Horizon Zero Dawn/Horizon Forbidden West

Specifically one of Faro's programmers brought up the idea of leaving themselves an administrative backdoor for the drones. Faro shot that idea down so the drones couldn't be hacked. Ergo he specifically and personally chose to not have a safeguard that could've prevented this.

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 24th 2020 at 8:01:11 AM

Yes, but that does not explain what the glitch was.

The glitch is the robots not answering commands and attacking everything.

The one part I dont get is why they didn't turn the other Faro swarm against the rogue one. It's only the Hartz-Timor Energy Combine Swarm that went rogue. Presumably Faro sold more than one? Since the Drones are unhackable, throw another swarm at them (patch the "turn against humanity" feature out first?). They can't hack each other.

(And if Faro robots can hack one another, then why would it take Minerva then a century to do what Faro robots can do instantly?)

But they can enslave each other, apparently. I agree that this is a bit of a plot oversight, but the implication is that the rogue swarm's hacking is just more powerful somehow than swarms still under control.

This is why the military explicitly switches to pre-robotics combat to fight the swarm. An alternative interpretation could be that they knew better than to send another swarm against it, deactivated all the robots they could, and sent in humans right away.

It's said they can hack other Robots. Which explains why other drones can't be used. But Faro's robots are supposed to be unhackable. They either are unhackable, or they are not. And there's no indication the Rogue swarm is better at hacking.

Maybe we've invented Schrodinger's Firewall

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 24th 2020 at 8:45:00 AM

Yep, it's a hacking paradox. The robots are unhackable, but they can also hack any other robot, including each other.

I think they’re unhackable but they hack robots from outside the Chariot line and retrofit them. Remember that the Horus was basically a mobile Cauldron capable of manufacturing anything. Also I don’t remember where but I think that the rogue swarm is mentioned to have attacked unaffected Chariot swarms.

I think the problem was that the rogue Chariots didn’t restrict their own production. In order to fight Chariot with Chariot you’d need to have the counter-swarm producing new bots at the same rate or faster, and that was the whole problem - out of control reproduction was destroying the biosphere; even if the rogue swarm weren’t attacking humans it would still have been a near-unstoppable existential threat due to its exponential Grey Goo-esque growth.

Edited by Dirtyblue929 on Jun 24th 2020 at 9:54:01 AM

The Chariots don't make robots out of the biosphere, that's just for fuel.

One could deny their production by denying them access to the raw materials they actually did need.

Still, I suppose that's a better reason why they didn't go chariot v chariot.

And how would you deny them access to raw materials, if you can't fight them off?

Make them overspread. Use planes and bomb them. They don't have those!

Heck, considering the amount of material that goes into making a robot and computer, it's not like they can get it all from one location. Really just need to break the chain on one of them.

These are all things they could have done early on, but they waited too long and by the time they were taking the threat seriously the swarm was already too big.

Guess that's another thing Faro can be blamed on, having sat on the news for god knows how long.

I think this is partially artistic license for the sake of the story.

No, it's mentioned explicitly that Faro sat on the information for too long. In fact, it's implied that he knew something long before anyone else had any hint of anything wrong. He was looking into retooling production into man-operated weapons and his only reasoning was "trust me," meaning he knew they were looking at a robot war, but he decided to profit from it first.

And yeah, sending another swarm against the rogue swarm would just accelerate the problem. Maybe if the timeline was decades instead of months, it would have been worth the risk that they'd be able to exterminate the rogues before they both ate the whole biosphere, but everything was too far gone by then.

That's also why all typical routes to victory were out of reach. Nuke 'em? Too many to nuke without killing the planet anyway. Cut off their supply lines? They've got too many.

And the swarm already dug up all the hidden Antiquity Sites, so Cultural victory was out of reach, too

Does that mean Elizabeth went for the old tactic to turtle and do the science victory?

Clearly she's got Gathering storm installed to undo the climate change mechanic.

Edited by Ghilz on Jun 24th 2020 at 12:13:41 PM

Actually, some powers in the Eastern hemisphere DID try nuking them, with predictably disastrous results. Didn't work.

Notice, by the way, that traditional US adversaries like Russia, North Korea, and Iran are conspicuously absent from the story. China is mentioned, but only as a place where American migrants go to find jobs (an ironic parallel to Mexico today, which also goes unmentioned).

Instead, we get various corporate entities, who seem to have all but replaced all nation states. This world is (or was) run by corporations, not states. Corporations are the main drivers of warfare, as well as major projects like reversing climate change.

Edited by Redmess on Jun 25th 2020 at 12:16:56 PM

That too. The other corporations likely dismissed Faro robots as not their problem (or assumed they were a deliberate attack) until it was too late.

x3 Science victory is exactly what they went for.

I wouldn't mind a Horizon Zero Dawn mod in Civ. Would be great fun.

I noticed that the Frozen Wilds DLC pretty much does away with the dripstones, which suggests that the developers perhaps realized it looked a little silly.

I have no problem with a soft retcon like that. As long as they don't stop the game for five minutes to explain dripstones.

Okay, I'm watching that same guy (Christopher Odd) play through the DLC, and... it's a live stream. And it is annoying as hell. There are constant random quotes thrown in by people in the stream, which gets really repetitive and interrupts dialogue, and Chris keeps stopping to react to the chat, which gets especially bad near the end.

I don't mind lets players talking in their video, but this is downright annoying. These videos end up being much longer than they need to be, babbling about viewers I don't know or care about.

The PC port has a release date: August 7th of this year, so a little over a month away.

My free time right now is best summarized as "Haha, no," but I might get it if it's good.

Fo interested the lead in to the Horizon Zero Dawn comicbook series from Titan is available For FCBD