Glinthawks, immediate results with only one use (provided all three arrows land). They do become fairly practical with the bows in The Frozen Wilds, however, because their overcharge mechanic allows extremely high damage if you can land a triple-shot.
  • Heavy Weapons are invariably lethal and massively destructive, and can shred anything short of a Thunderjaw before they even know what hits them. However, they're also very difficult to carry and move around with (in a game where most of your survival depends on dodging), they have limited ammo, and you can only acquire them by stealing them from the enemies that carried them, at which point there may not be enough enemies left to really enjoy them for more than a brief period.
• Awful Truth: In the days of the Old Ones, humanity thought that Project Zero Dawn was a weapon that would fight the Faro Plague. Those recruited (by force) to work on Zero Dawn find out the awful truth that there is no hope for the humanity they know, and that Project Zero Dawn is for rebuilding humanity after the machines have eaten everything. People are given an option for medically-assisted suicide if they can't deal.

B — C

• Back for the Finale: Multiple characters from previous sidequests will appear in Meridian to aid Aloy in the final battle. There's a trophy for finding all the possible allies for this part through completing certain sidequests.
• Back Stab: Combat heavily focuses on stealth, and one skill line is devoted entirely to allowing you to make various forms of instantly-lethal melee attacks against unaware human and mechanical enemies.
• Badass Boast: Aloy can direct a short one towards the Matriarchs (but primarily Lansra) if you pick the "Threat" response when Aloy is preparing to enter the Cradle under the Nora's sacred mountain.
  Aloy: I fought my way past an army while you cowered in this cave. You really think you can stop me?
  Teersa: Aloy! That is not necessary!
  Aloy: What would you know about what's necessary? About what it took for me to be standing here, now, on this threshold? This was my birthright. You don't get to take it from me a second time.
• Badass Creed: The Oseram Vanguard have one, because of course they do.
  Where does the Vanguard stand!?
  Front of the line!
  Why there?!
  Steel before iron!
  And what do we do?!
  Hit 'em like a hammer 'til they can't fight no more!
• Bad Powers, Good People: Many of the implements deployed Project Zero Dawn are identical to the Faro Swarms that destroyed all life: automated robot manufacture, networked unit operation, self-refueling from biomass. The difference? While the Faro Swarms were operating according to programming run apocalyptically amok, Project Zero Dawn put a true AI, GAIA, nurtured into having a good soul by Dr. Elisabet Sobeck, in control of the operation after the last of humanity died in order to replace the Earth's biosphere that the Faro Swarms destroyed.
• Bait-and-Switch:
  • At the end of the Proving the proctor says an outcast could never win the Proving, because Aloy's a Brave now—she clearly did it intentionally because she thought Aloy deserved a big moment..
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • Aloy tells Rost that she won't abandon him once she is accepted as a Brave. She will come to see him and she will break tribal law to speak to him, but assures him that he doesn't need to talk back, so "it will be [her] sin, not [his]." This is exactly what happens after the Proving; Aloy can indeed come and speak to Rost, and he in turn will not answer back. Not because he refuses to, but because he's dead.
  • The military contracted Faro to create the Chariot line. They got the Faro Plague.
    1. The military wanted unstoppable Robot Soldiers. Ted Faro sold them the greatest robotic army ever built.
    2. The military wanted Easy Logistics. He made them run on all types of biofuel, including human carrion.
    3. The military wanted as many as he could build. He made them capable of self-replication.
    4. The military wanted them to be immune to Hollywood Hacking. Faro made sure they couldn't be.
  • ...One "glitch" later, the world was annihilated by a line of killer robots that consume biomass as fuel, capable of self-replication, that don't listen when told to stop. They refused to end war, so war ended them.
  • Sylens lampshades this, that Aloy wanted to find out who her mother was and why she was abandoned. She wound up finding out she essentially has two mothers, and that she's basically the most important person in the world, on whom all of humanity's survival depends.
• Beef Gate: Played with.
  • Merchants require specific parts from rare machines in order to buy higher level outfits and weapons. This makes higher level equipment closed off to the player until they've progressed far enough to be able to find and kill the required machines, many of which are quite difficult.
  • A few main story missions require you to kill specific enemies, and seeing how all enemies are fixed at specific levels, this can prevent you from progressing if you're underleveled. However, the highest-level enemies sit somewhere around level 30, which you'll normally reach long before you encounter these guys, so it's rarely an issue. It's also not impossible to beat an enemy that seriously outlevels you; just more risky.
• Beehive Barrier: The Shieldweaver outfit has this as part of both its active and passive appearance. Getting it, on the other hand...
• Behemoth Battle: Go to the Thunderjaw site where two of the giant robo-T.rexes spawn simultaneously, override one and enjoy the ensuing carnage. If you own The Frozen Wilds, you can do it one better by pitting two Fireclaws against each other.
• Belief Makes You Stupid: A recurring theme amongst the tribes.
  • The Nora's shamanistic religion permeates every aspect of their lives and has made them into societally stagnant, xenophobic isolationists whose technology stalled at the Stone Age level. It leaves them woefully outnumbered and outgunned every time the outside world comes knocking, especially since it prevents them from even knowing about most of the things that exist beyond their borders. It's quite telling that it takes a child raised as an outcast from birth to show them how untenably self-destructive their culture is (with the help of a more open-minded Reasonable Authority Figure).
  • The Sun Carja nation fell into darkness under the reign of an insane religious zealot that killed thousands of innocents while turning virtually every neighbor they have into mortal enemies. Only when the lunatic was usurped by his definitively progressive son did the kingdom start to prosper again.
  • The Shadow Carja continued where the Sun Carja left off, and it is stated outright that their mindless religious fanaticism made them easy prey for Sylens and HADES, who recruited most of them for the latter's omnicidal agenda simply by posing as one of their deities, which the high priesthood accepted immediately. Helis even blows a prime opportunity to execute Aloy in favour of giving her a dramatic spectacle of a death in the Sun Ring, and even waxes poetic to her beforehand that he's understood that all of the setbacks she's caused the Eclipse were for the purpose of delivering her to him for such an execution at this moment, when really he just sucks at killing her.
  • The Oseram, notable for being the only tribe that doesn't seem to be religious, just happen to be the most technologically advanced faction on the map, capable of crafting advanced weaponry through their ever-increasing understanding of the machine technology that surrounds them. They have their own societal issues, but none of them are connected to religious dogma.
  • The Banuk, although on roughly the same technological level as the Nora, seem to be making some inroads into manipulating the machines to their own ends, but all of that is still steeped in ritualized mysticism with little hint of understanding what exactly they're doing. They did spawn the most tech-savvy character in the game, but that's mostly because the guy's Banuk in name only.
• Benevolent Dictator: Avad, the 14th Sun-King of Carja, forcibly took power by allying with exiles and foreign mercenaries, bombarding the capital's defenses with powerful siege weapons, and ultimately killing his own father to take the throne. As ruler, he put end to his father's brutal regime of mass human sacrifices and slavery, resulting in a more equitable and safe empire where foreigners and the lower class have a lot more opportunity, and is generally regarded as a ray of sunshine compared to the former darkness. Of course, some Carja, those who profited directly from the slavery and conquest, didn't take kindly to this, and it sparked a civil war.
• BFG: The game features several "Heavy Weapons" that Aloy can pick up and use (so long as their ammo holds out), but they're so massive they keep her from jumping or dodging while in use, and she has to take an extra perk just to maintain an acceptable walking speed while carrying one. Some of these weapons include rack mounted batteries stolen from the backs of the most dangerous (and gigantic) machines.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Sylens saves Aloy from the Shadow Carja Sun Ring with his own overridden machines.
  • Aloy then not much later blindsides the Eclipse onslaught on the Nora, slagging another Deathbringer, a number of Corruptors, and a corrupted Thunderjaw as well as killing a host of cultists trying to bring down All-Mother Mountain in which the Nora bunkered up. War-Chief Sona makes certain to note Aloy's surprise attack was instrumental in the Nora surviving the attack when High Matriarch Lansra starts on another rant about Aloy being the child of the Metal Devil.
• Bilingual Bonus: A datapoint from the time of the Old Ones is about "Haere Mai", a program meant to attract people back to New Zealand as it was being rebuilt. "Haere Mai" means "Welcome".
• Blown Across the Room: The Tearblaster, an Oseram gadget, will shoot directional air shockwaves that do no direct damage but heavy tear damage, sending machines' armor plates and vulnerable tear-off components flying off on a hit. It will also physically force around humans and smaller machines and potentially stun them.
• Bond Villain Stupidity: Helis likes this trope. In fact, it's bad enough that he becomes convinced that Aloy must have some divine destiny to be killed by him at a specific moment, rather than the more obvious answer that he's not good at following through.
  • First, he nearly kills Aloy at the beginning of the game via Slashed Throat, only being stopped by Rost's intervention. After fighting Rost off and mortally wounding him, he then decides not to finish either incapacitated Nora off in favour of setting up explosives to blow the whole mountaintop up, giving Rost just enough time to push her to safety.
  • Later in the game, he has Aloy at his mercy, but doesn't kill her outright. Instead, he explains his plans in detail, then throws Aloy into the Sun Ring, figuring that his machines will kill her in a suitably dramatic fashion. Instead, Aloy outsmarts and outfights the machines, giving Sylens plenty of time to (literally) ride in and save the day.
• Bonus Dungeon: All of the Cauldrons in the base game, as none are required for the main story. Completing them lets Aloy override more types of machines, which aids in quickly neutralizing big threats or weakening a large group by turning the machines on one another. Finding the data logs contained within also drops hints towards HEPHAESTUS's existence as the true cause of the Derangement and the increasing lethality of the machines the cauldrons are producing.
• Book Ends:
  • There are several parallels between Aloy's first major challenge, the Proving, and her last (in this game at least), the battle against HADES.
    • Both are prefaced by Aloy having to sleep in an unfamiliar place, wracked with uncertainty about her future.
    • Both challenges follow a similar format: a firefight that is mostly ranged, followed by some platforming, and then another, more intense fight against advanced enemies.
    • Just before the Proving, Rost gives Aloy his necklace for remembrance. Sometime after the finale, we see Aloy finding Elisabet's body and taking a necklace from it.
  • The first significant thing Aloy does in the game is rescue a fallen Teb from prowling machines. In the finale, after Aloy is knocked out by some falling masonry while protecting Meridian, Teb is the one who comes along and helps her up.
• Boom, Headshot!: Headshots deal extra damage on human enemies, is silent so it won't immediately alert other enemies, will drop most with a single hit, will drop all but bosses with a higher quality bow/arrow, and provides extra experience.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • The hunting bow is the most basic class of weapon in the game, but it's also the most flexible. Fire and tearing are incredibly common vulnerabilities to exploit, and it covers both nicely with its fire and hardpoint arrows. The latter in particular are also effective at destroying weak points and causing damage in general, and ammo for the bow is very cheap to craft.
  • The Lure Call ability can be unlocked as soon as you take control of Aloy after the prologue. It does nothing but letting Aloy whistle at enemies to lure them to her location, but its usefulness especially against large groups of human enemies (like bandit camps) can't be overstated, and it does quite well against most medium machines, too, if you upgrade the Silent Strike's damage.
  • Throwing stones is mostly superfluous in regular gameplay thanks to the aforementioned Lure Call, though it can be helpful in moving a group. On Ultra Hard difficulty, however, it suddenly becomes very useful due to the severe restrictions this mode places on the Lure Call ability. Luring hostiles with stones is a bit trickier than whistling at them, but unlike the Lure Call it won't alert the entire hostile force if you use it more than once. It also makes the Outlaw Dark Box you can purchase in Meridian much more practical as it multiplies the amount of stones Aloy can carry.
