Horizon Zero Dawn/Horizon Forbidden West

So, apparently NP Cs can kill steal. I just watched an NPC kill steal the XP from someone fighting a Thunderjaw.

Ah yes, I agree about the markers, I'd forgotten about that.

Man, the Nora really drop off the radar entirely once you leave their lands. Meanwhile, you are basically single-handedly saving the Carja from their downfall, becoming a hero to them, and come this close to becoming a Carja queen.

I don't think she's going to take any shit from any Nora after that quest line.

They do make a return For the final fight. But the Nora are by nature isolationists so that they become nigh-absent when you leave their territory isn't surprising.

Speaking of which, since there was the language talk earlier, the Nora are ... weirdly diverse. For a group that's 700 years old, very insular. The Nora are diverse as fuck. Not counting Aloy Since she's a clone You have people who are white like Rost. black like Varl and his family & Asian (Jom).

It's weird that for a group so insular, they have no homogenized over 7 centuries.

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 20th 2020 at 7:47:43 AM

Yep, they all should be light brown, realistically. But the developers wanted a diverse cast, so this is a bit of artistic license.

I just see that as... Is Overworld Not to Scale the right trope? The Nora seem like a small little tribe, but they control a pretty huge swathe of land so as isolationist as they are there are still subgroups dotted all over the place.

We just don't see the full scope of things because of worldmap compression.

There definitely is map compression going on. And I agree that there obviously need to be more Nora, if only to explain the dozen or so kids participating in the Proving, which is clearly something of a (near) yearly event.

Yes obviously I assume there's more Nora than we see, but even then, over 700, presumably free of any racial tension and segregation (at least among Nora), you'd expect them to have blended togheter racially.

And yes, I know it's an artistic decision to make the game more diverse. And a good one at that.

Now that I think of it, there is a chance that two people of mixed descent will have a baby with lighter or darker skin tone than the parents. It is something to do with how melanin production is determined by genes. But that may only be so in early generations of mixed descent. Obviously it does not happen in established populations.

There's actually an audio log by the scientist who was in charge of putting together the program to gestate the new humans, where he states that they're specifically preserving the racial diversity of the human race exactly as it was at the time of Zero Dawn, to prevent any sort of eugenics shenanigans.

Edited by shigmiya64 on Jun 20th 2020 at 10:40:33 AM

Yeah, I get that part, but unless the new humans are engineered to not interbreed, individual tribes should homogenize in the interveening 700 years since exiting the craddle facility. Especially the ones more closed off like the Nora. The Carja being more diverse makes sense. They were expansionist, and far more open, so there'd be more influxes of new blood.

And you're right. But, again, that was not what the developers wanted, so they took some artistic license.

And that is a perfectly fine use of artistic license! They could just as easily have made the argument that peopling the world with humans who all have the same skin colour would solve racism as well. Then everyone would look the same no matter where in the world you went. That would have solved the same problem in an entirely different way.

Of course that wouldn't have looked very good at all, so they went the "diversity everywhere" route.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 21st 2020 at 2:19:29 PM

I'm amused by the so called "disguise" you get after a certain mission. Yeah, I'm sure no one is going to notice the flaming redhead with a mask on...

I also noticed something annoying during these lets plays: you can have your inventory absolutely crammed with all sorts of resources, but it seems really hard to come across the actual ingredients for crafting potions. Seems to defeat the idea of crafting them somewhat.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 21st 2020 at 4:12:45 PM

How isolationist are the Nora, actually? I mean, by the time of the game they're just coming off the Red Raids, so they're at peak isolationism, but I wouldn't be surprised if they used to allow outsiders to marry into the clan on occasion, as long as they obeyed the tribe's laws. And we don't know how long they've been like this anyway. Sure the tribe has existed for seven hundred years, but their memory isn't going to go back that far. If they've been isolationist for only a hundred years, that would be "the way it has always been" while still allowing for a reasonably diverse population that had mixed with outsiders.

Crafting is always hard to balance. You know how it is.

Well, I finished watching the lets play of the game.

Damn you, Ted Faro.