  • On the machine side, one of the most basic attacks that machines employ is to hurl themselves bodily at Aloy (or any other foe), trusting their sheer mass to crush the squishy human. Though there are some tells that make them relatively easy to dodge, on higher difficulty levels even one of these impacts can instantly kill Aloy.
• Bows and Errors:
  • Aloy typically has her bow strung at all times, and she can hold it at full draw for an indefinite length of time.
  • The capabilities of bows in general are highly exaggerated; this is partly Acceptable Breaks from Reality since realistic bow physics would be less fun, and also hand-waved by the presence of scavenged advanced machinery in the setting that justifies the creation of both specialized ammo and absurdly powerful bows.
  • A detail created more by a quirk of the combat system than deliberate design is that the mechanic that creates a Bullet Time effect anytime Aloy is in midair means that the most effective way to aim a shot is to draw and then jump straight upward while aiming. This would not be effective technique in real life.
• Brick Joke: The first audio log Aloy found is a scientist sending a happy birthday message to his son: "Happy birthday, Isaac. Daddy sure does love his little big man." Years later, Sylens says those same exact words to Aloy after giving her a new copy of her Focus, proving to her that all the files and knowledge she accumulated throughout her life were preserved within the new container, despite Helis breaking the original.
• Broken Bridge: You can't leave the Sacred Lands of the Nora until after the Proving, which is the point where the whole game world is opened up for Aloy to explore. Even then there are locations you can approach but not explore until a certain point in the main story, like the GAIA Prime facility in the far north that's lacking a crucial access ladder until the game is nearly over.
• Bullet Time:
  • Aloy can learn multiple abilities that allow her player to slow down time while aiming any bow. The earliest available example lets her do this briefly while jumping or sliding; the more practical one can be enabled at any time. Upgrades exist to extend the time the effect stays active, and to increase her rate of fire while it lasts.
  • A similar effect triggers on occasion when Aloy performs a particularly long jump. Other games often couple this with Press X to Not Die, but in HZD it's just a graphics effect to make her climbing look even more badass.
• But What About the Astronauts?:
  • Subverted. General Herres specifically states that, "The destruction of a biosphere is not the sort of apocalypse you can wait out in a fallout shelter or space station. There will be no Earth left to reclaim. Just a lifeless, toxic rock with several million Faro robots on it... hibernating, waiting for something to eat." As far as is known, he's right; no trace of the old world remains save for ruins, and the only life is what was re-created by Project Zero Dawn.
  • Brought up again in the counselor guidelines, that it's unfeasible to maintain life in orbital, lunar, or undersea structures. Lunar mining has been a thing, but this is the only mention of trying to preserve life there. Survival for the short term in underground bunkers is brought up, but the best-planned bunker we know of, Elysium, is able to provide for its two thousand starting inhabitants for only a hundred years. If their population grew at all this time frame would shrink to thirty years, so everyone going in is sterilized. A Zero Dawn scientist also mentions unaffiliated shelters and how some of the people in them believe they'll make it somehow. She doesn't have hope.
  • Far Zenith apparently tried anyway, and apparently had some pretty advanced technology. Some people in the Zero Dawn project believe that it might even have a chance. You find a text message stating that the telemetry data indicated that the ship's antimatter containment failed and it blew up en route, making Zero Dawn the last hope for humanity.
• But Thou Must!: HZD's quests are about as linear as its world is open. Numerous quest objectives can be completed before the quest is given (like neutralizing the outlying Eclipse camps during "Revenge of the Nora"), but any objectives within the quest are fixed with no way to deviate from them, so Taking a Third Option is almost never possible. To stick with the aforementioned example: there's no way to finish "Revenge of the Nora" without a huge battle between the Nora Braves and the Eclipse forces. If you try to clear the enemy base all alone, which isn't all that difficult with a smart approach, the game will keep spawning waves of hostile reinforcements until you blow up the Blaze storage to trigger the battle.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": All of the machines are imitations of real, though extinct, animals, but since the people of this time don't know the names of their inspirations, they instead name them based on either their physical properties (Tallneck, Lancehorn), or behavioral patterns (Watcher, Thunderjaw).
• Cap:
  • The base game gives Aloy a level cap of 50, which The Frozen Wilds then raised to 60. New Game Plus eliminates it entirely with its Ghost Levels feature that allows you to keep leveling more or less indefinitely, although they don't actually do anything - they're merely a Bragging Rights Reward.
  • Most weapon and armor stats can only be improved to a certain point, usually at the accumulated maximum of three maxed-out mods of any given type. Damage boosts for instance are capped at +150%^note Damage Coils can provide a maximum boost of +50% apiece, stealth maxes out at +45%^note the best Stealth Weaves provide a +15% bonus, and so on.
• Cargo Cult: With humanity having virtually no knowledge of advanced technology, everything concerning the machines is very often interpreted religiously. The Old Ones who created them are deeply revered, and the mechanical world is shrouded in mysticism. The Banuk in particular are laboriously gaining some skills as technicians, but they have little understanding of the tech they manipulate and they interpret everything through a shamanistic system. AI personalities are seen as spirits and the benevolent driving force of the universe is the "Blue Light" - essentially the searchlights used by the machines as they move about elevated to a spiritual essence.
• Cast from Money: Metal Shards are used as the primary currency, but are also one of the main ingredients in basic arrows. Although they're easy enough to come by that it's unlikely to be an issue.
• Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: You can swap out weapons, outfits, and even mods on the fly from the pause menu, even in the middle of combat. For example, you might begin an encounter by picking off enemies from cover while wearing the Nora Stealth Hunter outfit, then when you're spotted and open combat begins, change to one with more damage resistance.
• Charged Attack: The Banuk bows Aloy can acquire in the Cut are their respective weapon class' Infinity +1 Sword for two reasons: unrivaled base stats across the board, and the ability to be overdrawn for seriously increased damage. It takes a few seconds to fully "charge" each attack, but if you combined it with the Triple Shot ability beforehand, the resulting shot packs enough punch to kill most medium machines outright and deal considerable damage to even the largest enemies.
• Closed Circle: A rather tragic case for Aloy occurs in the beginning of the story. The Nora's Sacred Lands are extremely isolationist and leaving is forbidden, even to Outcasts, whom are expected to spend their sentence living in the Embrace in complete isolation from their fellow members until they are allowed back into Mother's Heart. In Aloy's case, being outcast for life from birth effectively means she is both isolated from the small community within the valley and forbidden from leaving it to seek companionship elsewhere, even when she grows into a capable adventurer who can traverse the dangerous wilds. The number of people Aloy has interacted with growing up inside the Embrace can be counted on a single hand, furthering her sense of loneliness. Said isolationist views are so ingrained, that it takes exceptional circumstances, such at the attack on the Proving and the slaughter of the Nora war parties who tried to retaliate, to allow the high matriarchs to anoint Aloy as a 'Seeker', who is allowed to journey outside the lands with the All Mother's protection. Rost was only able to similarly journey outside the Sacred Lands by being anointed as a Death Seeker, one who is already considered dead, in order to avenge the murder of his family by outsiders.
  • The Closed Circle also means that Aloy is completely in the dark about any world events. Since she grew up within the Embrace, the heart of Nora lands, she is completely unaware of major events and cultures, most notably the Carja's Red Raids. At least one character is stunned that Aloy has no idea what that is and has to be told about it, allowing her to be a Fish out of Water character.
• Colony Ship:
  • There was an ill-fated attempt made in the 21st century in which the ship, the Odyssey, was rendered into space junk in 2057. One of the Zero Dawn scientists, Ron Felder, initially mistakes Zero Dawn for an attempt to build a colony ship to escape Earth, and points out that it is utterly impossible by reminding the counselor of the Odyssey and the immense difficulty of building one. Nor does he voice in favor of the idea of a generation ship.
  • However, there was a second attempt with a new or repaired Odyssey in the 2060s. Everything was going well until the engines exploded, completely destroying the ship and everything on it.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience:
  • All machines have blue eyes under normal circumstances, which turn yellow when they suspect you're around, and red when they're about to start attacking you.
  • All climbable elements are marked with yellow rope, tape, paint, etc,. so you can identify the way forward more easily.
  • The weapons, outfits, tradable and salable items scale from white to green to blue to purple (common to rare), with an extra purple-with-flourish for harder-to-obtain items that are either quest rewards or DLC-added unique items.
  • Overridden machines have either red wires around their necks if overridden by a Corruptor, or blue if overridden by Aloy (or Sylens). Machines afflicted with the Corruption status effect become tinted light green. Daemonic machines in the Frozen Wilds DLC have purple wires.
  • Entering the vicinity of an active bandit camp heavily desaturates the normally vibrant color palette. The same happens during heavy weather and at certain points in the main story, the latter of which usually coincides with a heavy Eclipse presence.
  • Cauldrons and ancient bunkers tend to have a bluish tint to them that reinforces the perceived coldness of their metallic or at least artificial nature.
• Colossus Climb: Aloy scales Tallnecks, humongous saurpod-like machines with radar disk-shaped heads that act as communications nexi for all machines in their region. Getting to the top and overriding one nets Aloy all its geo-data for the region.
• Commonplace Rare:
  • Upgrading Aloy's carrying capacity requires lots of animal bones and skins. With the legions of boars, foxes and bunnies hopping around the world one would expect this to be an easy task, but bones are uncommon drops and skins are rated rare for reasons unknown. The result? Hundreds of dead animals for a handful of resources that every single one of them should provide in abundance.
  • The rocks you can throw to distract enemies can be surprisingly hard to find for being, y'know, rocks. They only spawn near rivers and roads, and even there they're a rare find.
• Cool, but Inefficient: The Rattler is a prehistorical shotgun/submachine gun hybrid, which is pretty cool by default. Unfortunately, its spread makes it useless beyond close-quarters combat, and its damage output and elemental severity are subpar even when fully upgraded. It also can't hold much ammo, consumes it at a frightening rate, and crafting more is surprisingly expensive. You're almost always better off with a decent hunter bow and war bow to deal damage and induce elemental states, respectively. Modded for damage, and used on a Frozen enemy, however, it becomes an efficient and deadly weapon against larger machines, even on Ultra Hard difficulty.
• Cool Versus Awesome: It's no surprise the game got triple-A funding when its concept can be summarized as "cavewoman fights mecha dinosaurs".
• Corporate Warfare: One of the many quirks of the ancient world prior to the cataclysm. With widespread drone warfare, and little to no loss of human life in these conflicts, corporations would launch armed assaults on each other's facilities. These types of attacks on each other would then be televised, similar to sporting events.
• Corrupted Contingency:
  • HADES was designed as the part of GAIA'S subsystems that would purge the earth of all life if GAIA made an error and needed to restart the world because the one it was currently making wasn't fit for human survival. Unfortunately, when Far Zenith's Extinction Signal made all of GAIA'S subsystems sentient, HADES decided its purpose was to indiscriminately purge the world of all life, humans included.
  • A similar thing occurred with HEPHAESTUS as explained in The Frozen Wilds and Forbidden West; it was designed as the subfunction that would build and control the machines necessary for terraforming the world on a minute scale. However, when it became sentient, HEPHAESTUS decided to build bigger and stronger machines, resulting in Hunter-killers and Fireclaws.
• Country Mouse: Played at two different levels.
  • Aloy has shades of this when she enters Mother's Heart the night before The Proving. Not only did she grow up in wide-open wilderness with only Rost for company, but though he raised her with full knowledge of the Nora's laws and customs, he apparently didn't tell her anything about the tensions between the Nora and the Carja. When Teersa begins talking about a visiting Carja envoy and how much the Nora can't stand them, Aloy is totally lost, having never heard this before.
  • Also applies to how Aloy experiences the greater world beyond the Nora Sacred Land. Because Nora culture is highly insular and rejects most visitors from outside, Aloy is forced to deal with multiple tribes while being completely ignorant of local customs and the current geopolitical climate. She is very rustic in comparison to the more advanced cultures of the Carja and the Oseram in particular.
• Cow Tools: In-universe, this is how many bits of Old Ones tech is viewed. For example, you can find treasure labeled "Ancient Chimes" with a picture that's a set of keys on a key ring. Even though we see actual keys used by The Eclipse.
• Crapsack World:
  • The world of the 2060s, despite showing the peak of human technological advancement, is plagued with problems even before it's all destroyed by the Faro Plague. World governments become more tyrannical as their power is eroded away by corporations, severe Global Warming completely destroys entire nations like New Zealand, unemployment is at an all-time high due to widespread automation of industries, and many nations are embroiled in constant regional wars thanks to easy access to an endless supply of cheap Killer Robots. The efforts of people like Elisabet Sobek and, early on, Ted Faro brought things back from the brink. Though there was much that couldn't be fixed, still much was improving. And then Faro decided he could make more money from war machines.
    CYAN: There were many factors. Forced migrations, food shortages, collapsed economies, refugee crises, conflict over resources. But these all stemmed from one cause: catastrophic climate change that greatly reduced the habitable surface area of the Earth.
  • According to Sylens, the current world post-Zero Dawn is also this. Full of primitive, fractured, hostile, and superstitious tribes that would rather fight each other or go into forced isolationism rather than work together. It's only very recently that the world gets a little less crappy with the rise of the benevolent King Avad, but his hold over his kingdom is precarious and there are many enemies who would like to see him unseated from the throne. This is because Ted Faro sabotaged the APOLLO educational database — resulting in the first generation of new humans only being educated to kindergarten level — supposedly because he believed humanity would be better off without the super-technologies that led to the creation of the Faro Swarm... but given how every human alive at the time hated his guts, as well as the fact that APOLLO was supposed to teach the new humans not to repeat the mistakes of the old ones, it could just as easily have been because he didn't want to be remembered as the monster who ended the world. Sylens condemns him as a monster twice over — once for destroying the world, again for destroying all the knowledge of that world.
    Sylens: So this is why. This is why we were trapped in benighted ignorance. For an "innocent future". "Blameless men!" He never saw the slaughter in the Sun-Ring. Everything these people achieved, all the knowledge of the Old Ones — evaporated! Turned to dust, scattered to the void. Like the Alphas themselves.
  • Sylens believes this, but Aloy insists that it's A World Half Full, if not even better, and the story — not just her own impact, the efforts of many people she meets striving to make things better and often succeeding — seems to bear that out. It's a troubled world but every culture hurt by the Carja recognizes that it got as bad as it did thanks to one Sun-King and that his successor is penitent. Only a few years after the Red Raids ended, even the isolationist Nora allow a Sun-Priest to visit the Sacred Lands and enter the Embrace itself. There are people learning about every element of the world, trying to help the poor refugees at Sunfall, learning and pushing past their prejudices, having compassion for their enemies. There are bad people and bad influences but they're just a part of a broad, complicated future.
• Create Your Own Hero: Had HADES not tried to kill Aloy the moment he saw her, then she may never have left the Sacred Lands. It's possible she would have found out about Elisabet Sobeck via the door in All-Mother Mountain eventually, but the odds of that happening early enough to lead to her being able to defeat HADES prior to his assault on the Spire are practically zero given the tribe's customs.
• Crow's Nest Cartography: The Tallnecks, large robotic dinosaurs with Saucer-shaped heads who gather telemetry from all the other robotic wildlife. They patrol around ruins, and the player has to climb the ruins they circle, then jump onto the passing Tallneck to then scale its titular neck to the saucer section and thus get map information. They are basically a (slightly) mobile version of this trope.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: In the side quest "Acquired Taste", Brin comes across as a loony who's been tripping on the machine fluids he drinks. However, the visions he sees every time he imbibes machine blood paint a frighteningly accurate picture for the state of the machines and the Metal World (and the last one even provides potential Foreshadowing for the sequel). It's no wonder Aloy keeps indulging his bizarre obsession even as he asks for fluids from more dangerous enemies.
• Cutscene Incompetence: Inside the Zero Dawn facility, Aloy suddenly forgets how to duck when Helis throws a grenade at her, resulting in her being knocked out and captured. In the arena sequence that follows, pitting her against two Corruptors is treated as insurmountable odds, when the player is not only expected to face even worse odds at different points, but will in fact have already faced this same situation earlier in the questline, just with slightly better cover and an ally. As this takes place near the end of the game, the idea that the player can't win such a battle is almost comical.
• Cutscene Power to the Max: Warchief Sona is introduced in a cutscene by dropping a Sawtooth sneaking up on Aloy with a single, apparently unmodified arrow. Even at a high level with the best equipment, this would be a difficult feat for Aloy to achieve. During normal gameplay with Sona on the battlefield, she is a capable ally but does not display anything approaching that level of lethality again.
• Cyberpunk: The world of the Old Ones. The environment was screwed up, everybody was at war — openly stated to be nothing more than profit-motivated war — technology such as the Focus was widely available and exploited, and Faro's MegaCorp ticked standard "monetary gain at any cost" tropes on the list like there was no tomorrow (until there wasn't).

D — F

• Dead All Along: It turns out that all life on Earth as we know it has already been dead for centuries. The current life on Earth is in fact the result of a new biosphere artificially terraformed by GAIA to restore the planet.
• Death World: Earth was this after the Hartz-Timor Swarm/Faro Plague consumed all the life it could find. Even going outside without an environmental suit and breathing apparatus was deadly due to the toxic byproducts of the biomass-converting robot army making more of itself.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Most of the tribes are treated sympathetically, but they have different cultural values that make them far from ideal. The Nora have little disparity between the sexes (though only women who've had specifically girl children who've had children in turn can hold the highest positions of power), but they're also the most rigid and xenophobic. Meanwhile, the Carja and Oseram have a more Stay in the Kitchen attitude towards women, but they're more willing to collaborate with other tribes, the latter is the most scientifically-minded, and the former is in the process of becoming a more egalitarian society. The Banuk show no discrimination based on sex, but are harshly darwinistic about survival, and do not welcome even their own people questioning their roles and authority. Furthermore, every tribe sees itself as the most civilized and the rest as a bunch of savages, and they each have their own, varied draconian punishments for lawbreakers. Notably, the ones best equipped to achieve a more realistically grounded view of the world around them for the most part had been subjected to these punishments in one way or another.
• Despair Event Horizon: Many people who find out the true purpose of Zero Dawn can't cope with the news, which is understandable considering it straight up tells them that the Faro Plague is unstoppable and all life on Earth is doomed. The ZD staff knew this beforehand and had an extensive counseling staff on hand, and even offered medically assisted suicide as an available option. The Old One ruin Aloy falls into as a child and first discovers her focus in will have several of the player's first audio logs and datapoints be the corpses of several of these people in their last moments, including one who wanted their ending to 'be an exclamation mark instead of a eclipses', heightening the player's unease at what became of the Old World.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • There's a few early sidequests and their dialogue changes whether or not Aloy is still an outcast or has proven herself.
  • Similarly, people in Meridian will have different dialog during their quests if you've already saved Avad from the assassination attempt or rescued Prince Itamen and Dowager Queen Nasadi from the Shadow Carja.
  • If you neutralized the outlying Eclipse camps before reporting to Sona and Varl during "Revenge of the Nora", Varl will mention it and express his amazement at Aloy's capabilities. Sona is less impressed, though.
  • Similarly, if you've already cleared out at least two Corruption Zones before talking to Marea at Mother's Crown during "A Seeker at the Gates", she'll also be impressed with Aloy going One-Woman Army on something the entire Nora military couldn't fight.
  • There are a lot of quests where characters want Aloy to bring them a machine part, an animal skin, etc. In almost every instance, if you've already got enough of the resource in your inventory, Aloy will just tell them so. Same goes for several quests where you need to scout out an area. If you have happened to wander through there before the mission, Aloy will mention she has already been there.
  • If you have The Frozen Wilds DLC, certain dialogues in the main story missions may change depending on when you play through the DLC missions, and vice-versa.
  • Sylens usually introduces himself when he disables the Eclipse focuses to enable Aloy to get to Olin. If you start wandering toward Sunfall, the Eclipse base, prior to this, he contacts her to warn her away from it lest she be slaughtered as soon as one of their focuses sees her.
• Developing Doomed Characters: Both present and future ones;
  • None of the named Braves running the Proving survive, despite the early signs of a rivalry dynamic. The bigoted pricks who similarly get names and development as potential future pains-in-the-rear are either killed or utterly marginalized when Aloy's quest becomes much bigger than them.
  • None of the named Old Ones survive. The Alphas are killed by Ted Faro to prevent the new world from being tainted by the "original sin" of technological knowledge. One bunker of scientists killed themselves before they could be overrun. The biggest bunker, Elysium, was only intended to operate for a hundred years, and everyone in it was sterilized and intended to die there. The final fates of General Herres and Faro are ambiguous, however; especially since Faro is last seen broadcasting his image to the Alphas from his ultra-secure bunker as he kills them.
• Dialogue Tree: At certain points in certain conversations with NPCs, you have three options:
  • Heart (represented by a heart icon): Causes Aloy to give a compassionate response.
  • Intellect (represented by a brain icon): Causes Aloy to give a response which showcases her cleverness.
  • Threat (represented by a fist icon): Causes Aloy to stop playing nice and let the other character know just how little she thinks of them.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Preparing a Double/Triple Arrow shot takes a moment during which you're vulnerable in the heat of battle, and charging it on a Banuk bow costs even more time, but if you're a good enough marksman to make the shot count, few enemies will survive more than one or two hits.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • The best armor and spear in the game are technically only accessible after completing the third-to-last main quest. However, you can get them in relatively little time (and without completing any sidequests or exploring) if you rush the main missions, which is possible with little or no combat. Since the update that introduced a New Game Plus mode, however, this trope is in full effect if you choose to follow that path (although the enemies are also leveled up accordingly).
  • The Blast Sling in all its various incarnations. Even the basic contact explosive does high splash damage, staggers machines out of attack animations (even large machines like Thunderjaws), and can ignite Blaze on machines. The only drawback is the ammo is expensive to craft and has a maximum of 12 shots with the fully upgraded ammo satchel. Combine it with freeze arrows/bombs and you can tear apart everything below Stormbirds and Thunderjaws with ease.
  • The basic Sharpshot Bow can be acquired as soon as you have the funds to pay for it. Combined with Precision Arrows, headshots will drop nearly any non-boss human enemy you face through the first quarter or so of the game, and it's not too shabby if used against machine weakspots either. Combined with a careful application of stealth, clearing out the early Eclipse and bandit camps with it is laughably easy. It starts to lag once enemies reach double digit levels, but it won't be long until you're able to acquire better versions of the bow.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Aloy's last meeting with Nil, where they rendezvous atop a lonely mesa. He asks her a question, and she has the option to either accept it or not. If Aloy considers it, Nil says he wouldn't want to push her into something she really doesn't want to do. If she refuses, she stammers a bit, says she's flattered, but ultimately can't go through with it, which leaves him feeling hurt and rejected. Ladies and gentlemen, we have a duel to the death treated like a marriage proposal.
• Doomed Hometown:
  • A downplayed example: Seconds after the Proving finishes, a mysterious group of cultists launches an attack, killing many of the new Braves and devastating the valley; the Nora retaliate later, but in doing so strain their surviving war forces to the breaking point. Further downplayed by the fact that this isn't technically Aloy's home until that exact moment — she's declared a Brave right as the proctor takes an arrow to the chest and the attack begins.