I wouldn't be surprised if he turned out to be the big bad behind unshackling Hades and the other subroutines. The game is heavily hinting at the existence of a life extending mechanism. My money is on Faro having gone mad from guilt, wanting to eradicate humans because they are making the same mistakes all over again.

And since we haven't seen it yet, I bet he lives in Elysium. Probably killed everyone there so he would have enough food for the next thousands of years.

Just shy of 1000, actually. According to the wiki Aloy was born on April 4, 3021 AD.

I simply meant he would have food for thousands of years, not that that much time had passed.

Apparently the tech was cloning, not preservation. Still, that raises an interesting possibility as well: a clone of Ted Faro, maybe inside his "pyramid".

Finished the first game just now; very much enjoyed it.

Speculation time: So the story of Forbidden West seems to heavily focus on the climate going out of control and those red plants overtaking things. Since it was mentioned that all of Gaia's subroutines went sentient from the mysterious signal, I'm willing to bet that we'll be meeting or at least learning about Aether (Atmosphere AI), Poseidon (Ocean AI), Demeter (Flora AI), and possibly Artemis (Fauna AI). Hephaestus will probably also feature given his prominence in the first game's DLC and the lack of resolution to his story, and Hades is of course guaranteed after the post-credits scene.

What I don't understand is why GAIA buried the Faro Plague machines, instead of scrapping them entirely.

Yes, that seems very likely. The red weeds seem to be designed to deny food to humans more than anything else.

Speaking of red weed... That is the same stuff the Martians bring along in War of the Worlds. Add to that confirmation of a colony ship that was (apparently) destroyed, and we could well see either aliens, or a return of ancient humans to earth.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 23rd 2020 at 2:23:03 PM

Well keep in mind, HADES' job is to exterminate the biosphere if GAIA doesn't get it right, and it's an essential part of project Zero Dawn. HADES may not have been using the Faro bots in the plot just because they were convenient, it may be that it's in fact designed specifically to use them to exterminate the failed biosphere in the event that it's called to action.

Nah, they specifically address that - HADES is supposed to use GAIA's terraforming system to destroy failed environments; he only went to the Faro robots because GAIA blew herself up, keeping him from gaining access to the system.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Jun 23rd 2020 at 6:22:17 AM

There's an interesting line in the dialogue where Elisabeth first proposes Project Zero Dawn. She threatens to reveal to the world what the true cause of the glitch was. But we never find out what that was, I think.

What DID cause that glitch?

I thought that line was more her blackmailing Faro by threatening to reveal that he specifically ordered the very things that made the Glitch a problem; I think he used his wealth and power to cover up his direct involvement and possibly even the fact that the robots were designed to be unstoppable rather than evolving that way due to the Glitch.

In the context of that conversation, she was threatening to reveal that it was Faro's fault. Judging by the various notes and audio logs you can find, there wasn't any real malice involved, just Faro insisting on the bots being completely unhackable and a bunch of other stupid ideas that caused them to be unstoppable the second something went wrong. At the time, Elizabeth and Faro seemed to just be assuming it was nothing more than a glitch—albeit one that should never have gotten so bad if Faro hadn't been an idiot.

But the fact that a thousand years later an alien signal interfered and almost resulted in the world being wiped clean of life again puts all that in doubt. Maybe someone did manage to hack a Horus (or since that's supposed to be impossible, get in at the production level and screw with its programming) and change its priorities so that it would go Kill All Humans.

The big problem is a combination of motive and time. Who would be alive over a thousand year stretch and want to kill the world? And why would they wait a thousand years to try a second time? Faro is implied to be alive somehow, and he's crazy enough to think "this new civilization is evil too (through no fault of my own), so I should trigger the de-terraforming and let GAIA start over." The space colonists might be doing something, but why would they want to kill everyone?

Another interesting line in the APOLLO dialogue in the Cradle. Samina introduces two guides in the learning environment: Socrates and Aspasia. In another note, it is mentioned that the educational software will be set up as a game of sorts.

And then, a year after this game was released, Assassin's Creed: Odyssey comes out, which features Socrates and Aspasia in prominent roles, not just in the game, but also... in its own educational Discovery Tour DLC.

That almost must be an easter egg, right?

Edited by Redmess on Jun 23rd 2020 at 4:09:05 PM