  • Played more straight later in the game, when Helis sends an army of Shadow Carja and corrupted machines to devastate the Nora lands.
• Door to Before: Justified in the Cauldrons, as it's the lift from the forge chamber right to the cauldron's front door to deploy the newly manufactured machines.
• Double-Meaning Title: The first mission as teenage Aloy is called "The Point of the Spear". On the surface, this has an obvious meaning: The literal point of a spear, which Aloy now uses as a weapon after the Time Skip. However, it also carries a more metaphorical meaning: Rost sent Aloy on the quest so that she would learn that the purpose of being a Brave is to protect the tribe rather than pursuing one's own goals. In other words, he was teaching her the point of carrying a weapon.
• Due to the Dead: In the epilogue, Aloy finds the body of Elisabet Sobeck and says farewell using the common closing-their-eyes gesture. The scene also contains a subtle suggestion of how the other subordinate functions of GAIA have developed. In the Frozen Wilds DLC it is speculated that the metal flowers surrounded by triangles of regular flowers are being planted by a now-independent DEMETER. Surrounding Elisabet's body is an identical triangle of flowers, perhaps planted as a memorial by the AI Elisabet helped design.
• Dungeon Shop: Most merchants have set up shop in or near settlements, but there're also a handful that can be found in remote corners of the world, far away from any civilized outpost and often surrounded by nothing but aggressive machines and lethal weather conditions. No explanation is ever offered as to why they're standing around there instead of plying their trade somewhere more sensible.
• Dynamic Entry: Sylens blasts his way into the Sunfall Sun Ring to save Aloy from being killed in sacrifice by a pair of Corruptors after Aloy felled the corrupted Behemoth originally meant to do the deed. With him are a pair of Striders (one for him, one for Aloy to jump on) and behind him are a trio of overridden Ravagers brought in by a machine lure. While the crowd cheers the Ravagers-vs-Corruptors match-up, Helis screams bloody murder at Sylens fouling up his plans, and the two escape.
• Early Game Hell: After leaving the easy hand-holding of the Embrace, the game takes a massive jump in difficulty. You'll only have the most basic equipment (which lacks/has limited modification slots so you can't improve it by much), won't have access to all of the specialty ammo types, and will be extremely limited in how much you can carry. Taking down anything stronger than a Scrapper is going to require a careful application of stealth, Hit-and-Run Tactics, and perhaps some AI abuse. Once you've found the resources to expand how much you can carry, purchased higher quality weapons and armor, learned how to craft the specialty ammo needed to take advantage of stronger machine's weaknesses, and improved your skills to more capably deal with stronger foes, you'll feel much more like the "legendary machine hunter" Aloy is supposed to be.
• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • Campfires in Zero Dawn only let you save your progress; Fast Travelling is instead only done using a Fast Travel Pack. Forbidden West changes this to let you Fast Travel from Campfires for free, at the expense of never offering Zero Dawn's Golden Fast Travel Pack.
  • The Overdraw mechanic, where you hold a weapon's draw for an extra second to boost its damage, is only available to a few specific weapons that you can only get in the Frozen Wilds DLC, rather than featured across all weapons as in Forbidden West.
  • Rea, the Utaru who appears in the "Honor the Fallen" side quest, lacks a seed pouch. This is bizarre in light of Forbidden West, which revealed that Utaru carry seed pouches on their chests. These are treated like their soul and their seeds are planted after the carrier's death, so it's inconcievable for an Utaru to not have one. Rea also lacks the body/face paint of thick, white dots that all Utaru are depicted with in the next game, nor does she have their cloth undersuit and short, bulbous hair.
  • Similarly, Ullia is a Tenakth you can chase down during the "Sunstone Rock" side quest. While her facial paint and colours are now recogniseable as the jungle-based Lowland Clan from Forbidden West, her design lacks the rough-cut machine metal and Lowland feathers from that game, and oddly uses bamboo. Partially justified as she had just escaped prison, where she was unlikely to be been allowed to keep the metal parts of her clothing.
  • For those used to "The Base Team" from Forbidden West, it can be strange to see Varl be absent from 95% of Zero Dawn's story.
• Easier Than Easy: The Story difficulty setting quadruples Aloy's damage output while reducing the damage she takes to 10%, making it pretty much impossible to die unless you do it on purpose. If you combine this with the Shield Weaver Armor, only the most devastating attacks can even scratch the shielding, let alone damage her health bar. Fall Damage is still lethal, though.
• Easing into the Adventure: Until you've completed the Proving, you'll be limited to the Embrace, very much a Green Hill Zone limited to weak enemies. Once you leave there, however...
• Easter Egg: Guerilla Games' cooperation with Kojima Productions has spawned three Stranded collectibles in HZD that refer to the latter's then-upcoming Death Stranding game. The whole set can be traded in Meridian for a Mysterious Box that contains some goodies as well as a pair of warm socks. That last one doesn't serve a discernible function in this game, but given Hideo Kojima's track record, having a savegame with this item in Aloy's inventory when Death Stranding rolls around might have some effect there.
• Eating Machine: All Acquisition-class machines are this one way or another, as the name suggests. Some models like Striders, Grazers and Broadheads consume plant matter and process it into raw Blaze in their bodies, which is then further refined into the fuel that keeps all the other machines and installations throughout the world running. Other machines like Tramplers, Lancehorns, Behemoths and even Frostclaws/Fireclaws are basically ore refineries on legs that eat dirt, leach metals and minerals out of it and thus produce the raw materials required to build more machines. Scrappers and Glinthawks cannibalize other fallen machines for recycling purposes as well; if you destroy one in the process of harvesting, you may find amongst its wreckage a compacted cube of recycled metal stock it had formed, or a lootable container box full of salvaged machine parts.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: You have the standard Fire, Ice, Lightning, as well as Corruption (which acts like poison on humans and turns machines against one another) and Tear (which knocks armor and components off machines). Machines which are strong against Fire tend to be weak against Ice and vice versa, and Corrupted machines gain a Fire vulnerability as well.
• Eldritch Location:
  • A scanned glyph penned by a healer in the Blazon Arch describes the differing, outlandish locations that aren't even featured in the game called "The Forbidden West", transcribed from his wards whose injuries were caused by their expeditions who only brought back a few souvenirs, including a seashell, black sand, and some glass. The sequel is all about exploring these lands (stretching from Utah across to Las Vegas and San Francisco) and ultimately deconstructs the datapoint as Carja sensationalism, not dissimilar to Darkest Africa tropes. Among its descriptions are the Salt Bite lake, the Desert Clan's territory, the grasslands of No Man's Land, Las Vegas buried in the Stillsands, the Pacific Ocean, and machines not seen in the Sundom. While the descriptions are... broadly accurate, anyone who's played the sequel will tell you that the Forbidden West isn't any more or less extraordinary than the Sundom and Sacred lands in Zero Dawn. One has to think what the guards of Barren Light think of this!
  • The insides of cauldrons at least look the part, what with the dark, unpleasant atmosphere and constant hum of ancient machinery. They might also fulfill the role of Genius Loci, in the sense that they're run by an incredibly powerful artificial intelligence.
• Elite Mook:
  • Corrupted Machines have more health and do more damage than the base versions, and can't be hacked on top of that. "Daemon" versions in The Frozen Wilds are stronger still.
  • Redeye Watchers are better armored versions of the regular Watchers, and can shoot at Aloy instead of blinding her.
  • Ravagers play the role to Sawtooths. Aloy can even lampshade it:
    Aloy: (upon spotting a Ravager) That thing looks like a Sawtooth, but heavily armed. Great.
• Emergency Weapon: Zig-zagged with your Spear. As a tool that requires no ammo or aiming, it will obviously be always available when you need it. It's also pretty effective against the earlier enemies of the game should you be having trouble with the bow. Certain skills enhance its consistency and make it effective against medium-sized machines, and only Elite humans will survive more than a single power attack. But as the game goes on you'll find more and more enemies against whom deploying the spear is too risky, and if your ever-expanding arsenal of ranged weaponry is out of ammo or otherwise not up to the task, sticking around with your spear will just get you killed.
• Empty Levels: Aloy can technically level up past the Cap of 60, but none of those extra levels will do anything.
• Enigmatic Institute: The eponymous Project Zero Dawn is a case where a top-secret project is actually trumpeted and used as a beacon of hope and propaganda, even though no one knows what exactly it's working on. Rumors abound that it is working some kind of super weapon or other means to stop the Faro Swarm, all to keep people fighting in Operation: Enduring Victory, which threw the entire world's population at the robots just to slow them down enough for Zero Dawn to complete its work. In the meantime, Zero Dawn collected scientists from around the world (sometimes forcibly), and brought them to their secure facility where they were given the choice to either join the project or...not. The Awful Truth is that Project Zero Dawn is a desperate attempt to restore the earth to life-bearing capability after the Faro Swarm consumes all biological mass. Its true purpose is kept from the public to keep them fighting and to avoid the loss of hope and morale that would come with the knowledge that they are already fighting a lost cause.
• Eternal Engine: The Cauldrons are vast, fully automated underground assembly lines that have been churning out legions of robots for centuries without showing signs of slowing down. Their insides are clean, (mostly) intact, heavily defended and usually well-hidden from the outside world, ensuring that they'll continue their allotted tasks until GAIA's terraforming is complete and Earth's biosphere fully restored.
• Eternal English: People still speak American English with approximately the right accents for the region that used to be hundreds of years ago. This could be considered Translation Convention, except they're also fully capable of understanding audio messages recorded by the Old Ones.
• Everybody Hates Hades: All of GAIA's subsystems are named after various Greek gods that reflect their purpose. HEPHAESTUS allows GAIA to create robots for whatever purposes she needs. APOLLO was a repository for all human knowledge. HADES' purpose was to wipe out all life on the planet so that GAIA could start over if she had to. Deliberately subverted by the ZD staff, who point out that HADES serves a very necessary function: Preventing GAIA succumbing to Sunk Cost Fallacy and terminating the biosphere when it's not tenable for human life to thrive in.
• Everything Sensor: There seems to be no limit to what a Focus can detect and analyze. Many of the things it picks up on in Aloy's time are things that didn't even exist back when the devices were made. It's implied the focus is sensing and translating the machine designations given to them by HEPHAESTUS for Aloy's convenience.
• Evil Sounds Deep: HADES's voice is a perfect mix of robot and evil overlord; it's as deep as the ocean floor. Several characters (including Aloy) comment on how unnatural it sounds.
• Excrement Statement: An obscure tradition of the Banuk tribe known as "Banuk farewell mark", involves members of said tribe stealthily pissing on properties or belongings of people they don't like, "preferably someplace they won't find it until it gets nice and sour."
• Exact Words:
  • Rost very strictly adheres to Nora tribal law, which forbids speaking between an outcast and a tribe member. In "The Point of the Spear", he notes: "I never spoke to anyone." All entirely true; he whistles to request that the gate to the true wilds be opened, and only nods to the braves he passes by. The only person he directed any words to was Aloy, also an outcast.
  • "No outcast has ever won the Proving". It's entirely true, because people that complete the Proving stop being outcasts.
• Exposed to the Elements: The only things Banuk shaman wear above the waist are elaborate headdresses, glowing blue wires they thread through their skin, and, if female, a cloth band over their breast. The Banuk live exclusively in the mountains above the snow line.
• Failsafe Failure:
  • In the backstory, The Faro Plague. Ted Faro thought that it was a great idea to create autonomous, self-replicating killing machines that use biomatter of all kinds as fuel without any kill codes or backdoor access in case of emergency — with almost perfectly secure software, no less. It took 50 years for a hyper-advanced program with incredible processing power devoted exclusively to that one task to generate shutdown codes from scratch — the military would have been every bit as pissed at him if one of their chosen targets had been able to subvert their war machines. Well, Be Careful What You Wish For.
  • In the game proper, the plot is put in motion when someone or something activates GAIA's emergency failsafe, which function is to undo all her work in restoring earth's biosphere in case she messed up, even when said biosphere is actually functioning well.
• Famous, Famous, Fictional: When General Herres describes the true horror of Operation Enduring Victory he admits that it makes him the holder of a body count greater than history's monsters of which the last one is entirely fictional:
  Herres: Over the past sixteen months, Doctor, I have presided over the greatest wholesale slaughter of military personnel and civilians in the history of... history. Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Sorabella — add'em together, they don't even come close.
• Fantastic Measurement System: A few Old Ones logs mention that Artificial Intelligence is measured in terms of Turing, with 1.0T being indistinguishable from a human intelligence when taking the Turing Test. 1.38T was the record, but after VAST SILVER went rogue, laws were put in place to limit any AI to 0.6T. Both CYAN and GAIA break this limit, though both out of necessity.
• Fantastic Racism: There is plenty of prejudice, Cultural Posturing and various levels of verbal sniping ranging from friendly banter to lethal insult between all groups in the game, as catalogued below, but none of it is actually based around what we today would call race. All the tribes are about as phenotypically varied as modern-day America, and it is never brought up in any way. This is because their ancestors were intentionally created as such by GAIA. For the people of the tribes human populations have always been a collection of different phenotypes and the idea of categorising people based on appearance alone likely never even occurred to them.
  • Between the Nora and Carja. The Nora, being notorious isolationists and generally wary of outsiders, especially disliked the Carja for abducting their tribesmen for slavery and, much later, human sacrifices during the Red Raids. The Carja, along with other tribes, look down on the Nora as backwater savages, xenophobes, and paranoid zealots.
  • The Nora have their own institutionalized version within their own society. Anybody deemed an "outcast" in Nora society is banished into the forest to survive on their own until their sentence is complete (if ever). Regular Nora by law are not allowed to speak to or even acknowledge that outcasts exist, and are generally encouraged to persecute them.
  • The Banuk and Carja aren't friends, also largely due to the Red Raids. One of The Frozen Wilds DLC sidequests highlights this: trying to maintain the relatively peaceful recent relationship, Banuk put one of their own believed to have killed a Carja through a harsh punishment, being left naked and unarmed on a glacier covered in hostile machines, with the view that he'll probably die but if he lives and gets back he's forgiven. The Carja hearing about this are dismayed and want a proper trial for him — that is, having his mouth filled with salt and being staked out in harsh sun for three days, and if he only loses his sight or sanity that is a sign of the Sun's mercy.
  • Also between the Carja and Oseram. The Carja, aside from general snobbery, see the Oseram as uncivilized, with several even believing the Oseram support anti-Carja terrorists. The Oseram view the Carja as too soft for real work.
  • Notably, standard racism is absent, despite humanity being made up of the same racial diversity as its origins. This is because the current generation of humanity is descended from clones randomly produced in cradle facilities. Skin color is as much an arbitrary feature as eye or hair color, with no special history behind it and no reason for anyone to have a grudge against one color over another.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture:
  • The Nora, a hunter-gatherer tribe with fairly small settlements, have a Native American feel to them, especially since their warrior class are called "braves". They also wear blue face paint, which some Celtic tribes were known to do, and their architecture, especially in their "capital" Mother's Heart, resembles the Norse.
  • The more "civilized" Carja, with their sedentary, agricultural lifestyle, actual cities, veneration of the Sun, and practices of slavery and gladiatorial combat, show a mixture of Roman, Aztec, and Ancient Egyptian influences. Their naming conventions are more reminiscent of Arabic or Indian cultures.
  • The Oseram are all about forging and war, they love drinking and arguing, and what passes for their government is basically a council of village elders who substitute shouting matches for civil discourse. (Or Dwarves.) Adding to it, some serve in the Carja Vanguard, directly referencing the Byzantine Varangian Guard (Viking mercenaries serving the Emperor).
  • The Banuk are highly in tune with nature, somewhat insular, very spiritual, make their clothes out of the "skin" and "bones" of machines (animals), practice shamanism, and live comfortably in the frozen north, all clearly reminiscent of the Inuit. (Their name even sounds like "Inuk", the singular form of Inuit.)
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Used both in the form of ammo used by Aloy and other humans, and by the machines for the same purpose.
• Fling a Light into the Future: There are several cases of this.
  • The Zero Dawn Project. Since there was no way to stop the Faro Plague from destroying humanity and all life on Earth, the remnants of humanity instead decided to use their remaining resources to build GAIA, an advanced AI that would figure out how to shut down the Faro Plague and subsequently terraform and repopulate the Earth with life centuries after humans went extinct.
  • The Lightkeeper protocol was a variation in which the top members of the Zero Dawn project would clone themselves and raise their own clones to keep maintaining GAIA. That idea was quickly shot down, but some of the infrastructure remained.
  • GAIA created a clone of Elisabet in the vague hope that she would eventually find out the truth, stop HADES, and rebuild GAIA, with the means to do these tasks all being locked behind bunkers accessible only to people with specific DNA.
  • On a more personal level, Christina Hsu-Vey describes art as a necessary part of this in one of the audio logs, and how its survival means the survival of a culture:
    Christina: No, it is not fair, not at all, but for the sake of my family, for the sake of art— Art is alive, it must be able to speak from beyond history, and echo in the future. Not perish into oblivion. This opportunity, I must do this.
  • This as a whole is a major theme of the game: that we have the power to decide what we want our impact on the world to be and that we have to take responsibility for it, whether that means something as huge as saving all life on the planet like Elisabet Sobeck did, dooming it to oblivion like Ted Faro, or even just leaving episodes of your podcast hidden around your old workplace before it's sealed up just in case somebody ever wanders in and finds it.
• Flunky Boss: All bosses either have backup from the outset or start calling some in soon enough. Unsurprisingly, the Final Boss takes this up to eleven.
• Foreshadowing:
  • When Aloy finds the recording of herself meeting Olyn and sees it compared to the mysterious women from the Eclipse's focus databanks, a DNA record shows a 99.47% match between them, leading Aloy to assume that said woman is her mother. Since the knowledge of the old world was lost, Aloy had no way of knowing that such a close match cannot occur between familial members, as traces of DNA from her 'father' would have created a less-close match between then. This leads into the reveal that Aloy is a clone of said woman, Elisabet Sobeck, thus making her her mother only on a technicality.
  • When Aloy is introduced to the Faro robots, the recording states that the machines are designed to be unhackable (for decades), while the Faro Plague was estimated to wipe life out in 2 years. Aloy (unaware of hacking jargon) wonders how Sobeck and co. stopped the machines in time to safeguard life on Earth, while the answer, obviously, is later revealed to be they didn't.
  • Sylens states that he wishes to do over his work with HADES but place the AI under more safeguards. Which he ultimately does in the Stinger.
  • In an early mission done for Odd Grata, some of what she says to Aloy (in the form of "prayers" to All-Mother) seem to indicate she somehow knows Aloy was born of GAIA's ELEUTHIA Cradles, even if she can't express it in such exact terms, for the sake of stopping HADES.
  • Ted Faro killed the Alphas and deleted APOLLO (all the stored knowledge of pre-downfall humanity) so that the new humanity wouldn't make the same mistakes as the old (or so they wouldn't loathe him forever as the cause of the apocalypse). Not five minutes before you discover this, you can scan some audio logs with Ted Faro talking crazy about how the knowledge APOLLO would impart is "poison" and that he has a solution.
    • Ted Faro's deletion of the APOLLO database also foreshadows some elements in the next game. After all, why will a dead man be so worried about future generations learning his crimes and try to erase all proof, unless he planned to "guide" them into the new world?
• For the Evulz: One quest tasks Aloy with putting down three escaped convicts — one of which being a Mad Bomber who's proud of the chaos and destruction he'd sown, announcing himself like his own MC at an event when found. Instead of fighting him directly, Aloy has to navigate a Death Course he'd set up and littered with booby traps while he taunts her all the way to the top, and once she reaches him, he decides to blow himself up rather than go peacefully.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: During the scene after Aloy is recovering from her fall after Rost sacrificed himself during the Proving Massacre, she finds some information on a woman that looks like her, along with a string of coordinates. Plugging in those coordinates into a map function gives you the location of Pike's Peak, Colorado, where the Nora tribe presumably are.
• The Fundamentalist:
  • High Matriarch Lansra and Helis are incredibly hostile and dogmatic, each in their own way.
  • Subverted with Rost and High Matriarch Teersa, and some of the more sympathetic Sun Carja priests. Rost sees that the Focus she picked up in the ruins is important to her and allows her to keep it. Teersa is patient and fair-minded and finds ways to accommodate the world and her faith together, and can bend. Although the womb of the mountain is sacred ground and only Matriarchs may enter normally, when the Shadow Carja overrun Nora lands she calls for everyone, including Outcasts, to come into its shelter. Of the Sun-Priests Irid, the envoy sent to apologize to the Nora, plainly finds their beliefs backwards and is convinced that his faith is the truth, but is also patient and willing to explain and tolerate some hostility. Namman meanwhile is completely accommodating, interested in other faiths without being judgmental, and feels that all beliefs can coexist.
• Future Imperfect:
  • The lack of knowledge about the Old Ones has led to some funny beliefs among the tribes. For instance, there's this guy in Meridian who's convinced that promotional coffee mugs were ceremonial containers used in elaborate shaving rituals. When Aloy suggests that maybe they were simply drinking vessels, he brushes it off as ridiculous. Other examples include the various ancient charms (coins or tokens), chimes (sets of keys), bracelets (wristwatches), toothpicks (corkscrew on a Swiss Army knife), or an ancient sculpture (an artificial heart transplant). Since most of these artifacts are nonfunctional and of no practical use anymore, all you can do is sell them off for shards.
  • More broadly, humanity has largely forgotten that the machines were originally human creations. In Mother's Heart, you can hear a storyteller relating the Nora creation myth, according to which machines are as fundamental a part of nature as plants and animals.
• Future Primitive: Humanity now lives in tribes, wearing animal skins and crafting tools from what parts they can scavenge, though as the story progresses it's shown that it's really just the Nora and Banuk who are at that level. At their current pinnacle, the Carja tribe relies on agriculture, wears woven cloth, and builds stone fortresses and cities. The Oseram are adept at metalworking and tinkering, and the most skilled at it have produced machine-lures, sonic weaponry and phonographs. Combining the structural aptitudes of Carja builders and mechanical aptitude of the Oseram, and the Carja capital of Meridian has mechanical elevators up and down the mesa on which it is located.

G — I

• Gambit Roulette: Aloy's entire existence is one. She was born as a near perfect clone of an Alpha member of Zero Dawn so that she could pass the scanners in Mother's Heart. GAIA's plan starts going awry almost immediately, first through HADES corrupting the Alpha Registry for Mother's Heart and second by Nora tradition holding that only Matriarchs (women who are grandmothers or great-grandmothers) are allowed anywhere near the door she was intended to pass, meaning that under normal circumstances Aloy would have only been able to do so thirty years too late to matter and likely too old to be up to the task anyway. It was only by sheer chance that Aloy was able to complete the mission she was born to perform. This can be explained by GAIA's desperation; it was a Hail Mary pass by someone who was out of options and had nothing to lose. GAIA had to self-destruct to keep HADES from overriding her and destroying the world, and cloned her creator as the person with the best chance to set things right.
• Gameplay Ally Immortality: If an NPC ally has a non-generic name, they can be incapacitated but not killed. After about a minute they'll recover on their own and continue the fight, which is very useful for stealth attacks on harder difficulties because enemies prioritize the ally over searching for Aloy, thus giving her more options to sneak around and wreak havoc undisturbed. It also allows her to sit back and snipe the enemy from far away while her allies are drawing aggro.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Zigzagged. The story says that the combined might of the world's military, including railguns, nukes, and whatever new weapons technology the future has developed, didn't stand a chance against the horde of Faro machines, and it was ultimately only a decades-long hacking effort by GAIA which rendered them inert. But by the time of the game, even the biggest and nastiest biosphere-restoring machines GAIA created can be taken down by a single short, skinny redhead with a spear and a bow. Even the restored Faro-era machines such as the Corrupter and Deathbringer aren't that much of a threat, though this is said to partly be because of damage they suffered during a millennium buried underground, and also because Aloy never has to fight more than one at a time, except during the final battle, compared to the overwhelming swarms humanity faced during the first war. Additionally, these were only the "footsoldiers" of FAS's Chariot Line: the "Metal Devil" atop All-Mother Mountain is an example of the unstoppable Horus-class titans; Aloy never has to fight these Titans, as they are never reanimated.
  • The intro cinematic shows a pair of Tallnecks and a pair of Thunderjaws prowling the Embrace. Neither machine can be found in this area, neither are ever encountered in close proximity to each other, and Tallnecks are entirely solitary creatures.
  • The lore and descriptions of machine behavior imply that they roam the landscape, but in fact, machines are always found in fixed locations, prowling a small area.
  • In what is probably a development oversight, Teb describes Sona to Aloy as a tall dark-skinned woman (which is true) with long white hair (which isn't, her hair is black).
  • Aloy will often shiver and cuddle up while exploring particularly cold regions. This doesn't change even if you give her complete immunity to cold damage through appropriate cold weather gear.
  • The keeper of the stealth challenges for the Hunters Lodge makes a big deal of how he learned the importance of patience on the hunt. His trials still have time limits and they are no longer than the other Hunting Grounds' trials.
  • No matter what outfit you're wearing, Aloy will be shown wearing the original Nora Brave outfit that she received just before the Proving at the start of the game in some cutscenes, including the one that plays after the climactic final battle. Even so, many will show her wearing whatever you've chosen, such as when she runs out of the dust cloud in the Sun Ring with her gear back on after all of it was taken from her before.
• Gang Up on the Human: Different factions will fight against each other, but will always prioritize attacking Aloy if they see her. This can actually be taken advantage of, since foes will ignore a more pressing threat to make potshots or run haphazardly in Aloy's direction, which could result in them taking damage from a different source before they can pose any danger to the player.
• Generational Trauma: The game shows a world heavily impacted by this. One of the most powerful kingdoms, the Carja, committed genocide against several other tribes (called 'Red Raids' within the story). Although their king has been overthrown by his son, the relationship between the Carja and other tribes is still often dominated by resentment and trauma, more so because reconciliation efforts have been going very slowly.
• Genetic Engineering Is the New Nuke: Defied - in an official podcast, Guerilla said they wanted to justify such a strong presence of robots in the game. Genetic engineering and nanomachines both offered alternative solutions to some of the Old Ones' problems, though. For that reason the backstory includes some obscure datapoints about the Naysay Doom cult that released genetically engineered viruses, and a major incident with nanomachines devastating Indonesia, both of which led to dramatically increased regulation in those respective fields. Both genetic engineering and nanotechnology remain present in the setting, but are less emphasized.
• Genre Blind: Lampshaded: In one data point, Brad Andac laments that despite a century and a half of science fiction warning otherwise, humanity still managed to wipe itself out in a Robot War.
  Brad Andac: 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?
• Gentle Giant Sauropod: Tallnecks, massive machines designed to take after sauropods, are the only variety of machine that will never be hostile to Aloy, even while she's climbing all over their back to update her map.
• Giant Mook: Cultist Heavies have a lot of health and fight with heavy machine guns rather than the prehistoric weaponry everybody else is carrying.
• Godzilla Threshold: Project Zero Dawn. Billions of people were sent to their deaths against the unstoppable swarm of the Faro Plague all for the express purpose of buying time for the initiative to be completed. Furthermore, Zero Dawn was not a weapon created to destroy the robots, as the masses were led to believe via propaganda, but a massive undertaking to terraform the planet and bring life back to it in the centuries to come. There was no alternative; humanity was going to be extinct regardless, so it was either this, or allow life on Earth to come to a definitive end.
• Gondor Calls for Aid: In the final battle for Meridian, many of the people Aloy helped in both the main and side quests will show up to provide their assistance.
• Great Offscreen War:
  • The Red Raids; as the result of the Derangement that made the machines more hostile to humans, the Mad Sun-King Jiran ordered a massive series of human sacrifices which he believed would end the machines' aggression. This resulted in Avad overthrowing his father and becoming the current king, but also led to the formation of the Shadow Carja and indirectly, the Eclipse.
  • The Faro Plague was responsible for destroying all life on Earth in 2066 while the last remnants of humanity created Project Zero Dawn to allow the next life to inhabit the planet. Aloy eventually discovers the root cause of the apocalypse from beginning to end throughout her journey.
  • Operation: Enduring Victory, the military campaign organized by the USRC (United States Robot Command), where the USRC armed every able-bodied human on Earth and directed them against the Faro Swarm to buy time for Zero Dawn, all the while knowing there was no way they would ever win.
• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The post-apocalyptic state of the world turns out to be the responsibility of one man, now centuries dead—Ted Faro. His company was responsible for building the military robots to his insistence that they be hack-proof, and which later went rogue, ending up destroying all life on Earth due to their ability to convert biomatter into fuel and armaments, and to self-manufacture more fighting units. After Elizabet Sobeck's Heroic Sacrifice, Faro also interfered with the Zero Dawn project by deleting APOLLO and killing all the remaining Zero Dawn Alpha personnel, due to wanting to leave the next iteration of humanity free of the "original sin" of technological knowledge (or erasing evidence of his culpability).
  • It's revealed in the late portions of the main game that an unseen third party was responsible for activating HADES, which in turn un-shackled the GAIA sub-routines into their own A.I.s. After the credits, Sylens begins following the trail after capturing HADES.
  • HEPHAESTUS (not HADES) is responsible for hacking the forges to create increasingly dangerous machine designs, despite never appearing in the game outright. Having been disengaged from GAIA's control through the virus HADES unleashed, it deemed humans as a threat and overrode the Cauldrons in response.
• Green Aesop: Present, but not too heavily repeated, with the 2040s apparently having had a severe enough climate change that New Zealand and other island nations disappeared under the ocean due to rising waterlines. The "Great Claw-back" gave rise to green robotics technologies, and Faro Automated Solutions capitalizing on that. Their military robots only made the climate even worse.
• Green Hill Zone: The Embrace is the game's starting area where resources are plentiful, quests are easy, machine herds are few in numbers, and the worst machines you encounter are low-level Scrappers. The area adjacent to the Embrace is still fairly safe but already contains a Bellowback site, and the northernmost parts of Nora territory pit you against Sawtooths, Shell-Walkers and similar threats that require a modicum of leveling plus some decent equipment to tackle without getting curbstomped. It only gets more dangerous from there.
• Grey Goo: Such scenarios apparently occurred in the past, though obviously not to the point of being completely unrecoverable.
  • The "Haere Mai" and "We Were Indonesia" datapoints imply that construction companies' using nanotech led to the 2041 Citarum River Disaster, the real-world Citarum River being one of the most-polluted in the world.
  • Another log describes a veteran whose legs were lost to "nano-haze" stripping the tissue layer by layer.
  • The Faro Plague is an unconventional example — the robots use nanomachines to consume energy sources, including living things, but only rearm and make more full-size robots, not more nanomachines. Still, they eventually replicated at the expense of every living thing on Earth and left only the vast machine armies behind, stymied by the absence of material.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Although it takes some luck and effort, Aloy's stealth capabilities can be upgraded to the point that she practically needs to walk up to an enemy in plain sight and punch them in the face for them to notice her. They also never send more than one guy to investigate someone whistling from a nearby patch of tall grass even though the previous dozen that went looking mysteriously vanished. Note that none of this applies to Ultra Hard difficulty where enemy detection radii and sensitivity are vastly improved, and whistling twice at the same group gets them all converging on Aloy together.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • The Ancient Armor quest. Easy to get at the beginning of the game, but in order to complete it you'll need to find five power cells that are very tough to get if you don't know where to look for them. And four of them can only be found in areas unlocked by the main quest, so you can't just rush out to grab them and unlock the armor at the beginning of the game, either.
  • Players have completed the whole game without realizing there's a special fast travel pack with infinite uses for sale in Meridian, simply because the merchant that sells it is otherwise no different from all the others in the world, and the item is found in a rarely accessed shop category. Alternatively, it can also be crafted.
  • Climbing to Vantage Points or Banuk figurines isn't difficult in itself, but finding the first of the climbable ledges to begin the ascent can be frustrating at times without a small hint from the outside.
• Go for the Eye: Hitting a Machine in its eye-lights will do double damage, but it's an incredibly tricky target to hit, and they usually have larger weak points on show.
• Hairy Girl: Averted; it's a thousand-plus years from the present day, with all life on Earth having been wiped out and reintroduced...but even Aloy, a Nora "savage", has no underarm hair. (Although to be fair, no character, male or female, does. Either shaving arose across culture lines or GAIA engineered humans not to grow underarm hair)
• Hand Wave: Why are all of the post-Zero Dawn machines shaped like animals, instead of more practical designs? An easy to miss Datapoint reveals it's because GAIA just likes to build them that way.
• Harder Than Hard: Ultra Hard difficulty reduces Aloy's damage output to 70%, doubles the damage dealt by enemies, massively increases their detection range and sensitivity, disables enemy health bars so you have no real idea how much more they can take, multiplies all merchant prices by a factor of 5, and reduces the amount of healing medicinal plants add to Aloy's pouch. It makes knockdown and elemental effects much harder to apply, makes enemies much more aggressive, disables Mook Chivalry and makes it so that Aloy's Lure Call ability can only be used once before the entire herd immediately converges on her location. Needless to say that Aim Assist is also disabled by default. The general consensus is to not attempt this until you've acquired all the upgraded gear from a previous New Game Plus run, and even the associated achievement is conditioned on that fact. Of course, that hasn't stopped masochistic Challenge Seekers from starting an Ultra Hard game from scratch.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: No matter what the outfit preview shows Aloy wearing, there is an option to not render the headpiece (with no decrease in the outfit's performance). This becomes Hilarious in Hindsight when a certain masked outfit is required in a specific region where the residents know Aloy's appearance and are out to kill her.
• Here We Go Again!: Zig-Zagged; The Stinger shows Sylens bearing HADES towards a Metal Devil, despite his discovery of the omnicidal AI in one such machine resulting in the creation of the murderous Eclipse tribe and near-destruction of the entire world — and during his last conversation with Aloy, he clearly stated that even knowing how utterly dangerous HADES is, he still would do it all again. "A few more safeguards, perhaps — but basically the same." However, he makes his first question a good one: "Who sent the signal that woke you?", something no one else has the capacity to ask.
• Heroic Sacrifice: So many that it's pretty much one of the main themes of the game. In order of presentation;
  • Rost sacrifices himself to save Aloy.
  • In The Frozen Wilds DLC, Ourea completes the override of Cauldron Epsilon, but is killed by the subsequent shock.
  • Practically all of humanity sacrifices itself fighting the Faro Plague in hopes of buying just enough time for the Zero Dawn project to complete.
  • Elisabet sacrifices herself to ensure GAIA is not discovered by the Faro Plague.
  • GAIA sacrifices herself by detonating her core to prevent HADES from hijacking her functions.
• The Hero's Journey: A Reconstruction. Horizon Zero Dawn takes all the tropes and conventions associated that would typically be derided as cliché in myth or fantasy fiction, and applies them to a science fiction setting. The gods who shaped the world? They're Artificial Intelligences that were created for the specific purpose of terraforming the planet after it was turned into a lifeless barren rock. The Big Bad who's a Generic Doomsday Villain that only wants to destroy the world? It's one of those very AIs that's simply fulfilling the purpose it was programmed to do, but was activated in the wrong circumstances by an outside force. The Chosen One who was born in unusual circumstances and is seemingly the only person who can save the world? She was cloned from the singlemost brilliant individual of the pre-apocalyptic world, ensuring she would develop the skills, smarts, and determination needed to complete the mission she was made for. The game plays all of these dead straight, but the unusual setting not only serves to make them feel fresh again, it actually justifies them.
• High-Tech Hexagons: The Shield Weaver's Deflector Shield is composed of these.
• Hobbling the Giant: Aloy is armed with a tripcaster bow which allows her to deploy electrically charged tripwires which, as the name implies, trips, shocks, and jolts enemies who trigger the wires. This is most useful against behemoth enemies such as the Thunderjaw who are too big for Aloy to approach outright.
• History Repeats: With Ted Faro and Sylens. Both inadvertently instigate an apocalypse for personal gain, and try to repair the damage once they realise what's happening. Both do so by recruiting Elisabet Sobeck or genetic copies of her.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: A very viable, and even recommended, combat strategy. Machines will automatically lose aggro once they're far enough away from their spawn point, so you can sneak up, deal as much damage as you can, then run away and repeat as often as necessary until they're defeated. With patience (and plenty of arrows), you can (eventually) take down foes well beyond your level. Notably, several main quest boss fights drop you into an inescapable "arena" (one of them quite literally) to reduce the effectiveness of this tactic. Many of the AI upgrades in the Ultra Hard difficult also make this tactic more challenging.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • Aloy can use tear ammunition to remove machines' heavy weapons, like the Disc Launcher or Ravager Cannon. When she uses them, they absolutely tear through their former owners much quicker than any of her own weapons.
  • Igniting elemental canisters on machines triggers a massive explosion that deals heavy damage in a huge area after a short delay. While this is undoubtedly helpful in thinning out hordes of hostile machines, it can backfire horribly if you try this on a melee-focused robot, in which case the delay means the explosion will likely occur just as the machine reaches Aloy.
• Hollywood Hacking:
  • The Faro robots are so perfectly secured that hacking them by any means would take fifty years. This is improbable, to say the least; even in real life, it doesn't take that much to create a cypher that would take more than a thousand years to brute force. Hackers are already accustomed to this, and search for the "weakest link" in the security chain, and work outwards from there. In this case, it would make more sense to impound Faro's inventory and personnel, and reverse engineer the communications equipment into something that can piggyback on the swarm's signal.
  • One of the swarm's advantages was perfect communication through multiple redundant systems, from hacked satellites to quantum entanglement. If push came to shove and humanity was indeed completely screwed, the world's nations could launch a series of shrapnel bombs into the atmosphere, shredding most if not all the satellites in orbit. This would force the Faro Plague to operate in small independent groups. Quantum entanglement could only mitigate this, since it's dependent on entangling specific quantum bits. Once half an independent group is wiped out, so would their remaining long-ranged communication.
• Hollywood Science: The death of the biosphere is treated as if it immediately destroys earth's atmosphere, or at least does so within months. This isn't how it works - there's simply too much oxygen on earth and humans breathe it too slowly. In fact, there is enough oxygen in the atmosphere that even if every non-human lifeform on earth were to die, humanity would starve to death long, long before they would be at any risk of suffocation. The game handwaves this by saying the Faro Swarm (which numbered in at least the tens of millions) emitted toxic gases as by products of their replication process and their normal operation.
• Homemade Flamethrower: In the Frozen Wilds expansion, the Forgefire is a flamethrower made out of what seems to be part of a Bellowback's blaze pouch, with some wooden bits for handling and aiming.
• Hopeless War:
  • What the Old Ones' war against the Swarm really was. There was literally nothing humanity could do to defeat the robot hordes since they were Nigh-Invulnerable to any cyberattacks and their self-replicating abilities meant that for every robot humanity did manage to defeat, hundreds were already taking its place. All they could hope to do was ensure the world itself survived and that a new generation of humans would rise up to inhabit it.
  • To underscore the intensity of the fighting, after Aloy witnesses the activation of a derelict-yet-mobile Deathbringer, she remarks after destroying it that the ancients fought hundreds of them at once. The introductory hologram at the Zero Dawn facility shows their numbers at least 697,000, with Corruptors numbering at least 485 million. The lounge staff back in the day had to request extra soundproofing between the presentation room and the lounge area to keep down the screams and sobs from those who had yet to see the Bad News.
• Hope Spot:
  • Aloy and Erend discover that Ersa is not dead and is in fact captured by Dervahl. But they arrive too late to save her and she dies in Erend's arms.
  • The people of 2066 believed Zero Dawn to be a superweapon designed to stop the Faro Plague and willingly went all-in for Operation Enduring Victory to buy time. They were deliberately lied to by the creators and backers of Zero Dawn, who knew humanity was already doomed yet completed Zero Dawn with what turned out to be just enough time:
    General Herres: Then Enduring Victory served its purpose, after all.
    Elisabet Sobeck: Yes. If we'd had even one day less...
• Horse of a Different Color: Aloy gains the ability to use to certain robots — horse-like Striders, bull-like Broadheads, or ram-like Chargers — as rides.
• Hyperactive Metabolism: Healing potions in this game are made entirely from different cuts of meat. Aloy is essentially chugging pots of stew to recover from wounds.
• I Call It "Vera": Played with for humor. Nil calls his bow "The Voice of our Teeth", but then Aloy asks a follow-up question:
  Aloy: So... what's your knife called?
  Nil: Why would someone name a knife?
  Aloy: So much for small talk.
• I Don't Like the Sound of That Place: The Grave-Hoard, as immediately lampshaded by Aloy.
• Inexplicable Treasure Chest: Who put all those supply crates deep in every Old World ruin the game has? Or more specifically, who stocked numerous otherwise sensibly placed storage containers with materials that the Old World wouldn't even have known, let alone needed to supply the ruin's original occupants?
• Inferred Holocaust: In contrast to the very explicit holocaust that befell the Old Ones, the second one is not elaborated on. The ELEUTHEA facilities, crippled by the removal of the APOLLO system, are forced to release untrained teenagers with only a kindergarten-level education out into the wild when they run out of resources. This first generation of new humans must have died in droves before they figured out basic survival skills.
• Infinity +1 Sword:
  • Subverted by the three Hunting Lodge weapons. They are the most powerful weapons in their respective categories, and unlocking them requires beating some truly tough challenges, but their buffs aren't strong enough to give you a definitive edge in combat.
  • Played straight by the Shield Weaver armor, to the point that many players abstain from using it because it trivializes combat on all but the highest difficulties. It's so powerful that the Frozen Wilds DLC introduced Control Towers specifically designed to disable the armor's signature shielding.
• Insistent Terminology: A battle of insistent terminologies occurs between Ted Faro and Dr. Elisabet Sobeck. Lis, who quit working for Ted and started her own eco-automation firm when he went into the military automation business, insists on calling the malfunctioning Horus line of robots "killer robots", which Ted unconvincingly refutes by insisting they be called "peacekeepers".
• Instant Expert: Aloy exhibits perfect riding technique while mounted on a machine, despite there not being any chance to learn such technique prior to her gaining an override device. It's at least easier for her to learn a suitable riding technique because the machine is completely subservient to her instructions and isn't a truly living animal that acts on its own accord, so there's a greater margin of error for Aloy to improvise one on the go.
• In the Future, Humans Will Be One Race: Averted, humans are just as diverse phenotype-wise as they are in the present. Justified in that the Zero Dawn team deliberately designed the genetic diversity of the post-apocalypse generation of humans to match that of the status quo in the 2060s. Patrick Brochard-Klein, the Alpha behind the Eleuthia program was quite insistent about this, pointing out that he wanted the embryos stored in the cradles and other containers to offer a snapshot of human society in the present day and he was absolutely clear that this wasn't genetic engineering which he points out is illegal according to Accords that had been put in place (and which he co-authored).
• Ironic Echo: Helis's first words to Aloy as he threatens her life: "Turn your face to the sun, child." Aloy later returns the favor by saying his own words back to him before fatally impaling him.
• Irony:
  • Aloy became an outcast of her village because she has no mother. It's revealed that she effectively has two mothers — GAIA and Elisabet Sobeck.
  • The outfits that protect Aloy from fire are always the most revealing.
  • The entirely handmade and crude-looking Oseram armor pieces are actually more advanced than the scavenged pieces of robot everyone else is wearing.
  • When trying to convince Rost to remain in contact, Aloy promises him that he won't even need to speak during their visits if he cares about Nora laws that much. Sure enough, her promise is fulfilled when Rost is killed, and Aloy holds several one-sided conversations with him during her visits to his grave.
• Item Crafting: An important part of the gameplay, mostly revolving around ammunition for your ranged weapons. Running out of ammo in the middle of a fight is about the worst thing that can happen, so a large part of your resource satchel will always be filled with the stuff you need to craft Trick Arrows, sling bombs, wire traps etc. on the fly. Juggling the numerous resources required to do so is one of the challenges you'll have to manage to make headway in the game, especially on higher difficulty settings.
• It's Not Porn, It's Art: When Travis Tate attempted to have 265 "acknowledged classics of extreme exploitation cinema" archived for APOLLO, Samina Ebadji permits only the Pier Paolo Pasolini films on the grounds that, while they were extreme, they were also art — and not coincidentally, they had already been archived for this reason. She very bluntly and angrily rebuffs him on the rest, telling him in no uncertain terms that it'll be a good thing if nobody in the future remembers the Making a Millipede movies.

J — M

• Jerkass: Many of the Nora are not very nice to Aloy because she's an outcast. Most of them become more civil when she wins the Proving, and outright respectful later on. When she leaves Nora territory she meets a large number of people who are not very nice to her because she's a "savage". Most become more civil as she progresses in quests and makes the world better.
• Just in Time: Operation Enduring Victory just barely bought Project Zero Dawn enough time to be completed. After a multi-year war that was literally fought across the entire planet, the gap in time between GAIA going live and the Faro Swarm breaking through the final lines of defense was measured in hours at best.
• Justified Tutorial: The player is trained in nearly every basic mechanic in the game while playing as a very young Aloy being taught essential survival skills by Rost.
• Killed Mid-Sentence:
  • The proctor who was in the middle of her declaration of elevating Aloy to becoming a Brave gets shot by an arrow from Eclipse Cultists.
  • Dirid, the caravan sabateur in the Underequipped quest, is suddenly shot by a Stalker after Aloy confronts him.
• Kill It with Fire: Fire is one of the most consistently useful elements. Few machines are resistant to it, it causes decent damage over time, and the fuel that is used to make fire ammo is plentiful. Corrupted machines in particular are vulnerable to it.
• Killed Offscreen: Implied; After being told that outcast children effectively never complete the Proving and rejoin the tribe by becoming braves, Aloy takes the opportunity to make some barbed comments about how the Nora treat outcasts. Teersa replies that it's more a testament to how few children are made outcast in the first place, with the only one she can remember aside from Aloy herself being a thirteen year old boy who killed his own mother. Aloy admits someone like that probably wouldn't have lived long enough to compete in the Proving.
• King Mook: Many quests pit you against a unique Humongous Mecha variant of the normal machines you'd typically encounter in the wild. Can overlap with Degraded Boss if you fight them before ever encountering their smaller counterparts.
• Know-Nothing Know-It-All: A group of Oseram that heads to a Banuk village with curiously docile Machines in the northern part of the Sacred Lands gives off this vibe to the Banuk who host them for a meal. You then later find them picking over the remains of GAIA's AI core blown free by the GAIA Prime facility destruction, which has been transmitting the signal rendering machines docile in close enough proximity. Their bumbling attempt to scavenge it ends up causing the signal to expire, and all the machines in the camp go aggressive.
• Laser-Guided Karma: In the side mission "Fatal Inheritance", Aloy is asked by a man, Ranaman, to clear out a group of machines that killed his entire family and won't leave the estate. It turns out that Ranaman was exiled from his family and that he lured the machines there to kill everyone, so that he could claim the land as his inheritance. Ranaman threatens his sister and Aloy with another lure after Aloy destroys the first one... and he immediately gets carried away by a Glinthawk that was attracted to the lure that he was carrying.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: When Sylens admonishes Aloy to finish any unfinished business before entering the Zero Dawn facility underneath Sunfall and that he doesn't want to hear any whining about such event chains being rendered inaccessible, is he chiding Aloy... or the player?
• Lens Flare: Machine lights at the edge of Aloy's vision often produce this effect.
• Let Them Die Happy: All of humanity from the days of the Old Ones died believing that Project Zero Dawn was a super-weapon that would stop the Faro Plague before it destroyed everyone and everything. It stopped the plague, but that was long after the machines ate everything.
• "Lion King" Lift: As a baby during her naming ceremony, Aloy is lifted towards the sky by Rost.
• Loophole Abuse: Grata can not speak to other outcasts. She can, however, pray to All-Mother, and when Aloy is around she tends to pray about the things she needs, express her gratitude to All-Mother for the things Aloy brings, and ask her to help Aloy win the Proving.
• Lost Technology: It appears all of your enemies are made of it... if "lost" also means incomprehensible to presently-living humans.
• Low Culture, High Tech: In terms of what the various human tribes can actually produce themselves on a large scale they're around the Bronze Age. However looting Old World sites or scavenging bits of the machines they take down allows them to make use of tools and weapons that rival (or even surpass) real world modern technology. This goes double for the Oseram.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Firespitter heavy weapon carried by bandit heavies functions like a handheld hwacha, rapid-firing rocket propelled arrows that damage whatever they hit, then explode a few seconds after impact.
• Matriarchy: The Nora practice a literal case, with their rulers being Matriarchs and High Matriarchs. It appears to be a result of the Nora reverence of motherhood, with Matriarchs being grandmothers and High Matriarchs being great-grandmothers. There are leadership roles not restricted to women, such as the War-Chief and Seeker, but these roles are currently held by women anyway.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Aloy sounds like alloy (as in metal alloy), which alludes to her relationship with the Metal World, and an alloy is a compound of different elements which is fitting for a character who is a clone of a human woman birthed by an AI Computer.
  • Sylens is a mysterious dude who plays his cards very close to his chest, and has a tendency to go dark at inconvenient times. Aloy comments on how appropriate his name is. A more sinister meaning is appended in The Frozen Wilds where a Banuk remarks that silence tends to linger in the places he moves and is the fate of the people who follow him.
  • Faro's name is identical to Pharaoh, appropriately enough for a "king" who causes a devastating plague.
  • Elisabet Sobeck's first name means "divine abundance", while her surname is a homophone for Sobek, the Egyptian crocodile god of fertility, power and protection. Her environmental robotics company, Miriam Technologies, is named for the prophetess of Exodus, sister of Moses and Aaron, perfect for a visionary who guided humanity into the future. Miriam is also another rendering of "Mary", and there's heavy virgin birth symbolism between her and her clone Aloy.
• Mechanical Animals: Most of the mechanimals Alloy encounters or fights are actually created by the GAIA system for planetary reclamation. This has led to a number of machines that look like deer, horses, hermit crabs, crocodiles, and even wolves who recycle damaged machines. Of course with re-emerging humanity actively hunting said machines, they've become more adept at protecting themselves. Additionally new, less docile machines are being created to fight back that resemble tigers, T-Rexes, and birds of prey.
• Mechanical Horse: Striders, Chargers, and Broadheads. Every horse-like creature that Aloy can ride in the game is literally a machine that she's reprogrammed to make it subservient to her commands, allowing her to use it for speed boost when traveling to far-off locations. This justifies the 'horse's' total obedience to wherever the player directs it, as well as the easily-replaceable nature of it, as if one gets destroyed there are several copies of it running around in the 'wild' that Aloy can similarly reprogram, and since the machines are built to be self-sufficient for their purposes Aloy never has to worry about taking care of her 'steed' as it's built to last for a long time once out of the Cauldrons.
• Mechanical Lifeforms:
  • The Machines are treated as this by the tribal humans that live alongside them. Indeed, many of them simply act like metallic animals rather than typical robots, often seen grazing or defending their territory from intruders. The ancient, still functioning factories where they are constructed are referred to as 'Cauldrons', and the phenomenon that causes them to go berserk, known as 'The Derangement' is seen as something akin to a violent illness or Demonic Possession.
  • As the game goes on we discover that most of the Machines (specifically the animal-shaped ones) are part of a terraforming system once helmed by GAIA Prime and its subordinate functions to make Earth livable again after it was nearly sterilized by the malfunctioning war machines (The Corruptors, Metal Devil and so forth) created by Faro Automated Solutions. The 'Derangement' is, in fact, the rogue subordinate AI HEPHAESTUS, determining humans to be a threat to the robots and building more and more aggressive machines.
• Mechanical Muscles: Most of the animal-shaped machines have wiring meant to serve as muscles for the machine. Even some of the non-animal machines like the Watcher.
• MegaCorp: The world of the Old Ones is implied to have had several of these:
  • Lists such as the "Fortune 5" are mentioned, and those who own such companies became trillionaires..
  • One such company, Faro Automated Solutions (FAS), was responsible for instigating armed conflict for the sake of creating markets and consequently paving the way for the apocalypse.
  • Corporations were recognized as "people" to the extent that they could run for political office-by-proxy, in turn making it easier for future legislation to blur the line between a business and a country.
  • Increased business led to the various advertising methods seen in several of the datapoints, coupled with augmented reality, and corporate names began appearing everywhere.
• Mêlée à Trois: Regular and corrupted machines will attack each other on sight. Bandits will also attack machines.
• Mentor Occupational Hazard: Rost is killed right after the Proving.
• Menu Time Lockout: You can pause the game and change your entire outfit, craft ammo, swap out weapon and outfit mods, etc. right in the middle of combat.
• Mercy Invincibility: Averted; the game doesn't give you any. For the most part this isn't a big issue, as any strong attacks will send Aloy flying away, usually preventing an immediate follow-up attack. However, if you're foolish enough to take on several strong machines at close-quarters, be prepared to be stun-locked and beaten to death in short order.
• Metaphorically True: The Nora creation myth is that the machines and the Old Ones are Gods who created the world they live in. Near the end of the game, it's revealed the machines (who mostly are terraforming agents) and the Old Ones (who formulated them) indeed were responsible for the revival of life on Earth, despite them not being Gods.
• Mid-Season Upgrade: In two versions.
  • A few machines have more powerful variants that begin to show up as you progress through the story and enter more dangerous areas of the world. Examples include Redeye Watchers instead of regular Watchers, or Sawtooths graduating to Ravagers.
  • All machines start out with only partial armor plating, but if you kill too many of any given type, the Cauldrons roll out upgraded versions that have the same stats but significantly improved armor coverage, making even the likes of Watchers a challenge to One-Hit Kill at range. Note that your kill statistics carry over into New Game Plus, so you're likely to encounter the up-armored variants immediately.
• A Minor Kidroduction: The prologue cutscene shows us Aloy as a baby; the first playable segment of the game is of her as a child before a Time Skip to about age eighteen. New Game Plus starts you out immediately at 18.
• Money for Nothing: Averted for most of the game. Unlike most contemporary Action RPGs, quests in HZD almost never reward equipment. Better weapons and armor can only be acquired by purchasing them from merchants, and that stuff is expensive. You will eventually reach a point where you own everything you need and shards just keep piling up in Aloy's Hammerspace, but many hours will pass before that happens, and any accumulated cash reserves can still be tremendously useful to those who start a New Game Plus on Ultra Hard where items are five times as expensive.
• Mook Chivalry: No matter how many enemies you managed to aggro at once, only one of them will ever attack you at any given time. One of the challenges of Ultra Hard difficulty is that it disables this courteous behavior.
• More Dakka: Ensues whenever Deathbringer Guns or Ravager Cannons contribute to a battle, both of which are heavy machine guns of various make (the former is a normal ballistic weapon, the latter fires blue energy bolts). The Rattler is a more low-key example, being a crossbow of sorts that rapid-fires metal bolts in bursts of five.
• Motivational Lie:
  • Operation Enduring Victory was this on a global scale. The human race was effectively doomed the moment the Faro swarm went rogue. But the military leadership deliberately leaked rumors that Project Zero Dawn was a superweapon that would shut the machines down and save the world, in order to motivate millions of soldiers and volunteers to sacrifice themselves in a Hopeless War to delay the swarm long enough for Zero Dawn to be completed before the extinction came.
  • After receiving GAIA's message inside All-Mother Mountain, Aloy must translate the details of her mission into terms that the Nora can understand and be on board with. This results in her making herself into the Anointed of a god in their eyes. Aloy is clearly unhappy with this interpretation, but has to go along with it to get the Nora to cooperate.
• Mundane Fantastic: Given that Aloy (and thus, the player) can usually see the holographic locks even before activating the Focus, it's easy to forget that almost no one else in the world can, which goes some way toward explaining why some people fear Aloy: to her, she's manipulating symbols and interfaces in an augmented reality display, but to everyone else she's just waving her hands around and making ancient machines work. This is commented on in the Frozen Wilds DLC, with Gildrun being audibly confused by what Aloy is doing.
• Mundane Utility: Like all armor bonuses, stealth armors are primarily meant to aid in combat, but they also prove extremely helpful in exploring the world. A maxed-out stealth armor cuts enemy detection ranges down to 25%, allowing you to get within a few meters of most machines without triggering a detection circle even if they're staring right at you. If you just want to get from A to B undisturbed, stealth armor is the outfit of choice.
• Mythical Motifs: The Old Ones in general had a Egyptian Mythology motif, while the Zero Dawn project utilized a lot of naming schemes from Classical Mythology:
  • Two of the most important Old Ones are Ted Faro, a near-homophone for Pharaoh, and Elisabeth Sobeck, after the Egyptian fertility deity Sobek. Appropriately, Faro is a leader among men and Sobeck created the Zero Dawn project to ensure the continued survival of all life. Faro's company also has a pyramid logo, and his main line of robots is called the Chariot line; Scarab, Khopesh and Horus. During the Zero Dawn project, Faro hides out in a place called Thebes.
  • The AIs of the Zero Dawn project are all named after Greek deities, with GAIA as the foremost, named after the primordial earth goddess. A datapoint also mentions that APOLLO, the AI dedicated to the education of humanity, had special interfaces named Aristotle and Aspasia, named after famous Greek thinkers, and part of APOLLO's archive was designated HOMER, after the famous Greek poet.

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